Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : Hard drive space questions

[smoove.]

Hi, I was wondering if i could get some advice from you chaps on what I could do with regards to hard drive space in the future.
I've got my own image-hosting server (http://www.image-upload.org), serving about 10,000 files and the popularity is increasing daily, and each month new visitors are doubling the previous month. Now i've got 320gb of hard drive space and im using about 10gb of this so far, but i'm planning on making it account based in the future.
I've been in contact with a few hosts about their dedicated servers (including my own), in regards to how many hard drives the servers can take and everyone of them say 2 maximum.
Which leaves me in abit of a pickle, as Im not sure what I would do when I need more hard drive space and I've upgraded the drives already.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could do? I was thinking about keeping the server I have now, which is rather fast and is more than capable of serving thousands of accounts and images and renting some small low spec server, which allows many more hard drives than normal servers, to serve all the data and use the faster server todo all the sql processes and page serving. Is this possible? Any ideas for alternatives is apprecated.

[dkitchen]

Maximum of two disks per machine?? That's nonsense ...

You can add as many disks as you wish into one volume using RAID methods such as RAID5/RAID10, you can also use JBOD to combine volumes but that's not as effective/fast when you have lots of disks.

If it's a DB based pretty busy site you might want to split SQL and files/page serving between two boxes, depends how your CPU usage is.

[qwidjib0]

Yes typically very standard IDE configurations allows 2 drives, and I'm not sure if you could cram anymore into a 1u effectively, but you can definately get around that with RAID. That all depends on the deals you can get though, and you'll want to be careful not to max processing power or anything else. Two servers may still be more economical, but if your investigation proves otherwise, ask them about RAID arrays.

[VapoRub]

Maximum of 2 disk per machine is not nonsense. For example, 1u servers generally enable you to have a maximum of 2 disks.

Full tower servers would allow you to put up to 6 disks (additional adapter cards needed).

[smoove.]

Yea, alot of them said they are slim hard disks and dont offer raid.
So would it be better for me to look at full size server?

[qwidjib0]

Yes if you want more than 2 hard disks, i'd look at a 2u or tower server.

[shockuk]

A normal modern motherboard handles 2 IDE channels. This means you can have 4 IDE drives. Obviously in a 1u box the space is limited as stated above, but most server companies (to my knowledge) don't bother with 1u because of the sheer expense of the case. In fact, alot of companies just use standard miditowers which can be picked up for as little as £8.

[dkitchen]

Originally posted by VapoRub
Maximum of 2 disk per machine is not nonsense. For example, 1u servers generally enable you to have a maximum of 2 disks.

Full tower servers would allow you to put up to 6 disks (additional adapter cards needed).

The statement "You can't get more than two disks in a server" is nonsense, nobody mentioned a 1U server, however your statement is correct.