RE: SCSI needed for best performance - While this is true in some cases, if you are using striping or any RAID level (RAID 5 for example) that splits reads and writes across drives, then there will be several IDE channels feeding data to the RAID card at a time. Two ATA100 IDE channels will accept and provide data faster than the PCI bus that the card is plugged into can. The result is that you can use cheap IDE drives and get the same performance as the very fastest SCSI drives. Of course if you are running on some of the high-end server platforms from IBM, SUN, or HP then there will not be a PCI bus in the loop, and if you can afford such a server then the cost of getting the fastest SCSI drives and custom RAID hardware will not be an issue.
If you are looking at this type of high-end storage and want to save some money you should check out the fiber-channel RAID solutions from Adjile Systems <http://www.adjile.com> as part of you comparisons. For the best price/performance/reliability for my i686 Linux system (on a HP NetServer E60 Dual Pentium II box) I went with High Point Technologies Rocket RAID 404 card and Western Digital 180 GB drives. The documentation for setting up the card for Windows and Linux Lilo booting was complete, but seriously lacking for Linux GRUB boots. I worked out the GRUB issues with help from the suse-linux-e group at <http://lists.suse.com> last January and February. The setup was easy once I learned what to do. Best of Luck, Grant Q -----Original Message----- From: Gabriel Guzman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 10:06 AM To: Bernd Jagla Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; mysql Subject: Re: RAID hardware suggestions/experience Bernd, here is a good resource on the different types of RAIDs (0, 1, 10, 0+1 etc) http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html For high I/O, get a hardware RAID controller, several SCSI disks with 15,000 RPM and as much CACHE as you can afford and do RAID1. Better make sure you have a good backup plan though cause if one disk fails, you loose everything. RAID 10 or 0+1 might be a good compromise between data integrity and I/O performance. But for sheer speed, you will definitely want to go SCSI if you can afford it. RAID 5 will take a performance hit, especially on writing, I wouldn't reccomend it for what you are doing, definitely not if you will be using IDE drives... SLOW. Another idea would be to go with a disk array from a 3rd party vendor that you could attach to you DB box. Might be worth looking into at least. I've setup and maintained up to 1.5TB disk arrays in RAID 5 implementations (IDE and SCSI) and ide is definitely a slow solution for RAID5... good for backups, but not for I/O intensive applications. gabe. -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
