Re: Intel SRCS16 SATA raid?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex Turner [mailto:armtuk@gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 12:14 PM
> To: Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com
> Cc: Greg Stark; pgsql-performance@postgresql.org;
> pgsql-performance-owner@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Intel SRCS16 SATA raid?
>
>
> I have put together a little head to head performance of a 15k SCSI,
> 10k SCSI 10K SATA w/TCQ, 10K SATA wo/TCQ and 7.2K SATA drive
> comparison at storage review
>
> http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/compare_rtg_2001.ph
> p?typeID=10&testbedID=3&osID=4&raidconfigID=1&numDrives=1&devI
> D_0=232&devID_1=40&devID_2=259&devID_3=267&devID_4=261&devID_5
> =248&devCnt=6
>
> It does illustrate some of the weaknesses of SATA drives, but all in
> all the Raptor drives put on a good show.
> [...]

I think it's a little misleading that your tests show 0ms seek times
for some of the write tests.  The environmental test also selects a
missing data point as the winner.  Besides that, it seems to me that
seek time is one of the most important features for a DB server, which
means that the SCSI drives are the clear winners and the non-WD SATA
drives are the embarrassing losers.  Transfer rate is import, but
perhaps less so because DBs tend to read/write small blocks rather
than large files.  On the server suite, which seems to me to be the
most relevant for DBs, the Atlas 15k spanks the other drives by a
fairly large margin (especially the lesser SATA drives).  When you
ignore the "consumer app" benchmarks, I wouldn't be so confident in
saying that the Raptors "put on a good show".

__
David B. Held
Software Engineer/Array Services Group
200 14th Ave. East,  Sartell, MN 56377
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