Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : experts of server with 2 hard drives...advice needed

[xmlxp]

am getting new server with 2 (73GB) hard drives i need to know the following:

1.I need to put /home in one hard drive 73GB and the other partitions like /boot, /tmp,/usr and /var on the other drive

where should i put /home? on the primary or or secondary drive?is there any effect on the speed?

2. Am used to servers with 1 drive. is there any difference when it comes to security aplications such as APF,BFD,mod security and other aplicatuions settings?

3. in general should i take the same actions when handling a server with 1 drive and server with 2 drives?

thanks in advance for your reply

[linux-tech]

am getting new server with 2 (73GB) hard drives i need to know the following:

73G is way too small. WHy even bother, when you can get a decent drive for the same price most likely.

#1:
If your thought is to make it so that you can simply swap out the drives, don't even think about it, not going to happen. You still have to account for mail, mysql, passwords, dns, etc, all of which is pretty much stored everywhere.

If you've got your heart set on it, just put /home as the one drive alone.

#2:
not really any difference at all.

#3:
Typically, the second drive should be used for backups and unmounted when not in use, but if you're going to do things one way, then, you're fine.

Seriously, you don't want to stop with 70G drives. That will put some pretty serious limits on things. Most DC's will upgrade those reasonably cheap, and if you're building your own, you can always go through someplace like Newegg to get a larger, decently performing drive close to, if not exactly the same price,

[xmlxp]

actually the server will host one website based on vBulltin with a 6 GB database and 15,000 daily visitors so i decided to move to a stronger server, the new server specs is as following:

Intel Dual Xeon 2.8GHz Processor
2 x 73 GB SCSI
ECC Registered 4000 MB RAM
RedHat Enterprise 5

one 73 GB would be enough for one website, but the situation i have 2 drives and i want to use both of them to get better performace and otpimization to handle a heavy expanding vBulltin database.

the other thing i wanted to make sure that managing a server with 2 hard drives is exactly same as managing a server with 1 hard drive on all levels

[xmlxp]

i got advice to move the MySQL database to the second hard disk instead of moving the whole /home directory ... would that be better for performance?

[ServerMins]

If it is for one vbulletin site then I would say move the db to that other drive. I would also put swap space on both drives. Using another webserver such as lighttpd or lightspeed would be beneficial. Also eaccelerator will help if your are trying to squeeze as much out of the server as you can.

[Hugin]

Originally Posted by xmlxp

i got advice to move the MySQL database to the second hard disk instead of moving the whole /home directory ... would that be better for performance?

Depending on your needs, it would be wise to move mysql to a different server altogether.