[CentOS] Need advice on storage

Tue Nov 13 02:26:34 UTC 2007

Guy, 

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. 

I'd recommend that you stick with software raid and do something like this; 

1 x silicon image PCI 4 port sata controller *not hardware raid* ($25 from ebay for example) 
3 x 320gb sata hdd (~ $100 each here in Australia) 

for a total of $325 AUD you'd get around 640gb or redundant storage. 

2 x 74gb raptors will cost you $400 here in Australia ..... so thats $75 *more* for almost 400gb *less* storage that is *not* redundant ! 

Linux software raid-5 performance is pretty good, my 4 x 400gb sata's show 155mb/s reads with 'hdparm -t'. 

No brainer ! 

Cheers, 

Brian. 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "boisvert guy" <boisvert.guy at videotron.ca> 
To: centos at centos.org 
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 12:09:48 PM (GMT+1000) Australia/Brisbane 
Subject: [CentOS] Need advice on storage 

Hi all, 

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!). 

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. 

Here a the specs of the actual "server": 
Asus A7V600 (I know, that's bad but it just works!!!) 
Athlon 2500+ 
1 Gig RAM (we'll probably put 1 more gig soon if it can help) 
System Hard Disk: WD 80 Gigs 
Mail hard disk: Western Digital WD2000JB (IDE 200 Gigs) EXT3 on LVM 
Backups hard disk: 1 x 200 Gigs IDE, 1 x 320 Gigs SATA, 1 x 750 Gigs SATA --> LVM Total of 1270 Gigs 

Any help / experience would be appreciated. 

TIA, 

Guy Boisvert 

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