Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : What to do with an extra HDD?

[JinKingstonUni]

Through some awesome mistake I have just discovered I have a spare unmounted HDD in my box which my DC seems to have overlooked for 10 months.

At the moment I have:

sda/ - /
sdb/ - /backup

sdc/ - spare

No raid.

Not really sure what to do with it though?

PHP and MySql are the two most server intensive processes I run but I am not sure if the I/O of these two services is so severe to warrant moving one on to the spare disk (though I dont know how to check disk IO for mysql).

If it helps all 3 disks are WD 150gb 10k Raptors

[eth00]

If you have nothing else to do with it you might as well put your MySQL on to it.

You also could keep a second copy of the backups that are older, though that is also a perfect thing for the remote backups that you hopefully have.

[teck]

I agree with the above. Putting MySQL on it will help a lot.

[JinKingstonUni]

Thanks for the advice.

I didn't want to put more backups onto it as all my backups are uploaded to Amazon S3 for redundancy anyway.

I guess I will move it across.

[tomydurden]

Maybe a software RAID

[CN-Jeremy]

I agree.. Software raid .. Give yourself a little redundancy..

[continuation]

Put your MySQL's transaction log on your spare disk. Transaction log is all sequential IO's.

You really don't want to disrupt your transaction log's sequential IO's with random IO's from other parts of MySQL. Giving transaction log its own disk will greatly improve your performance if your system is IO-bound

[Vulsion]

Be honest and give it back...

You could use it to keep all your user files on one drive. Would seperate the OS drive, and the drive for your customers.

MySQL is another solid option!

Cheers,
Tyler

[devonblzx]

Depending on the amount of writes, a RAID5 on the three drives might do well. A RAID5 would give you 300GB of space (before partitioning/formatting) and would give you redundancy if one disk failed. The only downside is write speed, read speed is fantastic with RAID5. So you have to see how much writing your database is doing. Most databases are mostly reads from what I've seen.

[SnoorkAdvertiser]

I would also recommend placing MySQL on the spare hard drive that you have. This will give you a little much better performance in general.

You may also consider a software RAID as other members mentioned for redundancy, but I would personally recommend hardware RAID.