On Apr 25, 2006, at 5:09 PM, Ron Peacetree wrote:
...and even if you do buy Intel, =DON"T= buy Dell unless you like causing trouble for yourself. Bad experiences with Dell in general and their poor PERC RAID controllers in specific are all over this and other DB forums.
I don't think that their current controllers suck like their older ones did. That's what you'll read about in the archives -- the old stuff. Eg, the 1850's embedded RAID controller really flies, but it only works with the internal disks. I can't comment on the external array controller for the 1850, but I cannot imagine it being any slower.
And personally, I've not experienced any major problems aside from two bad PE1550's 4 years ago. And I have currently about 15 Dell servers running 24x7x365 doing various tasks, including postgres.
However, my *big* databases always go on dual opteron boxes. my current favorite is the SunFire X4100 with an external RAID.
