Hi, At least, rather than Seagate AS series or some "green" series try using Seagate ST.SV series SATA HDDs, the 10$ difference is woth it. They are certified for 7/24 operation and will not fail on you as quickly. And they perform a little bit faster.
Regards, Kerem On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Spyros Tsiolis <sts...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > Ditto, > > Don't know anything on RAID 10 with four disks, but I agree with the two-disk > scenario. > > s. > > > > ---- > "I merely function as a channel that filters > music through the chaos of noise" > - Vangelis > > > ________________________________ > From: Thomas Harold <thomas-li...@nybeta.com> > To: dovecot@dovecot.org > Sent: Friday, 2 September 2011, 3:23 > Subject: Re: [Dovecot] OT - small hd recommendation > > On 9/1/2011 12:48 PM, Daniel L. Miller wrote: >> >> Given my extensive requirements - I haven't yet filled my existing 320GB >> - size isn't a big deal. Am I actually deriving much benefit from 4-disk >> RAID10 using 160GB discs - vs a 2-4 disc 1TB RAID1 array? >> > > A pair of RAID-1 mirrors: > > - easy to deal with > - you can attempt to manually balance load between the two arrays (storage on > one pair, indexes and mail queue on other pair) > - disks can be pulled and taken to another machine and read one by one > - slightly harder to screw up (but both setups die if the wrong 2 disks fail) > > RAID-10 over 4 disks: > > - generally faster seeks > - generally faster read/write speeds due to striping > - generally the better choice for performance > - a bit harder to bury the disks vs a pair of mirrors > - lets you have a bigger partition > - all the eggs in a single array > > If you're having performance problems on the existing RAID-10, your only real > choices are to throw more spindles at it (move to a 6 or 8 disk RAID-10 w/ a > hot-spare disk), throw faster spindles at it (10k/15k SAS), or move to SSD. > > So, if you think you can manually balance the needs of the system, you could > try a pair of independent mirrors. But if you want less hassle, stick with > the RAID-10. > > (And look into a tool like "atop" which can be run in the terminal and does a > decent job of showing you whether the CPU/DISK is overly busy.) -- Kerem Erciyes - Sistem Danismani http://keremerciyes.com