Dedicated Server Urgent Question
 

I will buy an unmetered server for a movie website and i'm expecting 25Mbit transfer..
I can chose from these 2 options: 2x80GB or 1x260GB HDD.. What should i chose? Have the HDD number influence on the bandwidth transfer?

No influence... Ecrit moi un message pour des prix si vous voulez.

Les hard drives n'ont pas d'influence sur la vitesse de l'internet. Si vous voulez avoir un backup identique des disques durs, et n'avex pas besoin de plus que 80Go, achetez 2x80Go et fair un RAID en mirroir.

Si tu veux plus d'espace, achete le 120Go.

Bien repondu :thumbsup

merci :)

you might want to reconsider that.
Altho in his case its not a problem (at 25Mbps) a single hard disk can become
a bottleneck if you do a lot of IO

It's not an issue at 25mbps though...

besides, he didn't say there was a difference in plater speeds, cache, seek times, or interface, so I safely assumed that they were of the same performance, but different capacities...

I used to manage a national computer hardware distributor, and a lot of big server hosts pick a hard drive brand and line and stick with it for the most part, so in his case it probably holds true.

25mpbs is already a lot to put your trust into a single HD anyway...

That's true...didn't even think of that...

In fact, there was a guy from the Parks Canada who used to order parts through us all the time who said that the old server technician used to order single big drives because they were cheaper. When the drives would die they would lose tons of information at a time, so when George went in he started using a fuckton of 60 and 80 gigers in mirrored&striped RAID.... drives still died, and it was more expensive, but at least when they did go on the fritz they didn't lose everything.




On that note, about a month or two ago one of my dedicated servers' hard drive crashed. I lost probably about a hundred hours of scripting that day,

No,If you want to make a movie site,i think 1 X８０should be enough.

OMG! what a question..

Use RAID5 or RAID10, that way you have redundancy and load sharing over multiple drives. The catch is that you'll need a minimum of 3 drives for RAID5, and 4 for RAID10.

This is the correct way to do it for sure. Be real careful of any so called "un-metered" and "unlimited" types of hosting, be sure you will be able to get what you are paying for.

I take severe issue with "25mbit is not enough to swamp a single hard drive!".

Yes, in many cases this is true. Hell, in some cases we have customers maxing out a gige with a single SATA disk - simply because all the files they serve FIT IN MEMORY.

I have customers who max out their disk I/O with less than 1mbit of bandwidth. This is due to custom applications they run. I would say "in general" 25Mbit of "typical adult hosting traffic" will start to hurt your disk in many situations. Once you start hitting a bunch of random access on that disk, you will very quickly see a performance nosedive with very little warning in some cases. The easiest method to delay this is add RAM, as the more RAM you have the more files the OS can cache and thus not hit your disk to retrieve them.

Most sites follow the 80/20 rule. 20% of your content results in 80% of your requests. In this case, you want to at the very least have enough RAM to cache that first 20% of hot content. However has your content base grows into many gigabytes, this becomes less and less practical. This is where large RAID based systems come into play, as they spread your disk I/O across many spindles.

Basically, without seeing usage patterns no one can tell you if 25Mbit will swamp a disk or not. "In general" you'll be fine with room to spare, however large amounts of big files (movies) can quickly become more of an I/O load than you may expect.

Also remember that RAID *is not in any way shape or form* a replacement for proper backups!

G'luck!

-Phil

You got that right ... A separate backup drive would be required ( if you get hacked, or corrupted, that bu drive will be your life saver ).

With the type of volume you are talking about ( 25mbits ) , you should consider SCSI drives in raid ... and at least 2 gigs of ECC memory.

I'm sure its already been said but with movies you need to plan ahead for growth. Typically 80GB just really isn't a lot, so even 2 of those isn't all that much. I would typically recommend at least some type of mirrored setup with large drives, at least 160GB but more would be even better.

As mentioned, for even better redundancy you'll want to ask your provider about their back-up services.

Depends on the hard drives, there are cheap ones and good ones. also are they all new? Are they sata scsi or ata? Ideally it would be a sata with 10k rpm's rolling.