Re: File server questions.
- From: "m. Th." <theologos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 12:12:25 +0200
Peter wrote:
We saw many benchmarks in which SATA drivers doesn't perform better than SATA II drivers (with NCQ or not).
I'm not aware of drivers being specific to a SATA version.
Sorry, my fault. I meant drives, not driveRs.
"Who's to blame?"
OP way of understanding things. ;-)
(AFAIK, the disks cannot yet fill not the SATA max 1.5GBps neither the PCI-X bandwidth, but any comments are wellcome). A hardware RAID controller can get more speed from the disks?
Absolutely.
We think to upgrade the disks for our file server. Do you think that it matters to buy disks 1. SATA II 2. SATA II with NCQ 3. or stay with SATA (we have a 3ware 9550SX SATA II controller on a PCI-X bus with two Maxtor DiamondMax 10 in RAID 1).
That depends on a server load. You have provided no information in that respect.
Server data spectrum (current average values):
- 30-40 users.
- Office files: 15 users opening/saving frequently files (5k - 100k)
- Scanning: 8 users saving files approx. 500k - 2M in size. (4 continuously scanning with hi-speed Epson scanners)
- Picture browsing: 3 users browsing files 1M - 50M in size. (frequently but not very often)
- Printing: on 4 network printers (very often small documents, more rare big documents).
- SQL: approx. 20 DB files of different sizes, biggest is 60 MB, very often real-time reads, writes aren't a very big problem. (small amount, we can wait a little until the server posts the changes)
- Copies from and to server (sometimes a rather big amount of data ie. > 100-200 MB) (because we have some Macs with QuarkXPress which doesn't work on the network).
What do you think that we can do at the hardware storage level?
Do you think that RAID 5 is better than RAID 1 considering that in the case of RAID 5 the controller becomes a Point of failure? Or is very unlikely that the controller can go broken?
Likely or not, have a good disaster recovery plan. If you care about business continuity, of course.
RAID 5 is *really* faster than RAID 1?
Can be, if there are many disks in RAID5. Faster/slower depends on application.
In RAID 1 we have the advantage that immediately we can put the disk on other computer to save the most actual data.
You better test that idea.
We did. See bellow.
For RAID5 we don't know a program that can do this on another computer if the controller fails.
Ever heard about a BACKUP?
Gee... BACKUP! :) In fact, I'm very glad that we can discuss on this matter! We have three of them.
1. We use Acronis TrueImage 8 to make daily images of our system disk which we save on another computer on the network.
2. We use Retrospect 7 to make a full duplicate of files from user's and department's folders on another computer on the net.
3. We use Retrospect 7 to make a backup for the past versions of the files (two months back) on another computer on the net.
What do you think?
The main problem is that these things are on _daily_ basis and when our brave software RAID driver get corrupted rendered a mess on our boot sector the problem was that we must restore the _actual_ data because no one wanted to loose their work and no one remembered what did in that day. In this situation we picked a disk from the array and recovered the data with QueTek's FileScavenger which knows about RAID0 and RAID1 (of course) and thus we can get the most complete data.
If you know a program which knows RAID5 we are glad to know.
If you have better ideas please let us know.
TIA for your help,
m. Th. .
- References:
- File server questions.
- From: m. Th.
- Re: File server questions.
- From: Peter
- File server questions.
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