OT: Mirrored or RAID5

[Götz Reinicke]

UxBoD schrieb:
> Hi,
> 
> I am just about to reinstall my home server with Centos5 and not sure the best configuration for the disks.  I have a 3Ware 9550SX Hardware RAID card with four 200GB drives in hot swap bays.  Currently I have two 200GB mirrored RAID sets, one for O/S and the other for data.  I am thinking about recreating the RAID set as one big RAID5 so that I can maximize the data area as only 10% is used in the O/S area.
> 
> How does this approach sound ?  The server is a dual Opteron 250 with 6GB RAM.  Any help appreciated.

Hi,

we have two 3Ware 9550SX (4 and 8 Disk-Version) used in a mail/lamp- and
a fileserver. I use R5 and LVM to handle the partitionsize.

The fact is, that the performance depends on a lot of situations and
configration options; eg. 5 minutes ago I did a rw-test with bonnie++ on
both systems while users are using the servers:

The mailserver had a rw-performance in the first run from about 49MB
read and 42MB write; in the second run (10 seconds after) 49MB read,
41MB write. (RH EL 5, Sendmail, Mailscanner, SA, MySQL, httpd for
webmail, dovecot for imap/pop3 for 600 users - 10.000 Messages/day)

The fileserver had 37MB write, 67MB read in the first run and 60MB
write, 67MB read in the second.

The controllers do have a lot of options to set, the cache could be
different, the harddrives have different specs.

So, if you need a realy fast setup, you will have to test a lot of
configurations - if you want a simple, "avarage" setup, use R5 with LVM.

BTW: How many mails / MBs / users will be expected? What services will
run on the server?


Regards

Götz Reinicke
-- 
Götz Reinicke
IT Koordinator

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