X-Original-To: pgsql-performance-postgresql.org@localhost.postgresql.org Received: from localhost (av.hub.org [200.46.204.144]) by svr1.postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7D49ADBB65 for ; Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:41:17 -0400 (AST) Received: from svr1.postgresql.org ([200.46.204.71]) by localhost (av.hub.org [200.46.204.144]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 24984-04 for ; Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:41:21 +0000 (GMT) X-Greylist: from auto-whitelisted by SQLgrey- Received: from floppy.pyrenet.fr (floppy.pyrenet.fr [194.116.145.2]) by svr1.postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4732FDBB14 for ; Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:41:14 -0400 (AST) Received: by floppy.pyrenet.fr (Postfix, from userid 106) id 3EC4631058; Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:41:19 +0100 (MET) From: William Yu X-Newsgroups: pgsql.performance Subject: Re: Hardware/OS recommendations for large databases ( Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 07:41:10 -0800 Organization: Hub.Org Networking Services Lines: 25 Message-ID: References: <3E37B936B592014B978C4415F90D662D01995F7B@MI8NYCMAIL06.Mi8.com> <33c6269f0511152115v1a34ab81j30f1f5df5a6c6956@mail.gmail.com> <437B3B18.1040509@commandprompt.com> <437B4773.1040404@boreham.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@news.hub.org User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (X11/20041206) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: <437B4773.1040404@boreham.org> To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at hub.org X-Spam-Status: No, score=0 required=5 tests=[AWL=0.000] X-Spam-Score: 0 X-Spam-Level: X-Archive-Number: 200511/280 X-Sequence-Number: 15537 David Boreham wrote: > >Spend a fortune on dual core CPUs and then buy crappy disks... I bet > >for most applications this system will be IO bound, and you will see a > >nice lot of drive failures in the first year of operation with > >consumer grade drives. > > I guess I've never bought into the vendor story that there are > two reliability grades. Why would they bother making two > different kinds of bearing, motor etc ? Seems like it's more > likely an excuse to justify higher prices. In my experience the > expensive SCSI drives I own break frequently while the cheapo > desktop drives just keep chunking along (modulo certain products > that have a specific known reliability problem). > > I'd expect that a larger number of hotter drives will give a less reliable > system than a smaller number of cooler ones. Our SCSI drives have failed maybe a little less than our IDE drives. Hell, some of the SCSIs even came bad when we bought them. Of course, the IDE drive failure % is inflated by all the IBM Deathstars we got -- ugh. Basically, I've found it's cooling that's most important. Packing the drives together into really small rackmounts? Good for your density, not good for the drives. Now we do larger rackmounts -- drives have more space in between each other plus fans in front and back of the drives.