Re: more 10K disks or less 15K disks

Scott Whitney wrote:
> On the 10k vs 15k rpm disks, there's a _lot_ to be said about that. I don't want to start a flame war here,
> but 15k versus 10k rpm hard drives does NOT equivocate to a 50% increase in read/write times, to say
> the VERY least.
>

Your characterization is correct were there only the drives involved
here, so no flames on your raw data.

Once you've introduced a battery-backed write cache into the mix, this
whole area becomes impossible to compute that way though, and it was
that context I was commenting from at least. Those are good at turning
random I/O into something more like sequential, as well as reducing the
number of times you pay for rotational latency in several common
database operations. The effective impact is to significantly narrow
the difference between drives where the seek and rotation time are the
main differences in a database context--even though the worst-case IOPS
doesn't really change. IOPS is an interesting number to compute, but
real-world database performance isn't linearly correlated with it.
Maybe if your workload consists mainly of random, uncached index scans
system performance will scale just like IOPS, but that's pretty uncommon.

[Rant about making sure not to drink the storage vendor IOPS Kool-Aid
deleted]

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.us