<html><head><style type='text/css'>body { font-family: 'Arial'; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000}</style></head><body>Guy,<br><br>I don't think raptor hard drives are necessarily value for money and in your case, I believe that you'd be *much* better served with some sort of redundancy and not just plain old striping.<br><br>I'd recommend that you stick with software raid and do something like this;<br><br><br>1 x silicon image PCI 4 port sata controller *not hardware raid* ($25 from ebay for example)<br>3 x 320gb sata hdd (~ $100 each here in Australia)<br><br>for a total of $325 AUD you'd get around 640gb or redundant storage.<br><br><br>2 x 74gb raptors will cost you $400 here in Australia ..... so thats $75 *more* for almost 400gb *less* storage that is *not* redundant !<br><br>Linux software raid-5 performance is pretty good, my 4 x 400gb sata's show 155mb/s reads with 'hdparm -t'.<br><br><br><br>No brainer !<br><br><br><br>Cheers,<br><br><br>Brian.<br><br><br><br><br><br>----- Original Message -----<br>From: "boisvert guy" <boisvert.guy@videotron.ca><br>To: centos@centos.org<br>Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 12:09:48 PM (GMT+1000) Australia/Brisbane<br>Subject: [CentOS] Need advice on storage<br><br>Hi all,<br><br> I have a CentOS 4.5 server running on a workstation mainboard (PCI Slots only). We have now one 200 Gigs IDE disk dedicated for e-mail server storage. We use Communigate Pro and the server has 45 Outlook clients with the MAPI connector (All mailboxes on the server). When a user opens Outlook, a refresh of the local cache is performed for his data. There is a big "Public" area (about 50 Gigs) where all the projects data/infos are stored (all that on the same IDE hard disk). Clients cache updates are performed on e-mail folder access. We noticed server response slowdown as the number of user increased (quite normal!).<br><br> Now we want to upgrade the server to get better performance. I'd like to know if, as a temporary cheap upgrade, software RAID with a Sil 3124 and 2 x Raptor WD740ADFD (74 Gigs with NCQ) in Software RAID 0 would bring a significant performance boost. If it is the case, that would permit to phase out this server in 1-2 years and we'd upgrade the whole server after.<br><br>Here a the specs of the actual "server":<br>Asus A7V600 (I know, that's bad but it just works!!!)<br>Athlon 2500+<br>1 Gig RAM (we'll probably put 1 more gig soon if it can help)<br>System Hard Disk: WD 80 Gigs<br>Mail hard disk: Western Digital WD2000JB (IDE 200 Gigs) EXT3 on LVM<br>Backups hard disk: 1 x 200 Gigs IDE, 1 x 320 Gigs SATA, 1 x 750 Gigs SATA --> LVM Total of 1270 Gigs<br><br>Any help / experience would be appreciated.<br><br><br>TIA,<br><br>Guy Boisvert<br>
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