From owner-freebsd-isp Wed Jan 5 12:47:56 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from inc.net (mailhost.inc.net [204.95.160.26]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DF2C414CB2 for ; Wed, 5 Jan 2000 12:47:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from steve@inc.net) Received: from inc.net (niki.noc.inc.net [204.95.194.201]) by inc.net (8.9.3/8.9.1) with ESMTP id OAA16296 for ; Wed, 5 Jan 2000 14:47:16 -0600 (CST) Message-ID: <3873ADB5.F195C474@inc.net> Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2000 14:46:45 -0600 From: Steve Kaczkowski Organization: Time Warner Telecom IDD X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Cc: FreeBSD ISP Subject: Re: News Server reccomendations (one more thing) References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org "Gary D. Margiotta" wrote: > > In our experiences with news, you really don't want to RAID the spool > array... it's the same idea as in a heavily loaded mail server... the > smaller the disk, the more disks you have, the more spindles, the better > off you are. I would personally love to have 100 2GB Barracudas in a > rack, but that leads to one heckuva lot of real estate. > > IMHO, keep your spools away from RAID... with the introduction of U2W and > 10,000 RPM drives, you can put 2 silos filled with 9 GB U2W drives, and > still have it be insanely fast and large. You don't want to go above 9GB > in one shot, otherwise when a drive goes, you'll lose a heckuva lot of > information. Also beware of striping, as if one disk goes, you lose one > large chunk of spool. And drives will go... just due to the stress of > being up and running 24/7/365, usually at heavy useage. > > On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, Gary D. Margiotta wrote: Which is why they invented Hardware RAID, specifically a Mylex DAC960SX External SCSI to SCSI RAID controller. Using a controller like this has numerous benefits they include: 1) All RAID functions are offloaded onto Mylex controller so very little if any performance hit is noticed 2) OS independence, no drivers needed 3) Hot spares, if a disk dies in the array the hot spare will take it's place and if you're using RAID 5 you can just toss in a new disk. And many other cool/useful features.. We swear by em, I've got 18 of them sitting over in the corner waiting to be put into a box.. -- Steve Kaczkowski Time Warner Telecom IDD steve@inc.net (414)908-9012 http://www.inc.net (603)737-9209 Fax To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message