[Dovecot] OT - small hd recommendation
Daniel L. Miller
dmiller at amfes.com
Wed Aug 31 00:43:33 EEST 2011
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
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