It’s rare that Digg has a link to a RAID article with enough popularity to hit the front page, but it happened recently with one here from Jon Bach at Puget Systems. I have no idea who Puget Systems is or who Jon Bach is (apparently he’s the president), but the guy made a few interesting points that our readers may find interesting…

Question to the Storage Advisors: I now read that there are specialized RAID hard disks that have “Time Limited Error Recovery”, which my disks do not have. Will my RAID controller compensate for hard disk based error recovery that takes many minutes?

Question to the Storage Advisors: Why is such a large drive buffer/cache needed, considering controllers and the host have much larger caches anyway? And/or, why is read-ahead data not forwarded to the host immediately?

Question to the Storage Advisors: I’m torn between RAID 5 and 10. I know that with RAID-5, the performance of a third-party card is far superior than using an on-motherboard controller, but what about RAID-10? …

Question to the Storage Advisors: I am looking for advice on how to calculate throughput (MB/sec) from an IOPS value…

Question to the Storage Advisors: Tom’s Hardware recently did a report on the newer P965 motherboards with Intel’s new ICH8R Southbridge which supports their Intel Matrix RAID technology where you can have more two RAIDs on the same 4 drive set…

Question to the Storage Advisors: I have a question regarding RAID. With dual processor CPUs now common (e.g., Pentium D) wouldn’t a 4-drive RAID-5 array be faster than a 4-drive RAID-10 array? I would think the second core would (could?) be dedicated to parity calculations…

Question to the Storage Advisors: We are trying to build a data streaming system for data acquisition purposes. … What would be the best Adaptec controller to use for sustained writing at 100 MB/s for at least 500 GB of data?

A few days ago I sat through an SNW session presented by the venerable Scottsman Willis Whittington of Seagate…

Steve, Joe and I just finished filming a short segment with the effervescent Jon Toigo for his StorageTV website.