[SDBUG] January Meeting

[Miles Teg]

>Why not to use RAID 5 for databases (relational or otherwise) or any 
>random-like IO.

>For those that didn't know what the heck we were taling about, we  covered 
>the intimate details of RAID 0,1, 4 and 5.

RAID 10 is tops for database performance and redundancy.  With today's hard 
disk sizes, you can easily get 4 x 500GB SATA hard drives, and make a RAID 
10 with 1TB of storage pretty cheap.  For controllers, I recommend 
3ware/AMCC, like the 9550SX card (which is PCI-X not PCI-E) with the battery 
backup so you can go write cache enabled on the controller.

4 x 500GB = $864
9550SX 4 port = $329
battery = $100

So for $1,293 you get a 1 terabyte RAID 10 that can suffer 1 or 2 hard disk 
failures, depending on which drives fail.  If that's over your budget, 
reduce the size of the hard drives until the $864 comes down into something 
you can handle.  You'll find the performance of this setup to be quite 
impressive.  I run this for all but my real-time data storage systems for 
telecom, where I have no choice but to run a massive 10 drive SCSI raid.

Further, supermicro has some excellent 1U platforms which have your 4 drive 
RAID in the front, hot swappable.  Add the 9550SX, and you have the 
potential for very high capacity, very high performance, 1-2 drive 
redundancy all in a 1U case.  Add a couple of the less expensive dual core 
opterons, and you have a monster server for a quite reasonable price.