Has anyone posted an up to date hardware review lately? It seems clear that a RAID6 server with 300GB CHEETAH 15K.5 SAS drives will trump a P3 with a 30GB IDE drive, however, not everyone will spend the money required for the high end unit, I'm looking to build a new server & trying to make best use of funds (aren't we all). TIA
Do you mean a review to detail the best performance? This is complicated question since budget clearly plays a role. But I'll give you what I think are the highest performance options without considering costs (and not including a RAM storage array). RAID: 0+1 (mirrored stripe sets) Drive Type: 15K SAS array on an independent controller (PCIe bus) NIC: Multi-gigabit load balanced Remember that for raw speed, you would be better to have many smaller disks than a few larger ones. Also, having higher bus and memory speeds is important too. Network design plays an important role as well. Making sure all of your clients aren't all going over a single 1000Mb or 100Mb link to your server backbone helps remove a bottleneck. When measuring performance, it is important to note that your throughput is always going to be only as fast as your slowest link. If you really want to stress test your server, setup four or five clients all plugged directly into the same switch as your server and move large files to and from. Start with one client and add more one at a time. Watch the performance as you add additional clients. Hope that helps. John Schmerold wrote:> Has anyone posted an up to date hardware review lately? > > It seems clear that a RAID6 server with 300GB CHEETAH 15K.5 SAS drives > will > trump a P3 with a 30GB IDE drive, however, not everyone will spend the > money > required for the high end unit, I'm looking to build a new server & > trying > to make best use of funds (aren't we all). > > > TIA
> RAID: 0+1 (mirrored stripe sets)RAID 1+0 is much better - much less likely to fail, and rebuilds much faster: http://aput.net/~jheiss/raid10/ -- Best regards, Charles
RAID 10 is very good, but does have the downside of requiring quite a few disks to achieve large amounts of storage. Scott Lockwood wrote:>> Charles Marcus wrote: >> >>>> RAID: 0+1 (mirrored stripe sets) >>>> >>> RAID 1+0 is much better - much less likely to fail, and rebuilds much >>> faster: >>> >>> http://aput.net/~jheiss/raid10/ >>> >>> > > Thank you! I was not aware of that. > > >
Aaron Kincer wrote:> RAID 10 is very good, but does have the downside of requiring quite a > few disks to achieve large amounts of storage.Thats its only downside... but I love the performance and reliability. And with disks as cheap as they are today, using an Areca or 3ware card with 8 320GB drives is not all that expensive (well, not compared to 15K SCSI RAID)... LOTS of space, at least for my needs... :) -- Best regards, Charles
Relatively speaking, not expensive at all. You can get a Dell PowerVault loaded with SAS 320GB 15K at ridiculously low prices if you catch them around the end of a business quarter. They practically give stuff away to boost sales numbers for quarterly reports. Charles Marcus wrote:> Aaron Kincer wrote: >> RAID 10 is very good, but does have the downside of requiring quite a >> few disks to achieve large amounts of storage. > > Thats its only downside... but I love the performance and reliability. > And with disks as cheap as they are today, using an Areca or 3ware > card with 8 320GB drives is not all that expensive (well, not compared > to 15K SCSI RAID)... LOTS of space, at least for my needs... :) >