Hard Drive Setup.

[l2aider1]

Hey Everyone,

I'm curious as to what kind of hard drive setups others use in their dedicated boxes. I'm currently looking at 3x 160GB Single Platter SATA Drives in Raid 5. Does anyone else bother with raid? SAS Drives seem overkill to me. Are faster hard drives even necessary? I'd love to get others input on this.

[Monk]

Raid5 for gameservers is a complete overkill. You can have 16 processors and a single SATA drive can handle it fine.

[ChrisOlver]

Monk,

 

I don't know what game servers you are running but with Windows, the page file will kill a hard drive (figuratively) after 15 processes are running. We recommend either RAID0 (I know it gives no reliability) or two drives to balance the read/writes.

 

-Chris

[Monk]

IIRC IDE/SATA disks do not support disconnected writes, which is a significant performance bottleneck when you are writing to the disk; only disconnected reads are supported. Each drive in a raid system only gives you 1 concurrent outstanding write request per disk, so if writing to disk is really killing performance, add a few more.. personally, i'd spend the extra cash and get SCSI, then you get 128 cocurrent writes (tagged command queue depth), but that's only if you are writing to disk more than anything.

 

Gameservers tend to read() more than write(), plus having a huge pile of memory takes the pressure off the VM, disk/vm caches and other things mitigate paging to disk, so the performance is not as bad as you think under load. As long as advanced write caching is enabled, it should be fine, unless you trip power every so often.

[Saturnsix]

I just recently switch from sata to scsi and i notice the performance. highly recommend it

[WR-Rob]

We run different hard-drives for different uses.

 

We run SATAII Drives on all our gaming servers and dedicated servers unless customer asks for different, but on our hosting servers we have 2 machines running 6x 146GB U320 SCSI 15K Disks in raid5 and 1 running 4x 300GB U320 SCSI 15K Disks in raid5. It all comes down to need.

 

Altho our new batch of Dell servers we are ordering will all be with SAS disks rather than sata, simply to compair them to the sata gaming servers to see if there is a noticable performance upgrade.

[Monk]

SAS is just SCSI with a SATA cable. SAS supports all the basic scsi stuff, like QAS, domain validation, etc. SAS doesn't have clock skewing and supports TCQ (2^8 commands)