Looks like the price has gone up with the economy starting to recover. I paid $68 per WD RE3 500GB drive on Amazon.com back in June. I would still recommend going with 4 drives in RAID 10 over 2 in RAID 1 or even 3 drives in RAID 5. You will get almost double the performance due to being able to stripe across the drives. RAID 1 is just a mirror so you are only going to see the performance of a single drive. I have experience with software RAID levels 1 and 5 with mdadm. My file server has a RAID 1 of 2 x 160GB Seagate SATA Drives and a RAID 5 of 3 x 1TB Hitachi SATA drives. For the RAID 1 drives hdparm shows approx 68MB/s for each drive and 68MB/s for the array. With the RAID 5 I am seeing 82 MB/s for the drive and 140MB/s for the array. Keep in mind this is an older Pentium D with the drives connected to an Supermicro LSI 1068 SAS controller. My ESXi box has a RAID 10 of 4 x 500GB Western Digital RE3 drives on a PERC 6/i controller. The PERC is a Dell branded LSI controller. Inside the virtual machines I am getting 148MB/s. Unfortunately I can't test this at the ESXi level, but the MB/s will defiantly be higher as the virtual machine has another layer to go through. Ryan On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 3:25 PM, ML <mailinglists at mailnewsrss.com> wrote: > Ryan, > >> If you want performance stick with RAID 10. In general the more drives >> (spindles) the faster the array. The Western Digital RE3 500 GB drives >> are a good deal. You should be able to get 4 of those in the low >> $200s. In RAID 10 this would give you better performance than 2 x 1TB >> in RAID 1. >> > They are like $89.99 a piece on NewEgg. I have a friend that has 1 x > 1TB Seagate Raid level drives he will sell me for $100 each. > > Is software RAID 10 decent performance? > > -Jason > >> Ryan >> >> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 2:36 PM, ML <mailinglists at mailnewsrss.com> >> wrote: >>> >>> On Oct 29, 2009, at 11:11 AM, Neil Aggarwal wrote: >>> >>>> RAID 10 is striping across mirrored drives. >>>> >>>> So, if you have 4 x 1TB drives, think of it as two separate >>>> 1 TB volumes. The system will write half your data to >>>> volume A and the other half to volume B. The data in volume >>>> A and B do not overlap. >>>> >>>> Now, each volume is composed of a mirrored set of drives. >>>> Anything written to volume A is actually stored on two drives. >>>> Anything written to volume B is actually stores on the other two >>>> drives. >>>> >>>> Does this make sense? >>>> Let me know if you need any more explanation. >>> >>> No it makes sense. >>> >>> I am contemplating if I really need 4 x 1tb in this system. I mean >>> how >>> much space with some photo's, web pages and MySQL take up if there >>> are >>> 5,000 subscribers to start up? >>> >>> Would 2 x 1TB enterprise drives be enough mirrored? >>> >>>> Also, when you move to a hosted solution, I would appreciate >>>> your considering my company for it. >>> >>> Sure, I will be doing a lot of research on that for sure. >>> _______________________________________________ >>> CentOS mailing list >>> CentOS at centos.org >>> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> CentOS mailing list >> CentOS at centos.org >> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >