> On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 7:29 PM, Greg Stark<gsst...@mit.edu> wrote: >> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 1:28 AM, Scott Marlowe<scott.marl...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >>> >>> $750 is about what a decent RAID controller would cost you, but again >>> it's likely that given your bulk import scenario, you're probably ok >>> without one. In this instance, you're probably best off with software >>> RAID than a cheap RAID card which will cost extra and probably be >>> slower than linux software RAID. ... >> The main advantage of hardware raid is the error handling. When you >> get low level errors or pull a drive a lot of consumer level >> controllers and their drivers don't respond very well and have long >> timeouts or keep retrying tragically unaware that the software raid >> would be able to handle recoverying. A good server-class RAID >> controller should handle those situations without breaking a sweat.
> Definitely a big plus of a quality HW controller, and one of the > reasons I don't scrimp on the HW controllers I put in our 24/7 > servers. OTOH, if you can afford a bit of downtime to handle > failures, linux software RAID works pretty well, and since quad core > CPUs are now pretty much the standard, it's ok if parity calculation > uses up a bit of one core for lower performing servers like the > reporting server the OP was talking about. The database server is a quad core machine, so it sounds as though software RAID should work fine for the present setup. However, it sounds as though I should put some money into a hardware RAID controller if the database becomes more active. I had assumed RAID-5 would be fine, but please let me know if there is another RAID level more appropriate for this implementation. Thanks for the valuable insight! -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
