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Reccomend some Harddrives
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Reccomend some Harddrives

edited October 2011 in Help

Hey,
One of our servers we have in our rack in Sweden has a dodgy hard drive which is on its way out. This particular server is pretty knew (6 Months) and is used for hosting our website system.
Currently everything is okay and we are transferring everything over to the main disk but we will need the extra space sooner rather than later.

Hard drive needs to be at least 500GB if not a TB+. I would like to get an additional drive so my server has 3 drives in raid 10. Price wise no more than £500 per drive ($750-) but drive needs to be good quality with a decent i/o and ware ability.
I was thinking about sas 15k, what do you think?

Thanks!

Comments

  • jhjh Member

    You should be able to get 500GB SSDs at that price which should suit your needs perfectly and save you power.

  • jtodd said: You should be able to get 500GB SSDs at that price which should suit your needs perfectly and save you power.

    You referring to them Hybrid drives?

  • Well I have a SSD in my home pc which I run the OS on and its really good. However one does question its reliability or is that all just a myth? Seen as this server is used by our core system to our business it seems a bit to risky to place SSDs on.

    We also have a rack in synergy house in Manchester which is about 30 miles north of my home so I'm thinking of placing a test ssd server on it to check its reliable enough for use in the future.

  • jhjh Member

    No I mean full SSDs.

    I haven't stress tested any SSDs but in theory no moving parts and less power usage = more reliable.

  • But failure rates seem to be higher. Seen as I'm looking for our website system which powers an awful amount of stuff downtime needs to be decreased by as much as possible. As I said I will put some ssds into one of our spare servers and check it out(next week).

  • Failure of SSD would cause all data to be gone... Flash memory is great, but scary sometimes. At least with HDDs, you can manage to recover data by heading to one of the data recovery companies, but with Flash memory, that part is a lot harder.

  • net said: I would like to get an additional drive so my server has 3 drives in raid 10.

    RAID10 required a minimum of 4 drives.

    You can get a 300GB 15k RPM Seagate Cheetah for about $200, and could probably get 4 of them plus a decent SAS RAID controller for about $1000 :)

    A benchmark I found on a single 300GB Seagate Cheatah:

    4KB Random Read: 34,747 IOPS
    4KB Random Write: 33896 IOPS
    Max Read: 163 MB/s
    Max Write: 166 MB/s
  • @Kuro,
    Sorry that was a mistake, I should of been more clearer.
    I have 1 Main disk on the server and I have a small 15k SaS on the server already though not being used and the 'faulty drive'.

    Thanks for your suggestion

  • Intel 320 SSD seem to be the rage for high IOPS, reading reports of 40x the IOPS with them over 4x 15k SAS in raid10

    I think the 300gb model is in your price range. At least in the US, add in the EU social engineering fees and it might be too high.

  • kiloservekiloserve Member
    edited October 2011

    net said: I was thinking about sas 15k,

    In server grade hardware right now, 15K SAS is the most cost-effective (and fast) way to go if you need 500GB storage. I guess you could also go SATA but they are slower...especially with random access.

    SSD's are reliable but you have to get the right kind as the write cycles in all SSD's are limited.

    There are actually 2 varieties of SSD drives (and a few hybrids and variants):

    SLC SSD are server grade and they are the best way to go if you had a large sum of money. Their theoretical reliability is on par/better than mechanical drives aka SAS/SATA drives. The problem with SLC SSD's is that they are wildly expensive.

    MLC SSD are consumer/dekstop grade and not suitable as a standalone drive in a reliable server environment. These should not be used unless you are using something like a RAID 10 array and change them out on schedule. Or if data loss isn't that big a deal, you can go with MLC type SSD's and just replace and restore when needed. Most of the "horror" stories concerning SSD's in servers are due to the use of these MLC drives and especially when using only 1 (non-RAID).

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