After testing a lot of different configurations (which was quite a headache), I came up with the following. First of all, for both speed and reliability, you will want SCSI. The list of reasons are quite long for SCSI, and as you are doing research on the subject, it is an obvious choice and I don't need to list them here. Get drives with 15K RPM, since disk seek time is a killer in database applications. U160 or U320 SCSI 3. With lots of cache on the drive (should be standard). I've found U160 to be sufficient, but U320 might be better for backups, etc. We do have U320 controllers now, to be ready for the future. Next, I found RAID 10 to be the best combination of redundancy and speed. It is not cheaper though. I have not tested hardware RAID (which is a shame -- it is a big hole in my experience), but use software RAID. Either way, position all the sets of mirrors such that each mirror set (2 drives) are on separate channels. This way, if your SCSI controller (or RAID controller) has a channel die, the whole array can still function (even with half of the drives down). Then stripe your (3-4) mirrors. Don't stripe too many. More sets to stripe increase performance, but syncing the rotations of many drives degrades performance. So there are diminishing returns. For our calculations, 3-4 mirrors were sufficient. Most of our RAID sets are six drives (3 stripe of 2 mirror). For one, we wanted more space and it has 8 drives (4x2). Don't forget to install spares at the same time. I like using external SCSI disk enclosures, so you can swap servers with less headache.
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