Web Hosting Talk : Other Forums : Computers and Peripherals : 10k rpm vs 15k rpm

[Marwin]

Hi guys

I'm about to order a new PowerEdge server from Dell. I know what to order, except that I'm a bit uncertain about the hard drives. I have two options, either I'll buy six (raid) 15k rpm 146GB hds, or six (raid) 10k rpm 300GB hds for the same price.

We have a lot of traffic and a mix of serving (pretty basic html) web pages, pretty many db accesses and also quite a few file downloads. We run red hat, apache and mysql.

Would you go for the 146GB or the 300GB hds? And why?

[Mike V]

What controller is in the machine? And do you have an idea of your current or expected disk I/O activity? The 15k performance is worth it under an environment that is disk intensive (for example users read/write to a database server constantly). Something like a web page with static content doesn't need the disk much at all. Same is true for file downloads.

[nick125]

Personally, unless you are doing *really* heavy I/O, I would suggest 10k RPM, as it has lower heat (since the disk isn't going as fast), it would be less expensive, and it would probably be more reliable, again, because the disk wouldn't have as much heat. If you do choose to go with 15k RPM, you'll need to have a lot of fans to keep that drive cool

[riverpast]

Obviously it is a 2850 with PERC ;-)

If you want to spend the money anyway, the real question is whether you will need 6x300GB space, which is very unlikely for web hosting.

So, if you want to spend that money anyway on the same type of drives, I would get 15k drives.

However, you may want to get 2x300GB (RAID-1 for OS, websites, and file download) and then 4x146 15k (RAID-10 for DB).