Hardware upgrade advice

[Portia]

We are looking to upgrade a server and the client has proffered some suggestions. We are a little undecided so would appreciate some help…

[Soldier99]

It all depends on what the customer wants it for and how much he/she has to burn/waste/spent...

I would personally go for the SATA option , cheaper to upgrade/repair if needs be.

[The Enforcer]

less reliable and slower though

[Zenith]

True, but the redundancy in the data is there with true RAID 1 or 5.

[WhiteKnight]

The reliability of modern drives is so close to that of scsi now its really not an issue.

And the speed of 10krpm SATA2 drives is going to be faster than anything you could throw at it unless you REALLY tried anyway. Let alone a set of 5 in a raid array.

[porsche]

RAM Disk all the way

-Porsche-

[jase]

All depends on what the server is being used for

[Portia]

Originally posted by jase
All depends on what the server is being used for

Big (>10Gb) GIS data files and a couple of print queues.

[Omnituens]

i thought RAID's had to be set up in multiples of 2?

[Zenith]

It depends on which level of RAID you're after.

RAID 0 = striping
2 discs interleaved and appear to the system as 1 disc. Usually for data speed.

RAID 1 = mirroring
2 discs that have data written to both at the same time. Usually for data redundancy.

RAID 4 = striping with dedicated parity
At least 2 discs for striping the data (like RAID 0) with a 3rd disc for parity checking.

RAID 5 = striping with embedded parity
Like RAID 4 but the parity checking is embedded across all the discs of the array. Minimum no. of drives is 3.

RAID5 is the most popular for multiple disc storage these days because it allows for hotswapping broken discs and automatic rebuild of the data. It usually needs a good RAID controller card though.

[Drarok]

Note he says a GOOD raid controller.

We had a server at work blow up. "No problem", we thought. "It's RAID 5!"

So we swapped out the blown disk, rebuilt the array, only to find the volume was still shagged. Loads of corrupt files! :(

Damn bad old tech.

[zhardoum]

just had 18 samsung sata II hard drives delivered.. 4 were/are D.O.A.. 2 more fired up ok and died within 20 minutes and 2 more died within 3 days.. out of 18 8 are now dead in less than 4 days..

go with SCSI.. if its for business...

[Omnituens]

Originally posted by zhardoum
just had 18 samsung sata II hard drives delivered.. 4 were/are D.O.A.. 2 more fired up ok and died within 20 minutes and 2 more died within 3 days.. out of 18 8 are now dead in less than 4 days..

go with SCSI.. if its for business...
O_o if you wuold have said "18 Maxtor sata II drives" i wouldnt have been suprised.

8 disks fail? thats got to be some kind of a record.

[WhiteKnight]

Its just a dodgey batch.

All manufactures have their off days. Even with scsi disks. We had all the drives in a new server we bought die within a week once. (it had 8 drives in it too O_o)

The moral of the story....

Dont buy HDDs in one lump from the same company / manuf / at the same time.

[KingDaveRa]

HP.

Very good servers. Don't bother buying HP support, try a company called Maindec.

HP's raid controller's (6i I think now) are very good, very reliable. The battery backups are a bit crappy, but replaceable under warranty.

My experience is buy the decent kit and have done. DON'T scrimp, you will regret it.