Re: [cobalt-users] Is the RaQ XTR now worth buying???

[Bruce Timberlake <Bruce.Timberlake@xxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: James Dean Young <jd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, March 22, 2002 7:33 pm
Subject: [cobalt-users] Is the RaQ XTR now worth buying???

> Cobalt recalled these some time ago. I have heard stories of 
> crashes and whatnot. I am VERY used to all the other RaQs, 
> and have been using them since 96. I just had a hard drive 
> fail on the RaQ4i, but it has come back up and I am SURE 
> it will go back down...I need some RAID to feel better...
> although I am real leery of using the terms RAID and IDE 
> in the same sentence, let alone using them in the same 
> BOX! ;-)

There were some hardware-based issues in the early XTR models, but these
have all been fixed.  The current XTR product is very stable - we even
have one ISV customer buying them in large quantities (30-40+ XTRs per
customer) to base a backup solution on!

Our software RAID (available on RaQ4r first almost 2 year ago, then
Qube3 Pro, then XTR) has been virtually rewritten so as to be much more
stable and predictable than generic RedHat software RAID... as far as
IDE and RAID, there's no issue with the _type_ of drive for stability.
And with each drive in XTR running on it's own master channel, high
throughput from the disk subsystem can be achieved at about 1/3 the
price of SCSI drives.

> Can anyone let me know if the XTR is a good buy? Is the RaQ4r a 
> better buy?

Depends on what your need for drive space is.  XTR with 4 drives can
offer much higher capacity per 1U of server space, plus it has the
beefier hardware behind it.
 
> Is it STABLE?

Yes. Since relaunch there have been no issues reported to us regarding
stability or data corruption.
 
> Does the raid set up even WORK? Has anyone ever hot swapped a drive 
> in it?

Yes, I have done it in RAID 5. (Obviously RAID 0 and RAID 1 don't
support removing a drive).  And the drives are technically "warm swap" -
you can pull a single drive sled out of a running RAID 5 box, and then
reinsert a clean drive. But you need to reboot the system for it to
"find" the new drive.  But then RAIDing happens automagically in the
background onto that new disk...

--
Bruce Timberlake
Sun Cobalt Technology Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.