On 1/7/2015 12:50 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > Right... but only cost 133% (about) more than consumer drives, as opposed > to the 300% that the "server/enterprise" grade drives' cost. well, those $$$ drives are likely SAS rather than SATA, and that has other advantages... 10k or 15k RPM gives you up to double the IOPS per spindle of a 7200rpm SATA drive (and WD Reds are only 5900 RPM, I believe?)... 2.5" enterprise disks let you have more smaller spindles in the same space (24-25 per 2U vs 12 for 3.5") for higher IO concurrency, and SAS supports multipathing (dual porting) for higher IO bandwidth, also SAS has tagged command queueing which often performs better than SATA NCQ under high IO concurrency workloads, like database servers. -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast