Ninja Bastille Disk IO

Xelene · 14 May 2012 at 19:00

At work we have some pretty unique use cases for hardware, we have some very very heavy IO related tasks so was just having a play around.

You can buy a Dell 2U server that will fit 12 * 2.5" SATA drives with a pretty decent RAID controller. Just pondering 12 * Crucial M4 512GB in RAID 6. Would make a very very nice DB server.

m4cc45 · 14 May 2012 at 21:04

SSDs? Surely you'd want something else if you were going to constantly write - I know they've been getting better but I wouldn't want to put high writes on SSDs just incase you loose your RAID level and kill the array.

M.

Xelene · 14 May 2012 at 21:44

m4cc45 said:
SSDs? Surely you'd want something else if you were going to constantly write - I know they've been getting better but I wouldn't want to put high writes on SSDs just incase you loose your RAID level and kill the array.

M.

Heavy heavy read, it's like a 5tb memory cache

We probably have one of the largest render farms outside of ILM and Weta, probably the largest in Europe.

m4cc45 · 15 May 2012 at 08:19

Ah in that case it makes sense.

M.

Skidilliplop · 20 May 2012 at 20:18

For stupendous performance I'd look at fusionIO cards

They blow SSDs out of the water for most IO intensive stuff.

droyden · 20 May 2012 at 21:40

You would also want to look at Enterprise SLC SSD's

kerrgreg · 21 May 2012 at 06:20

Sounds great! got some solutions like that at my place, but why oh why raid6 raid 10 is much faster in my experience, and by the sounds of it your writes are only important in the short term as its a caching device?

Skidilliplop · 21 May 2012 at 10:04

kerrgreg said:
Sounds great! got some solutions like that at my place, but why oh why raid6 raid 10 is much faster in my experience, and by the sounds of it your writes are only important in the short term as its a caching device?

RAID6 is just as fast as 10 for reads, if anything it's quicker for the same size drive pool as you're striping over more spindles. It's writing latency where RAID5 and 6 fall over. But if you're writing once and reading many 6 is fine. Plus flash writes so fast and with such low latency you can get away with parity in places you traditionally couldn't.