John R Pierce wrote: > Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: > >> Yes, RAID-10 is a much more common configuration for four disks. Same amount >> of space, much higher performance (especially write performance in >> database-like workloads). The downside is lower reliability -- if you lose >> two disks, there's a 50% chance that your RAID goes with it, but that kind of >> scenario would typically be in “have backups” land. >> > > if you lose 1 disk, then when you lose another, there's only a 33% > chance that 2nd disk is the mirror of the first :) > > I would definitely want to have a hot spare regardless. that way when 1 > drive dies, it can immediately start re-mirroring it so the window where > a 2nd drive failure could cause data loss is narrowed considerably.
Why not just have the raid 1 mirror active with _all three_ disks from the outset. HDDs are silly cheap, especially so for the 'smaller' single platter devices. Single platters are also more reliable than the multi-platter TByte drives... Aside: My strong preference is to use linux for server work. You get a wonderful choice of filesystems and all the useful permutations of raid, all with very good solid reliability. No viruses in the wild and better yet, no silly side effects from running any anti-virus or whatever 'defenders'. However, the choice is with whoever is going to do the work! Aside 2: From what I've seen, AMD usually give a much better price-performance for server use compared to other CPU vendors. IO bandwidth is often more important than multimedia compute numbers... I'd recommend using an AM3 motherboard for it's memory and IO bandwidth. Also go ECC for the ram. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
