Re: drive optimisation

On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Bill Wichers wrote:

> My ultimate cache config would be RAID-5 config consisting of 9 GB
> Seagate Cheetah drives all talking on a pair of UltraWide SCSI channels.

I think considering the controller requirement, that maybe the 9GB drives
are the best 'buy' at the moment (false economy to build the cache from
more, smaller drives).

So RAID 5 is mirroring right? My current philosophy is that the cache is
is expendable, but then that's relative to what it costs, effectively, to
fill it again.

Are you then talking about two UW controllers running N*9GB drives up to
the bandwidth that they can support ( <15 devices)? It'd be nice to be
able to quantify when the need for additional controllers arises and
amortise this into the cost of the cache setup.

All of this fails to address the more subtle performance issues such as
drive fragmentation/optimization etc. When did you last swap your cache
drive for a freshly formatted one?

This raises the incompehensible scenario of a MS proxy administrator
running 'defrag' over their cache :) Then again, NT can do this in the
background right? :):)

Regards,
Alastair Waddell

>
> -Bill
>
> On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Alastair Waddell wrote:
>
> > I'd like to hear of experiences people have of drive configurations. Let
> > say that this is for the garden variety Linux box with 128MB RAM and a
> > P200 processor. Controller is Adaptec Ultrawide.
> >
> > I currently have one machine configured with 2*GB (Quantum XP34550W)
> > drives. I need to add a 4 meg drive so will partition this to match the
> > size of the existing drives making 4 equal partitions for squid.
> >
> > Next step will no doubt be the addition of a 9GB drive for which I will
> > probably build a RAID0 (md) drive out of the 3 old drives of 8GB total
> > size giving me 2 8GB drives.
> >
> > My question:
> > - Is this a sensible/optimal upgrade path?
> > - Should I really be adding another controller, if not now, then at least
> > when I put the 9GB or whatever in later?
> >
> > Also, what are people's views on the Ultra versus the UW controller - the
> > Ultras are a lot cheaper.
> >
> > General comments appreciated.
> >
> > Regards,
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Alastair Waddell o Tel +61 3 96 400-400
> > Technical Administrator o Fax +61 3 9222-1363
> > CyberLabs o http://www.cyberlabs.com.au
> > Queen Street, Melbourne
> >
> > + Virtual Services + DNS Maintenance + ISP Co-location + Internetworking
> >
>
>
>

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Alastair Waddell o Tel +61 3 96 400-400
Technical Administrator o Fax +61 3 9222-1363
CyberLabs o http://www.cyberlabs.com.au
Queen Street, Melbourne

+ Virtual Services + DNS Maintenance + ISP Co-location + Internetworking
Received on Wed Jan 07 1998 - 23:13:26 MST