5400 rpm hard drives, 900 MB/s

SL83 said:
What are you doing with 15k drives for your home PC?
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im buying two server boxes to bring home to play with. 1 is a terminal server and the other is a file server. seeing as how i dont need both, i am going to part out one of them and use the HDDs for my home PC.

i am really lagging in the VMware department so i will be using the one server box for learning that.
 
samUwell said:
i am so glad this thread is here.

sometime today i will be picking up 3 15K HDD's for my home computer and was wondering if i should RAID them and what kind of RAID; 5 or 10?
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If you figure out a way to RAID10 3 drives do let us know.

RAID5 is garbage for writes unless you have some sort of cache attached to it.
 
I need to do a software raid for my HTPC. I will be using Raid 5 because performance isn't an issue and I don't want to sacrifice so much space with mirroring.
 
samUwell said:
im buying two server boxes to bring home to play with. 1 is a terminal server and the other is a file server. seeing as how i dont need both, i am going to part out one of them and use the HDDs for my home PC.

i am really lagging in the VMware department so i will be using the one server box for learning that.
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Vlasic said:
If you figure out a way to RAID10 3 drives do let us know.

RAID5 is garbage for writes unless you have some sort of cache attached to it.
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This is a perfect example, if you're using a dedicated fileserver. Three 15k drives in a pool are effectively "striped" with zfs. Since I'm assuming they aren't very large, it would be cheap to back them up with some slower consumer-grade drives. Put the three fast drives on one controller (fast motherboard SAS or SATA?) and the slow ones on something else.

You'll get the advantage of 100% utilization of your fast drives, with a performance boost over using them as JBOD, it's cost-effective, and robust.

Win on all counts.
 
you can do sudo raid 5 easily with unraid.

Its snapshot raid not real time but no one really needs real time with a home server.

one parity drive and as many data drives as you want. drag and drop expansion and recovers nicely from my testing.
 
telos said:
you can do sudo raid 5 easily with unraid.

Its snapshot raid not real time but no one really needs real time with a home server.

one parity drive and as many data drives as you want. drag and drop expansion and recovers nicely from my testing.
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My server is running windows. I didn't think unraid worked with winblows.
 
BLOOPS meant flexraid :)

I did have one crash during a verify procedure in the 6 months i've been running it.

I should add its technically still in beta. The developer is extremely responsive on the forums if you are having any trouble though.

Unraid does the same thing but doesn't run in a proper OS. It just boots from a thumb drive that you have to pay them for :(
 
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neat I will check it out. I was looking for something of this nature to backup my movie and tv show collection.
 
I have an Equallogic PS6000E sitting in the box still doing nothing full of 1tb SAS drives. I am wondering if I should at least unbox it and put it in one of the racks at least.
 
Where I work they use SSD drives in most of the servers. For the OS. Single drive. No RAID.

Can someone explain the logic of this to me?
 
There is nothing important on an os drive. its probably a standard image they have on a DVD that takes them less than 45 minutes to reimage. Would take longer to repair a raid array and if there are redundant servers there is no reason 45 minutes of down time is going to hurt them.
 
I believe they are using Altiris for deployment over the network. This data center is nothing but redundacy. Every system has multiple levels of redundacy to minimize downtime.

This is what I was thinking. Servers are up 24/7/365. Never reboot unless absoulutely necassary and even the smallest server has 5 HD's and those are controllers for storage arrays, HP SSA70's. I see no benefit to using SSD drives for the OS.
 
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DocHolliday said:
Where I work they use SSD drives in most of the servers. For the OS. Single drive. No RAID.

Can someone explain the logic of this to me?
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i do similar for some of my servers. the logic is it is dirt cheap and gives you a 'hard' bootable environment so i can get all my VM hosts up without explicit need for a SAN or other backend to PXE/diskless boot my physical assets.

you can then keep full weekly bare metal backups of the physical images and in the event you lose a drive you get a new one and 'ghost' it back to normal health.

A lot of folks do this because a full diskless + virtulized environment can be a PITA to deal with in a disaster recovery situation.
 
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