On 01/06/2013 10:02 PM, Phillip Hellewell wrote: > On Sun, Jan 06, 2013 at 04:16:56PM -0700, Steve Meyers wrote: >> However, the only reason I'd get something besides an SSD for your >> server these days are if you need lots of space. You may not need >> the performance, but they are silent and cool. > > Ok, I think you've got me convinced. Silent and cool are big plusses > for me, and I don't need a ton of space (I've been getting by just fine > with under 30GB).
Unless you want to spend significant cash, I don't see any reason to go with SSD, frankly. The affordable ones have extremely high failure rates from the reviews I've read. And they often fail suddenly and spectacularly, with no warning. At least the ones you see advertised on newegg (OCZ, etc). >From your use cases, you definitely are more I/O bound than CPU bound, but you're not going to be pushing even 5400 rpm spinning disks, frankly, 90% of the time. It's not like you're serving a couple of thousand users over a couple of gigabit links, like the file servers I used to work with. >> Regarding the Atom processors, they're just a low-energy x86_64 >> processor. Depending on the motherboard chipset, you may only be >> able to use 32-bit though. The SuperMicro one supports 64-bit -- >> assuming it's the same one I've got. > > Thanks for clearing that up for me. Don't bother with Atom. I just put together a server in a 2U rackmount case. I bought an Intel Micro (or mini or nano or something?) ATX motherboard with onboard video in case I need a screen, a super quiet and efficient power supply, a quad-core 64-bit i5 processor, 16 GB ram, and two off-the-self 2-TB WD green drives (not enterprise, yes green drives) that I run in Raid-1 configuration. The drives throttle back to something like 5400 rpm when not being exercised. I've never had any problems or conflicts with linux and software raid and the drive's energy-savings modes. Green drives don't work at all in a true hardware raid because of the power saving settings triggering drive resets. But in my software raid they are doing just fine. I replaced the case fans with NewEgg's quietest fans, and despite two drives spinning and the stock cpu cooler, I can hardly hear the thing. I run mostly VMs on it right now, but in the near future it will be a home file server. I'll never ever max out the disk I/O on it. It's cool, quiet, and doesn't use that much power, but can handle full virtual machines easily. The entire server was about $600. Adding an SSD to this server would gain me nothing and 99% of the time I'd never notice it if it had it. -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
