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General discussion

Help me plan

Aug 25, 2005 7:57AM PDT

My web server machine has 4 SATA drives.

1x120GB, and 3x80Gb.

The 120GB has /, /boot, swap and all other system folders. Remaining space is unused.

Swap is 8gb, equal to 2 times the ram.

The other 3 sata drives are setup in raid0 for speed.

The raid array will be mounted on /mnt/raid and will contain all dynamic data.

Questions:

1. Instead of one large 8gb swap, should I create 4gb on the single drive, and another 4gb on the raid array?

2. I've seen people create several raid array on the same set of drives. E.g.

md0 = sda1, sdb1, sdc1
md1 = sda2, sdb2, sdc2
md3 = sda3, sdb3, sdc3

Is this multiple raid config better than the single setup I have?

TIA,
Richie.

Discussion is locked

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For web?
Aug 25, 2005 8:15AM PDT

Given that simple (?) IDE drives can burst data at up to 133 MegaBytes per second, it's highly unlikely you have a gigabit connection to the internet.

As such, can you write why RAID in this case?

Bob

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less stress per drive..
Aug 25, 2005 11:47AM PDT

Raid because hot spots could easily be created on a single hard drive. With stripping, data is accessed in parallel across several drives.

Besides, the quicker data can be passed to ram, the quicker processing can be carried out.

If my machine is indeed overkill, then I'd consider raid5 instead for redundancy.

Suggestions?

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Have you done this before?
Aug 25, 2005 12:04PM PDT

I've seen new to this effort builders fall for such setups, but unless you have some near gigabit internet connection I find it hard to believe what you're proposing.

But your money, your time. Go for it.

Bob