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Re: Offtopic : Large hostings and colocations ?where?



On 5/11/07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

2Tb would really need raid5, so you would be looking at 5*500GB or maybe
4X750GB or 3*1TB, which would make it rather tricky to get a server with
that for under $3000.  $4000 looks much more likely.  Rack mount servers
do cost more, and for hosted systems rack mount is really the only
option.


With disks of this size, I have to chime in against RAID5 in any way.  It is far too likely to lose a sector on two disks, and even if you had a hot spare to immediately start a rebuild onto, I've seen too  many RAID5 arrays (especially SATA/PATA) go south.

The cost of mirroring the storage initially (either RAID1 or via rsync to a paired machine) will be dwarfed by what you spend on hosting/bandwidth/power and god forbid losing a R5 array. 

Also, when drives do go bad, not having to sift through parity to find what's recoverable is priceless.

I might be Jaded, every day when I show up to work at least 1 drive has gone bad, sometimes 3.  On this scale what in a previous life seemed statistically insignificant  suddenly has real meaning.

2 boxes with 4x500GB disks should cost close to $3K.  Mirror the data, the services, etc... and sleep easy at night.

-Joerg



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