| Author |
Server+ Question :)
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| namrak 2002-10-15, 2:51 pm |
| Mark Hamill is interning with Industrial Light & Magic in a junior server administrator role maintaining their server farms. As a special project, Mark's supervisor asks him how he would configure the RAID array for highest read/write performance, redundancy and availability on a Windows 2000 Advanced Server box. The motherboard does not require being powered down for hard drive replacements and maximizing storage is not an issue.
The equipment Mark has available to him are:
1) five 18GB Ultra3 SCSI drives spinning at 15000 rpm
2) six 120GB Ultra ATA133 drives spinning at 7200 rpm
3) Adaptec hardware Ultra3 SCSI RAID controller
4) Promise Fastrak ATA100 RAID controller
How should Mark Hamill set up the RAID configuration?
A) setup RAID 0 using the six 120GB drives and the Promise controller for total of 720GB
B) setup RAID 5 using the five 18GB drives and the Promise controller
C) setup RAID 1 using four 18GB drives, the other 18GB drive as a hot spare on the Promise controller
D) setup RAID 0+1 with four 18GB drives, the other 18GB drive as a hot spare on the Adaptec controller
E) configure software RAID 0+1 in Win2000 using the six 120GB drives
F) Tell Mark to use the Force for his problem  | |
| azimuth40 2002-10-15, 3:38 pm |
| A: is out, no redunancy
B: is out promise controller doesn't support SCSI
C: is out you have redunancy but not the fastest or the right controller.
F: is out as a give away
That leaves D or E. Best practices would say don't rely on software RAID as it is affected by and has an effect on system load. The difference in disk sizes is a distractor. Availability and redundancy are qualifiers. Performance is just an side benifit given the remaining answers.
E: might have been best if it included the promise controller for the three parameters required simply because IL&M probably needs large drives also. The suzzy raid will still outrun it but has a smaller size.
So D would seem to be the best choice. Hot spare handles availability, performance is there and redundancy is there. Question doesn't address size, therefore size does not matter. | |
| twister166 2002-10-15, 6:11 pm |
| D. | |
| Lunatic Fringe 2002-10-15, 8:05 pm |
| I agree "D" is the choice I would make.
Very good deduction Azimuth, anyone looking to pass the test should look at the method you used to deduce the answer.
Great explination! | |
| Supertech 2002-10-15, 8:20 pm |
| Dee for me!
A hardware bus-based RAID solution would be the best choice because the controller has a processor embedded on the card. This embedded processor can manage some or all, of the RAID functions which leaves the host CPU free to handle application processing or network functions. This type of controller is referred to as an intelligent disk array controller. Another important advantage is that a bus-based array can support many of the high performance RAID features that are not available in a software-based configuration. These features can include support for hot swap or hot spare drives, support for SAF-TE, array management utilities, and others. | |
| azimuth40 2002-10-15, 11:44 pm |
| quote:
Originally posted by Lunatic Fringe
I agree "D" is the choice I would make.
Very good deduction Azimuth, anyone looking to pass the test should look at the method you used to deduce the answer.
Great explination!
Doing my best vulcan impression "Why thank you". I had been looking for a good question to show distractors and qualifiers, namrak showed up with the almost perfect one. Supertech put the fine point on why you don't want software RAID along with other GSTK points. | |
| Supertech 2002-10-16, 8:52 am |
| A special type connector is used for drives and enclosures that support hot swapping. This connector is called an SCA (Single Connector Attach) connector. The current version is referred to as SCA-2. This connector has 80 pins and includes the power supply pins in addition to the standard SCSI bus signals. The connector design ensures that the signal and power pins connect or disconnect at different times to minimize electrical problems during hot plug operations. Devices that use SCA type connectors are attached to the bus through a backplane without cables.
The motherboard really doesn't have any thing to do with allowing hot swapping. | |
| namrak 2002-10-16, 11:14 am |
| Supertech is finding holes in my questions again. Tough crowd heh heh. But he's right, I should have mentioned the use of SCA connectors. But coming up with these questions makes me look up information. I don't want to feed anybody bogus information seeing as other individuals may come along and look at these as well.
I agree Lunatic about Azimuth's deduction technique. Something I plan on implementing when I take the test. Take any clue(s) the question gives you and narrow your answer field down. Which is why you shouldn't rush through the test. But that timer in the upper right corner is sure hard to ignore though.  I'll be panicking at about 10 minutes to go with 40 questions left. | |
| namrak 2002-10-17, 10:32 am |
| the answer for the above question is (D).
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| dickrwh 2002-10-18, 8:33 am |
| D |
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