pg.ddx.io  pgsql-performance@postgresql.org mailing list archive  
help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Mark Mielke <mark@mark.mielke.cc>
To: Fernando Hevia <fhevia@ip-tel.com.ar>
Cc: pgsql-performance <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:23:28 -0500
Message-ID: <47728000.4000709@mark.mielke.cc> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <0ea101c847d2$16f94bc0$8f01010a@iptel.com.ar>
References: <0ea101c847d2$16f94bc0$8f01010a@iptel.com.ar>

Fernando Hevia wrote:
>
> Database will be about 30 GB in size initially and growing 10 GB per 
> year. Data is inserted overnight in two big tables and during the day 
> mostly read-only queries are run. Parallelism is rare.
>
> I have read about different raid levels with Postgres but the advice 
> found seems to apply on 8+ disks systems. With only four disks and 
> performance in mind should I build a RAID 10 or RAID 5 array? Raid 0 
> is overruled since redundancy is needed.
>
> I am going to use software Raid with Linux (Ubuntu Server 6.06).
>

In my experience, software RAID 5 is horrible. Write performance can 
decrease below the speed of one disk on its own, and read performance 
will not be significantly more than RAID 1+0 as the number of stripes 
has only increased from 2 to 3, and if reading while writing, you will 
not get 3X as RAID 5 write requires at least two disks to be involved. I 
believe hardware RAID 5 is also horrible, but since the hardware hides 
it from the application, a hardware RAID 5 user might not care.

Software RAID 1+0 works fine on Linux with 4 disks. This is the setup I 
use for my personal server.

Cheers,
mark

-- 
Mark Mielke <mark@mielke.cc>

view thread (37+ messages)  latest in thread

Message-ID: <47728000.4000709@mark.mielke.cc>
Permalink:  ../47728000.4000709@mark.mielke.cc/
Also on:    postgresql.org/message-id/47728000.4000709@mark.mielke.cc

 · 

reply

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Reply to all the recipients using the --to and --cc options:
  reply via email

  To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
  Cc: mark@mark.mielke.cc, fhevia@ip-tel.com.ar
  Subject: Re: With 4 disks should I go for RAID 5 or RAID 10
  In-Reply-To: <47728000.4000709@mark.mielke.cc>

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

This inbox is served by DDX for PostgreSQL; see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox