Re: question about storage
Jim Green put forth on 2/19/2011 6:33 PM:
> 2T drive is not that more expensive than 1T drive also, I use mysql
In fact it's right at double when you compare apples to apples. HDS has
the lowest cost 7.2k 1TB and 2TB drives at Newegg. The 2TB model is
slightly more than double the price.
The system I spec'd out has $110 worth of 1TB drives. 2TB drives would
be $240, adding $130 to the total system cost. My target was a system
under $400 total with good quality and performance, an adequate amount
of storage, storage redundancy, and including the GbE switch and cables.
The goal being a totally manageable alternative to low performance low
cost canned NAS products. Others read this list and might appreciate
this information as well, so I was responding with something I thought
might appeal to a wider audience as well. Ease of use was not a
consideration, obviously. Those who need the ease of use of a canned
NAS box aren't building DIY systems.
> database to store relatively high frequency price data and other data.
> Initially I plan to buy the WD green drives:( I guess the performance
> hit is for all >2T drives?
Only those drives using "advanced format" take the big performance hit
using default partitioner configuration. The most notorious offender
being the WD Green series, simply because it has had the largest sales
due to its low price. I hope for your sake you change your mind as the
headaches involved with the WD Green drives go beyond the sector
alignment issue and outweigh the price advantage by a wide margin. Go
with an HDS, Seagate, WD Blue or Black series, anything but WD Green and
anything but advanced format. You should prefer a 7.2k rpm drive with
native 512 byte sectors, which is exactly what I recommended with the
HDS drives.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Linux+WD20EARS
"Advanced Format" means the drive has 4096 byte physical sectors but it
lies to the host OS saying the sectors are 512 bytes. This causes
significant performance problems as the various Linux distros and their
disk partitioners/etc don't cope properly with this kind of sector
translation being performed by the drive firmware. Thus manual
intervention is required during partitioning to get proper performance,
and you have to know what you're doing in gparted or fdisk.
> This is nice and affordable but it doesn't provide much computing
> power for me do backtest the price data... I am considering building a
> desktop with i7-2600k core(need to wait till the motherboard for it is
> fixed).
This build is intended as an inexpensive good performance NFS/CIFS NAS
server, not an interactive desktop PC. It is meant to solve the
external disk problem you stated in lieu of a low quality canned NAS
product or multiple USB disks with mdraid.
You can easily change the configuration to:
4 or 8GB RAM
dual or quad core CPU
4 x 2TB HDDs instead of 2 x 1TB, but with a PATA CD/DVD drive
Bumping up to 4GB ram and a dual core 3.2 GHz Athlon II is only an extra
$35. If you think you need a quad core CPU, you're simply wasting money
and idle cycles, along with everyone else on the quad/six core bandwagon...
I'm partial to AMD platforms because they give much better performance
per dollar in the real world. It appears you're partial to Intel. Feel
free to substitute Intel platform parts for this build. You'll simply
see the price tag increase with little or no increase in real world
performance.
Just stay away from the WD Green drives, or any 512/4096 hybrid drives,
for your sake. :)
--
Stan
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