[Pc_Support] Re: eSATA RAID-1, putting the "IOP" outside the box -- WAS: Synology DS-106 w/FTPS (explicit) access

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 23:19 -0400, Damien McKenna wrote:
> Hitting the SATA directly will give a tremendous speed boost, the
> onboard RAID will be faster than CPU & system I/O-driven RAID,

Or even if a CPU-I/O interconnect uses PCIe x1 channels for SATA so
software RAID-1 can "keep up" with similar performance at least you're
not putting that "duplication" on the CPU-I/O interconnect.

> and be more reliable than Firewire.
> I've seen lots of comments of Firewire-based RAID systems dying
> because one drive gets unplugged, etc.  It just makes me nervous.

Er, I think you're comparing apples'n oranges.

First off, 95% of FireWire "RAID" out there is still _host-based_ and
_software_ driven.  If someone made a target-based hardware FireWire
RAID, then it wouldn't be as much of an issue.

Secondly, FireWire is compared to USB, _not_ SATA.
FireWire is a completely different protocol than SATA.
But FireWire has a protocol that is superior to USB.

I.e.,
  FireWire has a superior/superset protocol to USB
  SAS has a superior/superset protocol to SATA
  SCSI has a superior/superset protocol to ATA (aka IDE)
  Etc... 


-- 
Bryan J. Smith          Professional, technical annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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