Re: Home desktop/server RAID upgrade

[Brad Campbell <lists2009@fnarfbargle.com>]

On 01/06/14 23:59, Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>     These VMs are the area where my current RAID6 (5 drive, 16k chunk
> size) seems to have been a bad decision. The machine is powered off
> every night. Loading these VMs takes at least 10-15 minutes each
> morning where I see disk activity lights just grinding away the whole
> time. If I had a single _performance_ goal in upgrading the disks it
> would be to improve this significantly. Craig's SSD RAID1 suggestion
> would certainly help here but at 240GB there wouldn't be a lot of room
> left. That may be OK though.
>

Just a data point. I run between 4 & 10 VM's here 24/7 (always 4, 
sometimes 10). I started them out on a 3 drive RAID-5 on 7200RPM disks, 
then migrated them across to a RAID-10 of 15k SAS drives, and from there 
to a 6x240GB RAID-10 of SSD's.

I would _never_ go back to rotating media now. Some of my batch tasks in 
a Windows 7 VM took up to an hour on the disks. I'm down to 20-30 
minutes max now. Granted my workload is pretty atypical.

Much less power, less noise and less heat. Lots to love.

240GB drives are a bit of a price sweet spot, and still were when I 
bought these 6 over a year ago. I just went with 3 from Intel and 3 from 
Samsung just to spread the risk a little bit. 3 are on the MB AHCI 
controller and 3 on an LSI SAS.

Regards,
Brad
-- 
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