raid 0 is good if you make daily backups and dont worry about hd failures :)

4 drives in raid 0 would rock :)

But it would be a little risky :)

guys

raid-10 IS A STRIPED AND MIRRORED ARRAY. RAID-10 is the same as getting RAID-0 but also getting the benefits of RAID-1.

So you get striping and mirroring.

Your programmer is clueless on servers, he should stick to programming lol

RAID-0 is stupid when you have RAID-10 available as an option.

No sandman. this is what my programer is sayin.


"dude

not 4 drive raid 0

Im saying
two seperate raid 0 volumes

2x hdd raid 0 + 2x hdd raid 0"

boneprone, raid-0 is the most risky raid you can run.

whatever drives you put into raid-0 array will act as 1. so if just 1 drive dies, everything is lost.
this basically doubles the risk of just running 1 drive because you have the liability of both.

the only time to do RAID-0 is if you want speed but dont care about your data and downtime WHEN a drive fails (not if).

RAID-10 will give you both the benefits of RAID-0 (stripping) and RAID-1 (mirroring) in 1 package. the only reason people dont normally do it is because it requires 4 drives minimum and they dont have the budget for it.

and FYI, having 4 x hdd raid 0 would be faster than 2 x 2hdd raid-0

Yeah... You don't run RAID0 in a production environment unless one of these case are met, and even then you very much should question that decision. RAID0 exponentially increases your chances of a filesystem failure as you add each drive (e.g. 4 drives = 4 times likely to suffer data loss than a single drive).

The cases I would see as acceptable..

1. Scratch space. Meaning temporary disk storage space. Only there for doing things like resizing mpegs or whatnot. No data loss if it fails, and application should be smart enough to know it failed and not try to utilize it.

2. Very specific hardware load balanced setups, where individual machine failures are normal and expected.

4 drive RAID0 *will* be faster than 4 drive RAID10, but not by very much. You still will get roughly "4 times" the performance of a single drive in either case, minus overhead. The speed difference is negligible, and the chance of outage is guaranteed with RAID0. RAID10 you can sustain two drive failures, if they happen to be the correct drives. The single advantage RAID0 will give you, is the size of your array. (RAID10 will eat half the space in "overhead" - RAID0 has none)

Your sales guy is right, listen to him :) Anyone recommending RAID0 for a production server simply does not have any experience in the matter.

-Phil

he needs to stick to programing i was joking with the raid 0 on 4 drives 2 raid 0 arrays is kind of stupid makes no sence at all.

what i dont understand is why you want to serve thumbs from the same box much easier to unload thumbs on a seperate server.

Why exactly are you getting a new server?

Based on the screenshots, the current server looks to be doing the job just fine. One should be wary of "Top" stats - they can often paint a misleading picture of the situation.

Is the load average spiking above 2 a lot? and/or warnings/errors are showing up in the logs? and/or the server is often unresponsive? and/or are you expecting that server utilization to greatly increase very soon? ... if all no, then my view is leave things alone and save the money for something else... run with what you have for as long as you can.

Ron

You are no fun...

All sales guys boo you.


Come on guys... Say it.. "booooooooooooo"

I would tell your programmer to go and optimise the sql queries and tables. If mysql is constantly maxing out cpu on your current config, then there's something wrong. If the cause for this hogging is pretty much table reads, you need to start doing some table archiving so mysql can use the cache for the majority.

For example, I've a mysql dbase with 16 tables where one contains over 6 million rows, and another 1.2 million rows. The webserver mainly does db writes, which causes no spikes at all. When the db is being read, it's to pull out stuff based on days/weeks/months etc. Turn the mysql cache off and the server cpu is hogged by mysql. So, anything < today is archived, as this is never going to change by the db writes. Hence db reads for anything < today either use the cache, or very well optimised keys. This means I can hit mysql with a ton of reads and never hog more than 1% cpu. DB reads on "today" still caused big spikes, so all I did was inactivate reads on "today" and roll the website to be 1 day out-of-date. To the user, it doesn't make any difference, as yesterday's data becomes today's data, and they're none the wiser - all relative.

Like I said, dunno what you're doing, but you've gotta be able to hone your sql script somehow so as to not hog cpu like that on your current setup.... mysql optimisation isn't trivial, but it's always possible to keep on tweaking to shave a few cpu cycles.

between sata and scsi, i prefer sata in raid. unless you are going with SAS. :)

looks like i overlooked those stats. between server A and B, i'll go with A, because of scsi. unless you are running raid-10 with 15k rpm drives. if you have some money and time, try SAS. :)

check out this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI

if your hdd is doing swaping memory all the time, got more ram. :)

RAID-10 w/ SATA Raptors wins over the SCSI's, we've already established this

good thread, I learned a lot.

I'd go with A, but I know nothing so ignore the Fred

Ok after three days of Discussion this is what we are going for.

1U SuperMicro (brand new, 4x hot-swap bays)
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz (quad-cores, 8MB Cache) - $0 setup(waived)
4GB DDR2 ECC REG RAM - $0 (waived) setup
150GB 10k Raptor SATA HDD1 - $0 (waived) setup
2x 36GB 10k Raptor SATA HDDs - $99 setup
30Mbps Dedicated Unmetered Port
APC Remote Reboot Port
DDoS Protection
MRTG from switch


A three HD system.

My programer does not want RAID10. Its like it is a Sin or something.

Seems stable this way.
And a great price. So no SCSI and No Raid10... LOL. Talk about not going with the masses!

programmers taking you down. a programmer codes software, you cant rely on them for system administration, they are two different related technical fields.

Good choice Boneprone - whats the monthly rub on that? I was hoping you wouldn't do server A because it was pretty much a lateral move... and server B wasn't all that either - server C was the right option the whole time, the only way to have bettered that would have been to go with SAS drives.

With regard to the comment earlier that the Western Digital Raptors are consumer drives thats not true at all. They are enterprise quality and come with a 5 year warranty. The only reason companies like Dell don't put Raptors in servers, or at least even low or mid grade servers, is because they like to sell more expensive drives. Additionally, they never came up with a compelling offering of larger sizes... like the 300gb and now 500gb SAS drives. If you read performance reviews on http://www.tomshardware.com it's an excellent reference for processor comparisons and HDD benchmark performance. To answer the other earlier question, all Raptors are Sata 150 none are 300.

Also, a side note, the 15k drives aren't all that they seem at face value. Manufacturers like to let you just simply assume that they up the performance ante by 50&#37; when that's not at all the case. They typically benchmark out only slightly faster than the 10k sisters... and depending on the application, manufacturer model, you're going to see really varied results.

Brad

Thanks my man..

Its going to be 489/month for 30mpbs. Non cogent..

This is not my primary server which I of course have hosted at Jupiter (two servers there level 3) or even my secondary server which I have at reflected.. This is a script server that hosts some thumbs (non crucial ones at that) in which I need something that will be fast and not lag while processing my network's custom scripts. Yes they may not be the most efficient scripts but they were custom made to my needs and desires so naturally they may use some resources. Thats why im making this move.

I hope we made the right Choice. Seems there was tons of advice on going with RAID. My programer kept insisting it was not needed. He licked his lips some on the SCSI drives but he said in reality the three SATA raptors would be just fine spreading things across them. And with the Quad cores and 4 GIG Ram he was excited to get started with optimizing the scripts.


Hope all is well Brad.. See you in Vegas I hope!

Mojo 4-Life

Hey I want to give some serious props and thanks to all the people who helped out on this tread. It was very very very educational.. Even though I went with what my programer insisted on I still learned a lot..

Huge props for all you hosting people who posted here as well. And its extra classy none of you even spammed! It would have been perfectly fine if you did ya know!! But Ive taken note as im sure many others here have of this thread. Some of you who put their 2 cents in have been noticed and very helpful. Ill be sure to make a note and remember you all in the future.

Great thread..
And good to see there are so many well informed hosting options out there now days.
BP4L

Go with server B the dual cores and the SATA with the DDR2 ram will preform better.

Later,

Cheers - I was hoping they'd be at the faster 300, especially as they are part of a server, but there you go.

Hey Boneprone, why dont you just come back to LikeWhoa?