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  1. #1

    Raid and Drive Questions

    I'm looking for a new dedicated server and have some questions. For a mid/higher end setup with a very busy site that will be used for both a large database driven site as well as serving web pages, what is the ideal scenario in terms of Raid/vs type of Hard drives if one needs a lot of space on the server as well.

    I will probably need 3 1tb drives, but have some questions regarding Raid and SAS vs SATA Drives.

    1. For those of you who use a SAS drive for the database and booting I suppose, is there a way of having additional drives SATA drives for the web pages themselves?

    I was looking at probably a Raid 1 setup so could anyone give me some pointers on what to look for in terms of the Raid (Should I be going with SATA/SAS raid) or would I be ok with a fast enough processor and enough RAM to just go with Raid 1 and all drives using SATA. Thanks for the help.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
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    Quote Originally Posted by onthego View Post
    ..very busy site that will be used for both a large database driven site as well as serving web pages, what is the ideal scenario in terms of Raid/vs type of Hard drives if one needs a lot of space on the server as well.
    You've stated this will be a very busy database driven site which will likely mean that you'll have a lot of disk access. Disk access (I/O) will typically be your primary bottleneck in that scenario. Given that you need large drives and will likely have a lot of data stored then this can further complicate things in terms of I/O bottleneck.

    SAS drives are going to give you far better I/O performance than SATA drives. I would be looking for the 15K RPM SAS drives for this type of scenario.

    I will probably need 3 1tb drives, but have some questions regarding Raid and SAS vs SATA Drives.
    Does this mean you're need 3TB? If so, you're going to need some big drives and RAID 1 wont work with three drives - RAID 1 uses 2 drives.

    What I would actually recommend is looking into RAID1+0, 4 drives total and designed for better performance while still providing redundancy. You can have 4 drives in a RAID 1+0 configuration so you'd likely need to buy the biggest you can get.

    So, I vote for RAID1+0 with 4 15K SAS drives in RAID1+0 configuration.

    Best of luck!
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  3. #3
    Join Date
    Apr 2004
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    SAS is going to be faster but unless you have tons of traffic you will probably be ok with SATA. SAS is going to be faster so if you are going to be using a big database spend the money and go with SAS.

    This post should be moved to Dedicated Servers..

  4. #4
    Thanks very much for the help Crucial Web Hosting and Pinellas Hosting. Appreciate your giving me some options and your feedback!

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Dec 2004
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    You may want to look into a 'hybrid' setup of sorts. For example, you might have 1TB or 2TB SATA disks for your standard web content, and then one or more SSDs for your MySQL databases (15K SAS is excellent, but SSD will actually be much better). This will get you the best value, and you won't be limited by the lack of storage on the faster disks.

    Most dedicated providers won't necessarily advertise servers that have configurations like these, but I think you'll find it is something you can request if you contact sales directly.
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  6. #6
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    I would try to RAID1 everything. If you have 1 SSD, 1 SAS.. get 2 of each and RAID1 them.
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