Re: [GENERAL] server hardware recommendations (the archives aredead)

Greetings !

I'd appreciate hearing more about the difference between the "good" and
the "bad" drives, so that I can avoid the latter.

Thanks,

Courtney

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The Hermit Hacker wrote:
>
> On Wed, 15 Dec 1999, Jeff Hoffmann wrote:
>
> > > my preference tends to be software raid...whatever I've ever seen as far
> > > as hardware raid is concerned has been quite slower then software
> > > raid...and this is with high-end servers...
> >
> > i kind of question this, and here's why:  i just set up a linux dual
> > P3/256MB with 4 software raid 5 volumes and even loading data into one
> > of the databases slows it to a crawl.  i've been looking around because
> > it seems absurd that the machine should slow down so much.  i haven't
> > really found any answers, but i have seen several places which told me
> > that software raid under linux _isn't_ safe for multiprocessors & no
> > place has told me for sure that it is.
>
>         What filesystem?  I know (thank god) very little about Linux, but
> there have been comments here by some Linux folks (Thomas, wasn't it
> you?) that indicated that ext2fs sucks for this?  Are you running with
> fsync() on or off?
>
> > appreciate it.  assuming this is the case, software raid wouldn't be a
> > big problem if you don't do a lot of heavy writing.
>
>         Most of my RAID tests are on Solaris+Disksuite...with good drives
> in the machine, my writes are something like 18MB/s to the drive, stripe'd
> and mirrored...I think reads worked out to be 19MB/s...(bad drives, same
> setup, same machine, same OS, were net'ng me something like 3MB/s...really
> killed performance *grin*)
>
> Marc G. Fournier                   ICQ#7615664               IRC Nick: Scrappy
> Systems Administrator @ hub.org
> primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org
>
> ************