hardware

[rich.fromm]

Ed McNierney wrote:
> 
> Third, I do agree that fast RAID 5 disks and lots of RAM are always a good
> idea!
> 

Yes, for working with large data sets, more memory is in most cases likely
to be more important than a faster CPU.

But to speak out against sweeping generalizations, I wouldn't necessarily
agree that RAID 5 is always a good idea.  There are pros and cons, and it
depends on your circumstances.  If I remember right (and it's been a while
since I studied the details), the biggest downside of RAID 5 is that small
writes are slower, because of the need to write both the data disk and the
parity disk.  With most RAID controllers I believe (there might be
exceptions) there are also limitations concerning incremental upgradability
of the array.  (e.g. what happens if I have N disks and I just want to add 1
or 2 more)

- Rich

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