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Scott
Fri 20th Mar '09, 10:51am
I'm about to lease a new server and wanted to ask for opinions on my hard drive options. The server will hold probably 200 sites max and out of that 10-15 of them will be vBulletins of various popularity.

My specs so far are:

Dual Xeon E5420 Quad Core (Harpertown)
4 GB of RAM
147GB SCSI (SAS) 15,000 RPM HD

I have the option of a lessor 120GB 7200 SATA HD which would save $$ but I'm afraid of bottlenecks. I could splurge for a RAID set up but at this point feel it's over kill.

My question, do you feel the SCSI set up is worth the expense for the vBulletins?
royo
Fri 20th Mar '09, 11:55am
It should be just fine, but you're getting two quad cores and only 4GB of RAM, which isn't exactly balanced. If you have a chance you might want also want to consider 1 main drive for OS and some backups + an Intel SSD.
Scott
Fri 20th Mar '09, 2:04pm
It should be just fine, but you're getting two quad cores and only 4GB of RAM, which isn't exactly balanced. If you have a chance you might want also want to consider 1 main drive for OS and some backups + an Intel SSD.

Thanks for the input.
I was on the fence about adding memory . . . until now.
I also have a secondary drive on the box which is a SATA 160 and a server away from the dc for nightly backups.
Zachery
Fri 20th Mar '09, 2:19pm
If you're only using one machine, and this machine will have mysql data on it. Get SA-SCSI drives, theres no quesiton.
Scott
Fri 20th Mar '09, 2:30pm
If you're only using one machine, and this machine will have mysql data on it. Get SA-SCSI drives, theres no quesiton.

It's one box with the mysql data.
I'm still on the fence about RAID but my budget will be screaming.
Zachery
Fri 20th Mar '09, 2:39pm
SA-SCSI is the way to go, esp if you're going to be doing high demand stuff with lots of webserver requests and mysql data.
Scott
Fri 20th Mar '09, 2:44pm
SA-SCSI is the way to go, esp if you're going to be doing high demand stuff with lots of webserver requests and mysql data.

Thanks for the advice.

I'm now trying to budget in a 3 x 73GB SCSI SAS RAID 5 from my original idea of the single 147GB SCSI SAS drive.
eUKhost.com
Tue 24th Mar '09, 11:35am
SCSI did have the fastest speed by far, and still does. You idea to go with 3 hard drives would be perfect and RAID will add more security to it.