Re: SAS Raid10 vs SATA II Raid10 - many small reads and writes

On Wednesday 10 March 2010 18:32:41 Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 11:49 PM, Phillip Berry
>
> <pberry(at)stellaconcepts(dot)com> wrote:
> > Hi Everyone,
> >
> > We're in the market for a new DB server to replace our current one (yes
> > it's one of *those* questions) ;).
> >
> > It'll have quad core Xeons, 36GB RAM and some sort of Raid 10
> > configuration.
> >
> > Our provider is pushing us towards 6 x SATA II disks in a Raid 10
> > configuration or 4 x SAS disks in Raid 10 (budget constraints).
>
> Are those your only two options? No 6 SAS drives? Are you looking at
> 7200rpm or 10krpm SATA? 15krpm or 10krpm SAS? What RAID controller?
> Battery backed Cache? Software RAID?
>

They're charging a lot more for SAS than for SATA so it's a budget constraint. And we can only fit
six drives in the machine so that limits the number of drives for the SATA option.

Hardware raid controller for both options, but I'm not sure what brand (yet).

15,000rpm SAS
10,000rpm SATA

As with everything it's a trade off: 4 SAS drives or 6 SATA II drives in raid 10. I'm trying to find
out if (for many many small reads and writes) one is more desirable than the other.

Regards
Phillip Berry