Re: RAID Configuration Sugestion

On 8/30/05, Ron <rjpeace@earthlink.net> wrote:
> >If you still have the budget, I would suggest considering either
> >what Ron suggested or possibly using a 4 drive RAID 10 instead.
>
> IME, with only 4 HDs, it's usually better to split them them into two
> RAID 1's (one for the db, one for everything else including the logs)
> than it is to put everything on one RAID 10.  YMMV.

This coresponds to what I have observed as well. Of course, we all
know that work loads varry.

Just a note for the OP who has only two drives, there are tools for a
variety of OSs that monitor the S.M.A.R.T. features of the drive and
give an early warning in case it senses impending failure. I've caught
two drives before failure with these types of tools.

Also note that when reading discussions of this nature you must take
into consideration the value of your data. For some people, restoring
from a nightly backup is inconvienent, but not life-or-death. Some
people even do twice-daily backups so that in case of a failure they
can recover with little loss of data. This might be a good way to
mitigate the cost of expensive server hardware. If you cannot afford
to lose any data then you need to consider it imperitive to use some
type of RAID setup (not RAID 0) and to achieve great performance
you'll want more than 2 drives.
--
Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org