Re: PostgreSQL data on a NAS device ?

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Alexander Priem wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Does anyone have any experience with putting PostgreSQL data on a NAS
> device?
>
> I am asking this because a NAS device is much cheaper to set up than a
> couple of SCSI disks. I would like to use a relatively cheap NAS device
> which uses four IDE drives (7.200 rpm), like the Dell PowerVault 725N. The
> disks themselves would be much slower than SCSI disks, I know, but a NAS
> device can be equipped with 3 Gb of memory, so this would make a very large
> disk cache, right? If this NAS would be dedicated only to PostgreSQL, would
> this be slower/faster than a SCSI RAID-10 setup of 6 disks? It would be much
> cheaper...
>
> Any advice on this would be appreciated :)

How important is this data?

With a local SCSI RAID controller and SCSI drives, you can pull the power
cord out the back of the machine during 1000 transactions, and your
database will come back up in a coherent state.

If you need that kind of reliability, then you'll likely want to use
local SCSI drives.

Note that you should test your setup to be sure, i.e. pull the network
cord and see how the machine recovers (if the machine recovers).

Running storage on a NAS is a bit of a tightrope act with your data, as is
using IDE drives with write cache enabled. But depending on your
application, using NAS may be a good solution. So, what's this database
gonna be used for?