Does it make sense for hosting companies to buy servers with less than 1TB storage?
 

Seems like 1TB hard drive should be cheap enough.
Any video site that is growing to grow will need 1TB soon enough.
Is there really anything left in adult except video sites?

there are a ton of people that run blogs and other sites that dont need a ton of storage.

Maybe. But I think for the budget deals you often get old hardware so those lower capacity drives will be around for some time yet. Then you have SSD. A 1TB SSD would probably be too expensive for most if competing on price.

For me 500 GB is about perfect. I don't even use 40% of that but you need space for backups.

I can't even imagine owning a computer with only a terabyte.

its cheap enough, but as sandman says. usually 1tb is way overkill.

I would always recommend using SAN data storage for your data. That way you can grow above your 1tb need.

We use a Hitachi solution (fiber channel)

If you build a server you usually want fast reliable disks that can take the wear of being on 24/7. SSD is still fairly untested by enterprise standards and is known to have a more limited lifespan. The only alternative for many applications are mechanical enterprise drives at either 10K or 15K rpm, they usually come in sizes 146GB, 300GB, 450GB, 600GB and 900GB. There are larger enterprise drives, but they are as slow as consumer drives and won't do for many applications.

Storage is usually the main performance bottleneck for servers. SSD works great when the applications primarily requires reading from the disk, but if there is a need to write large amounts of data to the drives, SSD will fail a lot faster than a mechanical HDD. SSD will eventually take over in both the server and SAN environment, but as long as reliable SSD disks are as expensive, they are not a viable option for many.

SAN is good in that you separate storage from the actual servers and can scale easier, but it still relies on the same type of disks. Good SAN hardware solutions is usually pretty expensive as well.

Great post!

:thumbsup

Such a bullshit post. Please cite what experience and actual knowledge you think you have to make these claims.

Cloning a 1TB drive when it only has a few gig of data on it really sucks

Please point out what I stated that is wrong, I am always eager to improve my knowledge. As for experience, I am NOT an expert in any way, I run about 20 servers in a rack in my office that I manage myself. Even at this low volume of servers, drive swaps appear from time to time. I tried to save some money in the beginning by using consumer drive, but while some lasted long, many failed in a matter of months. These days I only buy enterprise drives, be it for servers or desktop. I don't use SSDs much in servers due to problems that I stated in the last post and some other problems.
Here is a pic of some spare hardware and some new and old disks:
http://skinmarketing.com/gfy-spares.jpg

Cool stuff/pix...

I use SSDs on several servers and so far had no problems or failures. They are really good for mysql and other dynamic stuff. They are still expensive when it comes to storing large amounts of data so enterprise HDDs in RAID does the job.

Then you have no clue whatsoever when it comes to configuring a raid.

I have between to 400 and 900 MB/s read/write on a std 2 TB LUN with 600GB 10K Rpm disks in raid 1+0. Depending on the amount of disks and block size

Did you misunderstand what I wrote? I was talking about the actual HDDs, not logical disks.

yeah we have lots of customers that don't need a big hard drive. We do include a 1tb though just in case.