Thomas F.O'Connell wrote: > I'd use two of your drives to create a mirrored partition where pg_xlog > resides separate from the actual data. > > RAID 10 is probably appropriate for the remaining drives. > > Fortunately, you're not using Dell, so you don't have to worry about > the Perc3/Di RAID controller, which is not so compatible with > Linux...
Hmm...I have to wonder how true this is these days. My company has a Dell 2500 with a Perc3/Di running Debian Linux, with the 2.6.10 kernel. The controller seems to work reasonably well, though I wouldn't doubt that it's slower than a different one might be. But so far we haven't had any reliability issues with it. Now, the performance is pretty bad considering the setup -- a RAID 5 with five 73.6 gig SCSI disks (10K RPM, I believe). Reads through the filesystem come through at about 65 megabytes/sec, writes about 35 megabytes/sec (at least, so says "bonnie -s 8192"). This is on a system with a single 3 GHz Xeon and 1 gigabyte of memory. I'd expect much better read performance from what is essentially a stripe of 4 fast SCSI disks. While compatibility hasn't really been an issue, at least as far as the basics go, I still agree with your general sentiment -- stay away from the Dells, at least if they have the Perc3/Di controller. You'll probably get much better performance out of something else. -- Kevin Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])