Re: Server choice.



Paul Halliday wrote:

Hi,

I am in the process of building a new database server and after
pricing up 2 Dell models I thought I would throw this out just to see
which choice would be better suited for FreeBSD.

The demands on the system will be mostly network -> disk I/O with a
hope of best performance on quickly servicing numerous reads; for
example when reports are generated using the data in the database.

The 2 choices (we dont have that much money and they have to be Dell)
are a poweredge 1850 and a poweredge 850.

850 specs.
----------------
Procsesor: Pentium(Dual Core) 830 @ 3.0GHz/2X1MB Cache 800MHz FSB
Memory: 2GB DDR2, 533MHz (2x1GB) Dual ranked DIMMs
Disks: SATA

1850 specs.
------------------
Processors: 2 @ Xeon @ 3.0GHz/2MB Cache 800MHz FSB
Memory: 2GB DDR2, 400MHz (4x512) Single ranked DIMMs
Disks: Ultra 320

The pricing is really close.

Thanks.


I have yet to buy a SATA based Dell server where the drives were hotswap or even easy to take out.

I have mostly Dell 1850s and 2850s, and all are RAID, they all use the amr driver and are hot swap.
I don't recall ever trying the hot swap as I am yet to have a bad drive, but I am pretty sure I have tried just pulling out a SCSI drive while the machine was running and putting it back in and it was fine.

For the SATA stuff I have bought 750s with SATA RAID 1 and they are fully hardware based, I never dealt with any drivers, I have them on less important services and also have never had to get a HD replaced, if I did the server would have to be shut down.

As for IO performance I have never done any real testing, I have noticed that Raid 5 is slower for writes but thats just the standard rule for Raid 5.

Mike





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