What are you using for general hosting? SCSI, SATA, RAID-1,5,10?

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IT_Architect

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What drive setup are you using these days for regular hosting servers? SCSI, SATA, RAID-10, etc.? Tried any of the new 2TB drives?

I'm getting ready to do another ESXi server. My experience has come from environments where 18-36 SCSI drive arrays and SSD-SLCs are required. With general web hosting, while I would want redundancy, I'm gathering that space is a bigger issue than performance.
 
SATA is fine if you use server-quality instead of consumer quality. We use software RAID 1 because it's simple and effective. We're currently using 1TB drives and testing 2TB drives (which appear to be fine).

While low-power drives can be tempting, don't use them if they save power by shutting down (not spinning) when not being used.

Jeff
 
jlasman said:
SATA is fine if you use server-quality instead of consumer quality. We use software RAID 1 because it's simple and effective. We're currently using 1TB drives and testing 2TB drives (which appear to be fine).

While low-power drives can be tempting, don't use them if they save power by shutting down (not spinning) when not being used.

Jeff
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And 'green' drives which are able to spin up from 5.4krpm to 7.2krpm can break your RAID or give a corrupted disk.

SCSI is an old technique, you do not want that anymore.
 
>We're currently using 1TB drives and testing 2TB drives (which appear to be fine).<

Those are things I need to hear.

The DC where I'm at also told me that the 2 TB drives do not have an unusually high failure rate. I trust them also because when we bought our SSD-SLC drives, they talked us into go RAID-0 instead of RAID-10 because they had several hundred of the drives deployed, and they have never had a single failure.

Thanks!
 
IT_Architect said:
>We're currently using 1TB drives and testing 2TB drives (which appear to be fine).<

Those are things I need to hear.

The DC where I'm at also told me that the 2 TB drives do not have an unusually high failure rate. I trust them also because when we bought our SSD-SLC drives, they talked us into go RAID-0 instead of RAID-10 because they had several hundred of the drives deployed, and they have never had a single failure.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

WOT? RAID-0 in a production environment?!?! Hundreds of drive deployed doesn't mean you can be the first one!!
 
tomtom901 said:
WOT? RAID-0 in a production environment?!?! Hundreds of drive deployed doesn't mean you can be the first one!!
Click to expand...
It's been a couple years and I'm not the first one yet. :D Like a motherboard or controller, they have no moving parts, and while they actually do wear, they far outlast platters. Moreover they do backup every night to another machine on the internal network. Recovering to the previous nights backup with ESXi means selecting power from a web interface. :) Cold boots, BIOS and all, and 10 second delay screen still come in right at about one minute. Defrag has no meaning with them.

There are cheaper versions that don't use the SLC technology. Their track record isn't nearly as good, nor are the non-Intel drives at the moment. The draw back to Intel's SLCs is $, but for critical server, it doesn't pay to save a few bucks.
 
Drives space has gotten amazingly inexpensive and the speeds are pretty amazing. 7200 RPM, but with an arial density of two gigs on 4 platters, it keeps the max. transfer way up there.

I was going to get the 500 gig Seagate with 64 gigs of flash when my laptop drive went bad, but they were having a few too many teething issues at the time.
 
I picked up two of those Seagaste Barracuda XT drives yesterday afternoon; I'll try to get them into a local system (not at the datacenter) for some testing later today.

Jeff
 
More details, please, scsi. The only problems we've seen with recent Western Digital is that software RAID 1 drops one of the drives occasionally when we used power-saving drives, so we no longer use them in RAID configurations.

The Tom's Hardware site has a bunch of comparison articles; you can find one of them here (tomshardware.com).

Jeff
 
On new servers we are using SAS drives. We usually use a Raid 1 or a Raid 5 depending upon the projected load. We do not use SATA on servers running critical applications.
 
I've decided to put two of these Western Digital drives, in a RAID 1 configuration into the datacenter, for a bit more testing. They're Enterprise drives, have a good reputation, and include a feature to keep the RAID from breaking. The Tom's Hardware Review has an error; we were able to confirm that these are 7200 RPM drives, though the spec doesn't list a drive speed.

I'll be the first to admit it if these drives give us a problem. Stay tuned :).

Jeff
 
chasjs said:
On new servers we are using SAS drives. We usually use a Raid 1 or a Raid 5 depending upon the projected load. We do not use SATA on servers running critical applications.
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Other than the nutso-traffic site, I've been using RAID-1 SAS also with VMware.
 
My server has a Dell PERC6 controller with six 10k SAS hard drives in RAID6. Running ESXi 4 on a separate SD card. The PERC6 controller card has virtually no performance penalties when it comes to RAID6 over RAID5 or RAID10 (none that I noted, anyway).

For my future SAN, I plan to get a MD3200i with 7200 RPM near-line SAS hard drives, probably go for the 2 TBs. I'll be using RAID10 here.
 
I am using RAID10 on my VPS (and RAID1 on my previous dedicated server), its running smoothly and fast. If you may choose between RAID1,6,10 you should choose RAID10 for sure! The fastest RAID setup possible.
 
Suurbier said:
I am using RAID10 on my VPS (and RAID1 on my previous dedicated server), its running smoothly and fast. If you may choose between RAID1,6,10 you should choose RAID10 for sure! The fastest RAID setup possible.
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Are you using SATA or SCSI?
 
Im using Dell PE R610 with 6x 500GB SATA 7200rpm 2.5" drives (provided directly by DELL).

Using this RAID configuration:

4x500GB RAID 5 - OS, DA, User data
2x500GB RAID 1 - Weekly Backups (from DA Admin Backup)

I used WD 1TB SATA 7200rpm 2.5" Drives and two of them failed after 2 month.

WD Support worked fine, but, as far as i heard in my life and basing on my experience the WD HDs use to break too much, i would prefer/suggest Seagate/Maxtor HDs.

Regards
 
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