I will have this server colocated as a web server with Cpanel/WHM.

1. P4, Intel, 2.2Ghz, Northwood, 512K cache.
2. Tyan S2090 Mother board,
3. 1GB, ECC, 2100 DDR ram.
4. 80GB, IBM, IDE, 7200 rpm, hard disk. this seems a mistake. I should buy a maxtor or WD.

My question is,

1. How do you think about it overall?
2. How to improve the performance? Raid 0?
3. How many simulatnous users the current machine can handle in VBulletin?

Thanks.

charlie.

That looks excellent. The only thing that I am not liking is that fact that you said "I SHOULD BUY A MAXTOR OR WD"

Hmmm. I don't think so. The Maxtor drives are not to be targed to be used a server drives. They are meant for personal computers/desktops. Trust me, I have learned from experiance. Sure Maxtor will replace them once they die, but there is downtime. I suggest an IBM or Western Digital or some quality type hard drive.

Per my statement above, a raid would be nice in the instance of the other drive failing. It may be something to look into.

Not sure as far as how many users can handle.

Originally posted by asyui8


1. How do you think about it overall?
2. How to improve the performance? Raid 0?
3. How many simulatnous users the current machine can handle in VBulletin?


1: Sounds like a good setup, Pentium4's have proven to be very reliable. I have a P4 server, and has never given me any trouble.

2: Two recomendations, you stated you were going to be colocating this server, therefore you wouldnt be able to upgrade quickly if needed. I would upgrade the memory to 1.5-2.0GB(just incase). And I would upgrade the HD to a Western Digital Caviar 7200RPM / 8MB Buffer. Hardware sites reviewed the WD Caviar, and stated it can compete with high speed SCSI drives. Also the WD Caviar is about $90 for the 80GB version. Raid is also a viable solution.

3: After the upgrades mentioned above, ALOT!

Originally posted by InterServ-JB
That looks excellent. The only thing that I am not liking is that fact that you said "I SHOULD BUY A MAXTOR OR WD"

Hmmm. I don't think so. The Maxtor drives are not to be targed to be used a server drives. They are meant for personal computers/desktops. Trust me, I have learned from experiance. Sure Maxtor will replace them once they die, but there is downtime. I suggest an IBM or Western Digital or some quality type hard drive.

Per my statement above, a raid would be nice in the instance of the other drive failing. It may be something to look into.

Not sure as far as how many users can handle.

I totally and completely disagree with this statement. Maxtor drives are NOT only meant for desktop computers. I personally believe that Maxtor makes ten times the drive that Western Digital does. That, however is my opinion. Saying that Maxtor drives are only suitable for desktops is misinformation.

I would definetely select Maxtor, not WD since I have bad experience with WD drives

its all about what you want

i myself have used both WD and maxtor and love both and would recommend either.

I, too, would use Maxtor if I could. I've seen WD drives die in under 3 months, and I've heard numerous horror stories of IBM drives (often dubbed "DeathStar") dying in the same timeframe.

A Maxtor drive might last you longer, but, even if it doesn't, they come with an awesome warranty -- I think for like three years, if it dies, you ship it off, and they send you a new one.

Performance overall should be pretty darn good. If you want to squeeze every bit of performance out of it that you can, you might want to take a look at the software side of things, and see if there are any ways to speed things up there.

I would not use RAID 0. It's faster, yes, but it also increases your likelihood for failure -- if one disk dies, the whole stripeset is lost. (This is only what I've heard, I dont' know this for a fact.) I would use RAID, but for the redundancy, not speed. Your screaming-fast machine is useless if it won't boot because the hard drive died, and it's only a matter of time before that happens.

The comment, however, about using a Caviar disk are right on. (I think I totally contradicted myself... Oh well.) Check out this review. I think a 3-disk RAID 5 set of these is going to be the next thing I put in a computer. (Maybe lower-capacity drives, though) :)
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/02q1/020305/index.html

Of course, I most confess this -- I don't exactly practice what I preach. My computer is running off of a single 5400 RPM WD drive, no RAID. The Caviar drives are supposedly awesome.(But I am deathly afraid of it dying one of these days...)

thank you guys. It helps me a lot.

the reason i chose IBM hard drive is that I have two currently and had no problem. But they are for my AMD 450mhz home lan, though it is seldom shut down for 2 years now.

To move away from the bashing of various hard drive companies... :D

Someone recommended upgrading the RAM. I'm not sure if it's "necessary," but I will say this -- you can't go wrong with adding more RAM, if it's within your budget. 2 GB of RAM sounds extreme, but the RAM you're not using (at least under Linux, I'm not sure about other OSs) is used to cache files, which can speed things up by many orders of magnitude, as there's a heightened chance of it having whatever page you're requesting right in RAM, instead of having to get it off the hard drive.

Speaking of OSs... What are you running on this for software? Some sort of UNIX, I hope? :)

the reason that I will use Raid 0 not redundancy is, i can afford loss of data. the server is for adult pictures. if there is a catastraphic loss, so be it. the important info, such as accounts and login info will be backed up.

when i get many clients, it will have better redundency.

but if the server has some video stuff, the hard disk speed will become a big issue. am i right? even that is not too much a necessity since at beginning i do not have much clients. when i do, i certainly can upgrade.

as i said at the first sentence, it will run cpanel/whm. so it will be red hat for OS.

Originally posted by asyui8
as i said at the first sentence, it will run cpanel/whm. so it will be red hat for OS.

FreeBSD is also supported :D

I suggest to go with P III, for what I read (but never used), P IV do work perform very well in rackmount servers.

Also, I had a very very bad experience with Maxtor HD.

Originally posted by asyui8
the reason that I will use Raid 0 not redundancy is, i can afford loss of data. the server is for adult pictures. if there is a catastraphic loss, so be it. the important info, such as accounts and login info will be backed up.

when i get many clients, it will have better redundency.

but if the server has some video stuff, the hard disk speed will become a big issue. am i right? even that is not too much a necessity since at beginning i do not have much clients. when i do, i certainly can upgrade.

What you're doing requires extensive drive reading. Raid0 will improve read/write speeds but offers no redundancy. Raid1 will improve read speeds while at the same time offering redundancy.

could anybody give me some idea how Raid 1 can boost speed? by what percentage as compared with Raid 0?

1. RAID does not increase speed

2. I'd get a WD drive

Please don't get the IBM in a server environment, it's not made to run more than 8 hours per day!

http://www.storagereview.com/cgi-bin/news_archive.pl?viewhl=864

Storagereview recommends the Maxtor series as best server drive and the WD as desktop machine. It's a shame because the IBM's are real fast, but in server environment cannot take a chance of failure.

Check out storagereview.com, you will find a lot of usufull info there...

Thank's for the link.

Originally posted by roly
1. RAID does not increase speed


RAID 0 does increase speed! With at least two drives in Raid 0 Array there will always be two hard drives head that simultaneuously write down the stream of data; one part of data is being written/read by one hard drive and the other part of data is being written/read by the other drive, all at the same time.
How doesn't this increase performance?

Further readings: http://www.raidtoolbox.com/raidinfo.html

I use almost the same configuration. Only addition is that I have a Raid5 configuration. It helps alot, as one time my backup drive failed which was our inhouse data file, and luckily it was saved by our raid config.

Raid 0 is striping and does increase speed by a good margin. Raid 1 is mirroring and will not increase speed at all.

IBM generally makes top of the line hard drives. However, there was a batch of hard drives, produced in a third world Asian country, that was bad. Avoid the Deskstar 75GXP model. Maybe avoid the Deskstar period. Other IBM products are not effected by this. Other IBM hard drives are great, especially look for the ones produced here in the USA. Naturally, the top quality ones are made in the USA. You buy cheap Asian produced products, and you should expect what you get.

Please look at the link above there new models apparently are not made to run more than 33 Hours per month. When you call IBM they will say to not use them in a server environment. Also as you may know IBM sold there hard drive business to Samsung recently. Not to mention there current hard drives are $15-20 cheaper in every model compared to the competition. Basically not good signs coming out ot IBM at all.

Believe me for YEARS I used IBM for just about everything. When I owned a computer store we used the 75 GXP's all the time and in fact not as many came back as we thought would. But we did have people come back with bad ones and even though IBM replaced them, the problem would persist ;-(. SO especially when you put them in a rackmount, which may be a little hotter and work more than a machine running at work or home I would be careful.

seagate seagate seagate the best drive i've ever used.

I have no reasons to believe Storage Review or any reviews out there. Does SR said Maxtor D740X is best for server environment? Wrong with me , I run servers from many hard disk manufacturers , my first Maxtor D740X is much slower than IBM Deskstar , slower until died after a few hours serving medium load Linux server. Bad experience persist with my other Maxtor drives. Enough for Maxtor, I'd completely stay away from them. Try reading REAL PEOPLE EXPERIENCEs many agree that Maxtor crap,low. My own experience shows that IBM is the best drive in decent environment. ex. IBM can't tolerate high temp so I blew desktar with 4 fans , its temperature not higher than 30C, as a result , it works perfectly on all servers , no failure , extremely fast.

My friends also have Seagate IDE died on his servers after a few months serving lighly load server. I thumb up WD for reliability and IBM for speed.

I've had great experience with WD and IBM. Seagate barracudas are where its at as far as scsi, but if you need to use IDE, the WD Caviar 80 is a perfect choice. At $90 bucks a pop you can't go wrong.

Infact buy 3, 2 for raid 0, 1 for extra redundant backup.

BTW anyone know of a free ghost type utility other than dd?
<correction> does anyone know of a ghost type utility (free) that can run while the os is running ? </correction>

My Western Digital 100GB drive failed after only 4 or 5 months of use. It took a full month to get a new one. They were lucky I was out of town that month, or I would've knocked down their doors...

seagate > ibm

Most IBM drives are not suggested for 24-7 use. Don't belive me? It's on their website somewhere, and it usually says it if you buy the boxed drive and not the OEM.

I like maxtor too, bad experiances with WD. But everybody who has good experiances, loves them.

i think its a mixed view on ibm, maxtor, and wd, siome people swear by them , other's don't ...

bottom line , they're cheap, get a couple

For sure. If you're going IDE, get a couple. Play around with them, figure out what you like.

All of our IDE servers have Seagate or Maxtor. SCSI we use Seagate or IBM.

b-a-r-r-a-c-c-u-d-a

barracudas rock! i've got dual 80s in this machine.