So, the answer should probably be presented in tiers for the size of the application, but I'm wondering about people's experience with choosing where the disk drives used by the database should reside. Here are some of the options: JBOD - (just a bunch of disks) Old fashioned internal disks - fast but not very expandable NAS - Slow bu...
What is the best way to configure disks in a VMWare server that will be hosting multiple machines? A single RAID 5 array hosting multiple VMs would provide good throughput but means all VMs are accessing the same disks (so one VM accessing the disk will delay another accessing the disk) Skippig RAID and having a single VM per disk me...
What is the best way to install Windows on a system without a Floppy drive, when RAID drivers are required for the installation? I'm specifically trying to get Windows 2003r2 64bit onto a rack-mount server that can't have a floppy drive installed. Do I need to go through slipstreaming an install disk (and if so, can that be done on a...
I need to record in some kind of file, the specific time at which blocks are written to in a filesystem, over a number of physical disks (RAID). I intend to do this by periodically by interrogating the writing device to find out which block it is writing to at that specific time. At some later date it will be necessary to locate and r...
If I were to consider between LVM (Logical Volume Management) and RAID, would I have to choose between the two, or would they go hand in hand? Which one would should I choose over the other, for various setups (say, database server, file server, workstation etc). Comparison would be great. ...
How do I monitor RAID state on Adaptec cards (especially ASC-29320ALP) under linux ubuntu 8.04 with kernel 2.6.24-19? The ubuntu works with the BIOS configured RAID perfectly. I am concerned though, that should one of the disks fail, nobody would know until it is too late. Adaptec's site provides only the driver itself: http://www.adap...
Hey guys! I hope that many of you are working with high traffic database-driven websites, and chances are that your main scalability issues are in the database. I noticed a couple of things lately: Most large databases require a team of DBAs in order to scale. They constantly struggle with limitations of hard drives and end up with ve...
When configuring a database server with mechanical drives, mirroring hard drives or using RAID5 for redundancy in case of drive failure is the norm. Is this redundancy also required when using solid state disks or is the "mechanical" reliability of SSDs (write fatigue not withstanding) such that drive redundancy is unnecessary? This is o...
Hi, We have various servers running Ubuntu and Windows Server 2003 We use Nagios to monitor our systems. What is the best way to monitor the RAID configuration on these servers? I'm pretty sure the RAID is a hardware RAID as it is configured in the BIOS. Thanks ...
Here's the situation: I have numerous old hard drives, all of which are at least 120GB. I'd like to be able to combine these together into a big network share with maybe some kind of RAID option. How best to do this? I've a slightly older PC (about 2GHz) that I'd like to use as a server across my network. Ideally I'd like to be able...
I have a project where I'm collecting data in vehicles on hot swappable SATA drives in low horsepower windows machine. Drives are 750G and 1 Terabyte and will likely get larger or expand to multiple 1TB drives. After collecting the data we fedex off one drive for central collection and wish to have a backup copy remain. Initially the ...
So we've decided on an EMC NX4 for our storage setup. Database workload Write: ~220 IOPS Read: ~6 IOPS Web workload Write: ~10 IOPS Read: ~55 IOPS I had planned to go for 5 x 15k SAS disks in RAID 10 + hot spare for our databases, and then a 7 x 7,2k SATA RAID 6 + hot spare for our web data. However, EMC conveniently forgot to mentio...
I recently had a motherboard die, and used the on board RAID controller to do RAID 1 with two hard drives. I'm wondering if I can take one of the drives and access it normally, in a non-RAID setup. EDIT: It was an Intel D975XBX2 if that helps. ...
I am usually renting dedicated servers under Windows Server 2003/2008. Those servers are said to be "hardware RAID1"; yet I am wondering how can I verify this property of the server remotely? As far I can see, disks appears as classical IDE disk from the windows disk manager, and it does not tell me anything about the RAID properties o...
Hi. My server runs CentOS 5.3 with 2 harddisks. The harddisks were configured as RAID 1 (software-based RAID). The operating system also use the RAID. I would like to reinstall the server. I don't mind loosing the data. I already backup the data elsewhere. Do I have to remove the partition first? Or can I just reinstall the CentOS and...
I would like to change the filesystem of my RAID-0 from ext3 to xfs. I use Centos. Do I have to remove the RAID first using mdadm? Or can I just change it? How to do that? I don't need to preserve the data. Thanks ...
When using the SQLIO benchmark tool on a 4-core Dell server with 6 15k 450GB (fast) drives, RAID 0, we found the max throughput was 2MB per second. But when configured as RAID 5, we get 30 MB per second. It seems that the RAID controller, Dell Perc 5i integrated controller, is maxing out the throughput per disk. With RAID 5, I expe...
Error Windows Setup: "setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer" This is not exactly a programming question but I thought you guys might be able to help. I just received a Dell Precision 670 workstation. Windows is not recognizing the hard drive and I have experienced this before with other computers. I usually ...
Hello, We are going to change our server with a new one with 2 scsi hard disk. My colleague proposed to install the OS windows 2003 on one disk and put the Databases with sql server 2008 (3 of 100 MB and 1 of 2 GB) on the other one. I was thinking that it would be much more performant to use Raid 0 but i don't have enough knowledge to...
Hello, I'm making a program which tells me information about the system hardware, but I don't know how to know if the system has a RAID or not, and if it has, its type. The program is written in Python, but I'm using a library which wrappers C# libraries, like Win32_Classes, so I can use any C# libraries. I've used a function called Win...