When did RAID 5 debut?

[USSEnterprise]

Reason I need to know, is a guy is offering me a Gottlieb Gigi for $300. I told him that I am debating whether to buy a new PC or his pinball machine. He offered to throw in, with the purchase of the Gigi, an HP Server with a RAID 5 array.I just sent him an email asking the model, but I am trying to figure out when it is from. When did RAID 5 come to be?

[boykster]

That's a pretty random way to ask about raid, but anyway.

i don't know exactly WHEN Raid 5 came about, but I can tell you that if it's a compaq server with RAID5, its almost certainly SCSI and will be more $$ than its worth to run and maintain.

I have access to a TON of old compaq servers from work and I passed on all of them.  Just not worth the effort.

[shmokes]

I just bought three brand new rackmount Compaq servers and they all run SCSI RAID 5.  They don't cost any more to run and maintain because I swear to god nothing ever dies in a Compaq Proliant server.  Seriously.  That's obviously not true, but I'm telling you the things are tanks.  They just run and run enlessly.  I have a server that's at least 7 or 8 years old with a RAID 5 array and it has never, ever had a single hardware problem.  Not so much as a fan or power supply has gone out on it.

As for RAID 5, I'm not sure when it debuted, but it's been around for ages.  pushing 10 years, I'd say, maybe longer so answering this question really won't do you much good.

[shmokes]

Also it's going to be big.   AND HEAVY.  Especially the heavy part.  They tower servers probably weigh about 60 lbs.

[USSEnterprise]

Its a Proliant 1600

[shmokes]

Pentium III or Pentium II. 

1999

Too much bulk and weight for the processing power if you ask me.

[boykster]

Oh, I'm not saying that compaq servers aren't built like a tanks and won't last forever, but the compaq brand SCSI drives/caddies that you'll have to use on an older compaq arrays, etc will be fairly expensive for the amount of storage you'll get out of it.

If it's a 1600, then it's pretty old and won't support large'ish drives.  I have an old compaq server (at work) that was "state of the art" back in '99 that has multiple raid5 arrays (one with 16 drives) but the drives are 18gigs each.....

We used to be an all compaq server shop (save for a couple of SGI racks we had for scientific stuff) until we got bought out and switched to IBM, so I'm very familiar with compaq servers

 

[NightGod]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks
History

Norman Ken Ouchi at IBM was awarded U.S. Patent 4,092,732 titled "System for recovering data stored in failed memory unit" in 1978 and the claims for this patent describe what would later be termed RAID 5 with full stripe writes. This 1978 patent also mentions that disk mirroring or duplexing (what would later be termed RAID 1) and protection with dedicated parity (that would later be termed RAID 4) were prior art at that time.

RAID technology was first defined by a group of computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. The scientists studied the possibility of using two or more disks to appear as a single device to the host system. [1]

In 1988, RAID levels 1 through 5 were formally defined by David A. Patterson, Garth A. Gibson and Randy H. Katz in the paper, "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)". This was published in the SIGMOD Conference 1988: pp 109–116. The term "RAID" was first introduced in this paper; it spawned the entire disk array industry.


Wow...that took me like 30 seconds to find.

[Stingray]

Wow...that took me like 30 seconds to find.

Well yeah, but to be fair you probably have an attention span.

-S

[NightGod]

If it had hit 31 seconds, I never would have made that po.....ooooooooo shiny!

[AlanS17]

In 1988, RAID levels 1 through 5 were formally defined by David A. Patterson, Garth A. Gibson and Randy H. Katz in the paper, "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)". This was published in the SIGMOD Conference 1988: pp 109–116. The term "RAID" was first introduced in this paper; it spawned the entire disk array industry.

There's nothing "inexpensive" about a SCSI hard drive. 

[boykster]

There's nothing "inexpensive" about a SCSI hard drive. 

My point exactly from my first post.

On a cost / GB basis, IDE -> PATA or SATA will cream SCSI any day.  Then toss in that compaq's use a proprietary caddy you might as well just go to the bank, get a couple of stacks of $20's or $100's and have a campfire and roast marshmallows.

Don't get me wrong, Compaq servers have served me VERY WELL over the years, but for home use, I prefer generic hardware running 3ware (or other) IDE raid arrays.  I also prefer linux for these systems, but win2k / 2k3 server would probably be ok to. 

[Random24]

Something else to think about with an old server is power consumption.  I was running an old HP server for about a year.  I then went on an electrical efficiency kick and replaced all my incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent.  It seemed like our electric bill was still large after all that so I looked around for what else might be using a lot of power and found the old server.  I scrounged up some other parts and bought a new power supply that was rated very good on power consumption and built myself a PC that I would use as my server. 

Even with 6 IDE drives running 24/7 I have saved almost $40 a month on electricity compared to the old HP server with 6 SCSI drives and 4 IDE drives.  I also went from a dual Pentium Pro 200 with 512MB of ram to an Duron 1600 with 1.5GB.  Had I not run the old server for the year I could have probably bought better hardware with the almost $500 I would have saved.

[NightGod]

There's nothing "inexpensive" about a SCSI hard drive. 

No, but at that time, four 10 MB SCSI hard drives were alot cheaper combined than one 40 MB hard drive, which what they actually mean by it. Just like today you could get three 250GB SATA drives for $200 but one 750GB SATA would cost you $375.

THAT'S where the "inexpensive" part comes in.