Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : 1 drive or 2?

[dvd871]

Howdy folks

We're about to order our first dedicated server for an rpg game site and a few other sites that we host spread out all over the place on various shared hosts. The rpg site is php/mySQL based and gets a good bit of traffic. Sometimes with as many as 20 - 30 players online at the same time. My question is, should we go with 1 drive or 2 in the server?

My thoughts were to get a server with 2 drives. One for mySQL only and the other for the rest of the content, OS, php, apache, etc. Is this a viable solution or am I way off the mark here? Anything else to consider?

Thanks in advance!

[pergesu]

Go with two drives and use one of them for backup, and do remote backups as well.

[rehash]

if you go with 2 drives, failures may happen on 1U units, it happened to me about 3 times on different servers on different datacenters, lately I found they were too close and could overheated each other.

[Neosurge]

Whenever possible use more drives!! I use a multiple drive configuration on all hosting machines, the performance increases are huge. If possible, use raid1 or raid1+0 and have /var/ on a seperate hardware raid card. You can acheive enormous performance gains from this

[gbjbaanb]

If you want to boost performance of MySQL, get more RAM instead of a separate drive.

Its never a bad idea to get 2 drives and configure them in RAID1 so failure won't take your server down - but that depends on how much hassle, length of downtime you can handle.

I don't know why you'd have /var on a separate raid array.. I'd stick everything on the raid.

[dvd871]

I should have mentioned in the initial post that DB performance is disk-bound with 50 - 60 tables some as large as 20Mb, sometimes 5 - 10 queries per page, table scans, etc. Seems to me that the multi-drive config would help speed the reads from the database.

[M0NkEY]

Originally posted by gbjbaanb
If you want to boost performance of MySQL, get more RAM instead of a separate drive.

What he said.

Unless you're talking about VERY big databases with lots of traffic, but then you'd still want lots of ram before a seperate disk.

[RackChat]

Originally posted by Neosurge
Whenever possible use more drives!! I use a multiple drive configuration on all hosting machines, the performance increases are huge. If possible, use raid1 or raid1+0 and have /var/ on a seperate hardware raid card. You can acheive enormous performance gains from this

RAID 10 would be too expensive for his needs, but as you said RAID 1 would be the best solution.

RAID 5 also has the highest read data transaction rates, and is cheaper than RAID 10.

[Take-IT-EZZI]

Definitely 2 drives, RAID 1.

Redundancy is manditory if you are going to be responsible for peoples data.

[JoshuaJames]

I disagree that RAID 1 is needed for Redundancy... I have one drive for data, one drive for backups, and then I rsync that drive with a computer that is within the office. We have a T1 and if the disk drive crashes at the hosting complex, the traffic can be re-routed automatically to the offsite backup with very little downtime. The servers are exactly the same, the only difference is the line. Most clients would prefer a slower website than no website at all. RAID 1 only offers a false sense of security. Alot of the times if one disk goes you are going to lose both..

[riverpast]

Originally posted by JoshuaJames
Alot of the times if one disk goes you are going to lose both..

with cheap RAID cards

[Take-IT-EZZI]

Originally posted by JoshuaJames
I disagree that RAID 1 is needed for Redundancy...

Agreed, I didn't mean to imply there weren't alternatives.

[JoshuaJames]

Maybe river, but also you have to think of the factors going into a disk drive crash. Lightning, Sharp Jolt to the Case, Hackers, Corrupt data being mirrored. RAID 1 is a safe bet in the freak occurence a drive just dies, or perhaps is old and on it's death bed. But the sudden trauma that results in most disk drive failures is usually so severe it will do more damage than selectively wiping out one drive.

Or at least that's my experience, I prefer the multiple server approach than RAID. To each his own though.