A little OT - but I've seen a few opinions voiced here by various admins and I'd like to benefit.
Currently running a single combined server for multiple operations - fileserver, mailserver, webserver, virtual server, and whatever else pops up. Current incarnation of the machine, after the last rebuild, is an AMD Opteron 4180 with a Supermicro MB using ATI SB700 chipset - which means it supports SATA 3.0.
Current storage is one o/s drive, and a 4-drive RAID10 array. The RAID10 is using the Linux softraid via mdadm. The drives are Seagates - ST3160811AS. So it's 320GB of storage, and SATA 1.5.
I'm seeing some warnings & errors in my logs & dmesg - and Google tells me this can the result of several factors, including the hard drives. I haven't seen any SMART warnings as yet - but I am getting a little nervous and thinking about upgrading the storage.
At this time, I'm just interested in recommendations for hard drives & partitioning strategy. At the time I created the RAID10 array - I was still in the early stages of learning these technologies (not that I know that much more now!) so I probably didn't take advantage of any of the advanced settings such as stripe size, cluster size, etc. I am using XFS.
As part of the potential upgrade, I'm considering changing to RAID6 - seems a bit more efficient use of space. I see no reason for SSD - I think a set of reasonable 7200rpm drives should be just fine. What I don't know is, compared to my current 4 drive RAID10 with SATA 1.5, would even a single SATA 3 drive be comparable in terms of seek performance? Should I stick with the RAID-10?
Daniel