On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 14:40 , Florian Schmidt sent: >On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 07:00:23 -0500 >Joe Hartley jh@brainiac.com> wrote: > >> On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 12:33:36 +0100 >> "Happyface" happyface@happyface.dk> wrote: >> >> > 2. Would I gain much performance in using some kind of RAID system for the harddrives ? >> >> This is the only part of this I can really comment on: no, you won't >> get any performance boost from a RAID. RAIDs help protect data, but >> cannot write it any faster than with a single drive, and in some cases >> a RAID will slow you down because it'll spread the data across multiple >> drives, and there's overhead involved in doing so. >> >> To protect my sessions, I have a process to rsync my /tape directory off >> to my server at 4:00 AM nightly. That's saved me at least once! > >Huh? > >There are different RAID types. There's some to increase redundancy and >some to increase performance. Let's take a look a 2 disks not used for >redundancy but for performance. Since the pci bus is not the bottleneck >with a single drive, but the drive itself, it does make sense to >write/read to more than one drive in parallel until the pci bus becomes >the bottleneck. And of course the speed increase holds for both write >and read operations. > Agreed. Also, running RAID 5 to 5 disks is faster and safer. You're writing 2 bits per byte of data to each of the 5 disks at whatever rate the disk will handle. Even though your writing 10 bits instead of 8 it still should be faster. Jan