[olug] Booting from SAS drive in a desktop?

[Obi-Wan]

> Best bang for the buck SAS w/ Hardware RAID
> Get a PERC 5/I of ebay for ~$50 and do this mod
> http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1703561

That's pretty cool (no pun intended).  I did decide against the SAS
drives due to lower speeds, increased noise, and increased power draw
vs the SSD (I bought a Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB for $88 of Amazon).
However, that PERC 5/i will work with SATA drives, too, and will provide
a battery-backed cache in addition to the hardware RAID support.

I actually changed my mind on the Dell 2950 altogether.  Not sure if
the eBay seller will let me cancel my order, though.  I may end up
with a rather nice Dell 2950 (dual quads, 16GB, PERC5i) that I need
to sell, incase anybody's interested.

I originally wanted the 2950 to use as a fileserver to house on-site
backups of all my computers.  I also have two USB backup drives that
I alternately take off-site in case my house burns down.  While having
a near-line backup on the LAN is handy when I accidentally delete a
file, I decided that it wasn't worth the $900 that this server would
cost me, since I already have everything backed up on the USB drives.
I'll keep a near-line backup of my boot drive, and just live with the
USB backups for everything else.  The enterprise sysadmin in me wants
to do this right, but my budget objects.

Life was easier when I didn't have 3TB of critical data to juggle.

-- 
Ben "Obi-Wan" Hollingsworth    obiwan at jedi.com    PrairieRimImages.com
   The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the
     Giver of all good things, so if I stand, let me stand on the
       promise that You will pull me through.  -- Rich Mullins