Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade (RAID)

On 3 May 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 13:53, Chad Thompson wrote:
> > I have a server on a standard pc right now.
> > PIII 700, 1Gig ram (SD), 40 Gig IDE, RedHat 8.0, PostgreSQL 7.3.1
> >
> > The database has 3 tables that just broke 10 million tuples (yeah, i think
> > im entering in to the world of real databases ;-)
> > Its primarly bulk (copy) inserts and queries, rarely an update.
> >
> > I am looking at moving this to a P4 2.4G, 2 Gig Ram(DDR), RedHat 8,
> > PostgreSQL 7.3.latest
> [snip]
>
> How big do you expect the database to get?
>
> If I may be a contrarian, if under 70GB, then why not just get a 72GB
> 10K RPM SCSI drive ($160) and a SCSI 160 card? OS, swap, input files,
> etc, can go on a 7200RPM IDE drive.
>
> Much fewer moving parts than RAID, so more reliable...

Sorry, everything else is true, but RAID is far more reliable, even if
disk failure is more likely. Since a RAID array (1 or 5) can run with one
dead disk, and supports auto-rebuild from hot spares, there's really no
way a single disk can be more reliable. It may have fewer failures, but
that's not the same thing.