What To Do With 6 Hard Drives
Mar 25, 2007I am about to buy a Compaq server with 6 SCSI hard drives. In you opinion, what is the best RAID configuration with 6 HDs?
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Hard Drives For VPS
Apr 23, 2009I'm building a couple of VPS host servers for a client.
Each server have to host 20 VPS and each server will be 4 cores with 32GB of ram. So CPU and ram should be just fine, my interrogatioon now is hard drives. The company owns the machines, but not the drives yet.
I searched a lot on your forums but found nothing relating on VPS. I'm basicly a DBA IRL, so I have experience in hardrives when it comes to databases, but it's completely different for VPS.
According to my boss, each VPS will run a LAMP solution (having a separeted DB cluster is out of question for some reason).
First, raid1 is indeed a must. There is room for 2x 3.5 drives. I might be able to change the backplane for 4x2.5, but i'm not sure...
I've came to several solutions:
2x SATA 7.2k => comes to about 140$
2x SATA 10k (velociraptor) => comes to about 500$
2x SAS 10k with PCIe controller => comes to about 850$
2x SAS 15k with PCIe controller=> comes to about 1000$
They need at least 300GB storage.
But my problem is that the servers do not have SAS onboard so I need a controller and in my case the cheapest solution is best.
But I'm not sure that SATA 7.2k will hold the charge of 20 complete VPS.
Does it worth it to go with SAS anyway or SATA should be just fine? With SATA better use plain old sata 7.2k or 10k drives?
That's a lot of text for not much: What is best for VPS: SATA 7.2k, SATA 10k or SAS 10k?
RLX Blade Hard Drives?
Jan 7, 2008Do the old RLX Blade servers use 'mini' hard drives? I can't find an answer anywhere. I seem to recall that they use smaller 2.5" drives. Is this the case?
And, if so, do they make "good" drives worthy of being in a server in that size? Are they essentially just a laptop drive?
Linux Hard Drives
Jan 12, 2008On my centos webserver I currently am using a 250gb ide drive.
I just bought 2 Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB hard drives.
And now I am wondering what kind of setup I should have?
Should I have the 250gb hd as a backup drive now and have the two raptors in a raid 0 array.
What would be the best configuration?
Where/How To Duplicate Hard Drives
Jul 3, 2007I am in a little bit of trouble I got a couple (5) of 750GB hdds that I need backed up to another couple (5?) of 750GB hdds so I can save the data storage on them. They are in a Linux box with a LVM setup I also have a RAID ware card on it but not using any RAID # on them. I decided after finding out what I could do with it to go to Windows 2003 on the server and installing RAID5/6 on it.
It seems that I will have to give up all my data and have everything wiped off from the hard drives this is very sad for me but I still have a chance to save the data on them. So I am thinking of copying them to another bunch of hard drives and then re-add it once the system is in place.
I was looking at this
[url]
But thats clearly too expensive as I just need to back up 5 hard drives (750GB/each) and just need to do it one time. Anyone have any suggestions to this or how should I go about doing it. It doesnt have to be right away but its good to know my options.
Is there any place where they might to do this kind of stuff they let you rent their machine for a couple of hours for a fee so you can back up your data? The server is a COLO and the hardware is mine so I have every right to take it off and back it up with no problem from the datacenter.
Server With 2 Hard Drives
Sep 11, 2007am getting new server with 2 (73GB) hard drives i need to know the following:
1.I need to put /home in one hard drive 73GB and the other partitions like /boot, /tmp,/usr and /var on the other drive
where should i put /home? on the primary or or secondary drive?is there any effect on the speed?
2. Am used to servers with 1 drive. is there any difference when it comes to security aplications such as APF,BFD,mod security and other aplicatuions settings?
3. in general should i take the same actions when handling a server with 1 drive and server with 2 drives?
1 Domain To Use 2 Hard Drives
May 31, 2007i just got another HDD on my server, but i want to use 1 domain and use both hard drives for the 1 domain.
How do i set it up so that both hdd's can be used by the 1 domain..im using WHM but cant seem to do it.
What Is The Difference NAS And Many Hard Drives Server
Mar 28, 2008i feel the NAS are not very cheap,
it looks likely just a low-level server with many hhds,
but why people not buy a server and put many hhds on it?
Performance With 500GB+ SATA Hard Drives
Jan 16, 2008running new servers on 500GB+ hard drives, how are these drives performing when they become 50% full?
Can they properly be 50% or more utilized on a cPanel like server with 200+ acccounts?
Software RAID5 Not Booting Up Without All Hard Drives
May 14, 2007I setup a Software RAID5 the following way:
/dev/sda:
1: /boot 101MB
2: software raid ALL
/dev/sdb
1: software raid ALL
/dev/sdc
1: software raid ALL
/dev/sdd
1: software raid ALL
/dev/md0: ext3 mounted as / for all of the software RAID partitions.
I was left to believe this would create redundancy as long as only one drive is removed from the array. Although when I unplug any of the hard drives (one at a time) I get input/output errors and when I try to reboot I get kernel sync errors.
What exactly am I doing wrong when trying to create redundancy? I know that SDA contains the /boot/ partition so it wouldn't boot without that but even if I unplug B,C, and D it still can't sync.
Shared Hosting Clients' Preference On Hard Drives
May 2, 2009I know SCSI drives are better than SATA, but I wonder if the community will prefer SATA or SCSI especially when you will be paying more for less.
Heres an example.
You can get:
2GB SATA for $5 & 500MB SCSI for $5, which will you choose?
Replacing Or Upgrading Hard Drives...remote Method
Dec 20, 2007I want to try something different on our methods of replacing or upgrading hard drives.
I want to be able to do most of it via our KVM/IP instead of babysitting the server(s) for so long in the DC.
My thoughts are, how can I add the new hard drive in the DC, and move the data over via the KVM/IP. Can this be done with just a raw drive added (no new setup) using DD or even rsync, or is it better to setup a new installation of CentOS on the new drive, and use rsync to move the data over. Then how do I get the proper drive to boot until I go back into the DC to remove the bad or old drive? I'd be interested in how some of you folks are doing this, as far as what's easiest and could be done over the KVM/IP once the new drive is connected.
Or on systems that have 2 drives with cPanel/WHM, how can we temporarily on an emergency basis untilize the backup drive to do a new setup, copy the data over from the drive that is failing, then just replace the bad drive as a backup drive next time you go in the DC? We have an external USB CD in place to allow remote installs...just curious if anyone does something like this or has ideas how we could make this work.
We use cloning software now, but can end up babysitting a clone for a long period in the DC like this.
How To Distribute Service/content Across Multiple Hard Drives For Best Performance
Mar 19, 2007Suppose I have only two phisical hard drives. What is the most optimal way to distribute the following (a windows server):
OS/IIS
Web pages and scripts
SQL server
SQL database
Should it be :
HD1 : OS/IIS + Web pages/scripts + SQL server
HD2: SQL database
or other setups?
Google Doubts Hard Drives Fail Because Of Excessive Temperature, Usage
Feb 17, 2007Mountain View (CA) - As a company with one of the world's largest IT infrastructures, Google has an opportunity to do more than just search the Internet. From time to time, the company publishes the results of internal research. The most recent project one is sure to spark interest in exploring how and under what circumstances hard drives work - or not.
There is a rule of thumb for replacing hard drives, which taught customers to move data from one drive to another at least every five years. But especially the mechanical nature of hard drives makes these mass storage devices prone to error and some drives may fail and die long before that five-year-mark is reached. Traditionally, extreme environmental conditions are cited as the main reasons for hard drive failure, extreme temperatures and excessive activity being the most prominent ones.
A Google study presented at the currently held Conference on File and Storage Technologies questions these traditional failure explanations and concludes that there are many more factors impacting the life expectancy of a hard drive and that failure predictions are much more complex than previously thought. What makes this study interesting is the fact that Google's server infrastructure is estimated to exceed a number of 450,000 fairly mainstream systems that, in a large number, use consumer-grade devices with capacities ranging from 80 to 400 GB in capacity. According to the company, the project covered "more than 100,000" drives that were put into production in or after 2001. The drives ran at a platter rotation speed of 5400 and 7200 rpm, came from "many of the largest disk drive manufacturers and from at least nine different models."
Google said that it is collecting "vital information" about all of its systems every few minutes and stores the data for further analysis. For example, this information includes environmental factors (such as temperatures), activity levels and SMART parameters (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) that are commonly considered to be good indicators to describe the health of disk drives.
In general, Google's hard drive population saw a failure rate that was increasing with the age of the drive. Within the group of hard drives up to one year old, 1.7% of the devices had to be replaced due to failure. The rate jumps to 8% in year 2 and 8.6% in year 3. The failure rate levels out thereafter, but Google believes that the reliability of drives older than 4 years is influenced more by "the particular models in that vintage than by disk drive aging effects."
Breaking out different levels of utilization, the Google study shows an interesting result. Only drives with an age of six months or younger show a decidedly higher probability of failure when put into a high activity environment. Once the drive survives its first months, the probability of failure due to high usage decreases in year 1, 2, 3 and 4 - and increases significantly in year 5. Google's temperature research found an equally surprising result: "Failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend," the authors of the study found.
In contrast the company discovered that certain SMART parameters apparently do have an effect drive failures. For example, drives typically scan the disk surface in the background and report errors as they discover them. Significant scan errors can hint to surface errors and Google reports that fewer than 2% of its drives show scan errors. However, drives with scan errors turned out to be ten times more likely to fail than drives without scan errors. About 70% of Google's drives with scan errors survived the first eight months after the first scan error was reported.
Similarly, reallocation counts, a number that results from the remapping of faulty sectors to a new physical sector, can have a dramatic impact on a hard drive's life: Google said that drives with one or more reallocations fail more often than those with none. The observed average impact on the average fail rate came in at a factor of 3-6, while about 85% of the drives survive past eight months after the first reallocation.
Google discovered similar effects on hard drives in other SMART categories, but them bottom line revealed that 56% of all failed drives had no count in either one of these categories - which means that more than half of all failed drives were put out of operation by factors other than scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation and probational counts.
In the end, Google's research does not solve the problem of predicting when hard drives are likely to fail. However, it shows that temperature and high usage alone are not responsible for failures by default. Also, the researcher pointed towards a trend they call "infant mortality phase" - a time frame early in a hard drive's life that shows increased probabilities of failure under certain circumstances. The report lacks a clear cut conclusion, but the authors indicate that there is no promising approach at this time than can predict failures of hard drives: "Powerful predictive models need to make use of signals beyond those provided by SMART."
Invalid Cross-device Link - Additional Hard Drives Linux
Mar 25, 2008OP: Linux Centos
I just got an additional 500GB hard drive added and mounted it to /home2
There are files that are in /home1 (orginal HD) that will need to be constantly moved over to /home2 via a ftp
But i keep getting this error
550 Rename/move failure: Invalid cross-device link
Does anyone have any ideas? I tried changing permissions but no luck also tried mounting the 2nd hard drive within a directory in /home1. Still gives the error.
400GB Hard Disk Drives In RAID 0, RAID 5 And RAID 10 Arrays: Performance Analysis
Mar 7, 2007Quote:
Today we are going to conduct a detailed study of RAIDability of contemporary 400GB hard drives on a new level. We will take two "professional" drives from Seagate and Western Digital and four ordinary "desktop" drives for our investigation. The detailed performance analysis and some useful hints on building RAID arrays are in our new detailed article.
[url]
Do Hosts Use Enterprise Drives Or Desktop Drives
Nov 5, 2009i want to know if there is a difference between enterprise drives and desktop drives and which ones hosts use
View 7 Replies View RelatedDell Drives In A RAID Array With Non-Dell Drives
Sep 14, 2009I have a couple of Dell 1950s and in one of them, I have 2x Seagate 15K.5s that I purchased through Dell and I also have a spare sitting in my rack in case one goes bad, also from Dell.
I was going to be repurposing one of my other 1950s and was going to get two more 15K.5s for it, but wasn't planning on getting them through Dell (rip off?). This way, could still keep the same spare drive around in case a drive went bad in that system as well.
When I was talking to my Dell rep recently when purchasing another system, their hardware tech said you can't use non-Dell drives with Dell drives in the same RAID array because of the different firmware between them.
Anyone know if it is true? Anyone have any experience with using drives from Dell in conjunction with the same model drives from a third party retailer?
SSD Drives
Oct 5, 2009Has anyone begun implementing SSD drives? We're thinking about using them as OS drives.
View 14 Replies View RelatedUsing 2TB Drives
Sep 30, 2009I'm not sure they make sense yet, especially in bigger raid arrays...
View 14 Replies View Related1.5TB Drives
Nov 4, 2009I know there are a lot of experienced hardware guys on here, so I wanted some input on 1.5TB drives. Are they reliable enough to be used in non-mission critical storage servers? 99% of what we do is OEM (Dell) equipment, so I don't test raw hardware much these days.
I've read a lot of negative things about Seagate lately. Can anyone chime in with specific models they've had positive or negative experiences with from any vendor? Reading some reviews on the WD 1.5TB Caviar Black drives, there seems to be some weird issues with them going into a recovery cycle.
Kernel Drives
Aug 4, 2009What is the best way to find out which filesystems and harddrive drivers you can remove? Obviously, i need ext2,3 but how do you find which HD you only need?
View 1 Replies View RelatedWDC Drives, Caviars Vs Re
Oct 1, 2009I was just wondering whats the real live experience or difference on using Western Digital Caviar series (green, blue or black) on a DC environment vs the RE which are suppose to be for enterprise business.
On the WDC website the caviar series are targeted under desktop disks not servers. But allot of servers and providers use them. If you have servers your suppose to use the RE series, I exclude raptors as I only want to compare medium performance disks here.
How To Mount And Use Multiple Drives
Jul 4, 2009I must not even understand the basics of how mounting works in Linux.
Physical drive /dev/sda1 is mounted at /
I created a software RAID array (using mdadm) out of two other drives using mdadm, at /dev/md0, and mount it at /vol:
mount /dev/md0 /vol
Code:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 9.9G 2.2G 7.3G 23% /
/dev/md0 200G 470M 200G 1% /vol
Now I start creating files in /vol/*
Then I unmount /dev/md0
I still see the files at /vol/*. They seem to be on /dev/sda1.
So how do I use the RAID array at /dev/md0 that I tried to mount at /vol?
Listing Drives And Mounting Them
Nov 8, 2009My server has been formated it has two drives. I have my back up on the second drives.
What is the command I use to list the drives and how to mount the second drive.
SSD Drives In A Server Setting
Oct 4, 2009Does anyone have experience with SSD drives in a server environment? I've seen now a few offers with SSD (Intel) and wondering if the speed is noticeable?
Are they worth it? from what I have been reading is that they a superior in reliability, but have issues with limited write cycles.
How To Mount And Use Multiple Drives
Jul 5, 2009I must not even understand the basics of how mounting works in Linux.
Physical drive /dev/sda1 is mounted at /
I created a software RAID array (using mdadm) out of two other drives using mdadm, at /dev/md0, and mount it at /vol:
mount /dev/md0 /vol
Code:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 9.9G 2.2G 7.3G 23% /
/dev/md0 200G 470M 200G 1% /vol
Now I start creating files in /vol/*
Then I unmount /dev/md0
I still see the files at /vol/*. They seem to be on /dev/sda1.
So how do I use the RAID array at /dev/md0 that I tried to mount at /vol?
250GB Or Larger Drives
Mar 24, 2009Anybody know the best place to get a really cheap server with at least 250GB drives? I'm assuming most providers offer HDD's of that size on relatively cheap systems now if we're just looking at SATA.
The machine doesn't need to be anything special, I don't need a ton of bandwidth.
Basically this will be an extra backup machine to pull backups from servers instead of my usual "pushing" of backup data.
So to clarify, I'm looking for a simple machine pretty much anywhere with some drive space! VPS just won't cut it because the drivespace they provide is too expensive (yes, I understand they have nice drive setups though).
RAID etc is not needed, I'm not running anything mission critical but would like to have more locations in place to hold backups for me. WHT worries me alot
Offshore 10Krpm Drives
Oct 15, 2009I can't find providers with 10Krpm HDs+ offshore and they have to have good support. Also I need atleast 2Tb over 100Mbit.
The reason why I need it to be offshore is because my client wants to have a subtitles sites and I'm not exactly sure if its legal or not in america and UK. Also netherlands or germany is preffered I looked at swiftnoc but not sure if they have 10krpm hard drives.
Raid 1 Vs Two Physical Drives
Nov 1, 2009I have number of question relevant to dedi. severs. I dont know to post them seperately or in single thread , sorry to mod for my negligence.
raid 1
or
If I have two drives ,and take daily backup on second drive
how much average small websites can hold a single machine=
quad xeon 2.3 , 4gb ram, 1 tb drive what you say?
how many websites you ever hosted on single machine?
is it wise to host large number of website on single powerful machine with external backup, or go for number of small dedis.
Solid State Drives
Jun 15, 2008I'm sure by now we have all noticed the Liquid Web ads for solid state drives by now. These offerings would make for incredible database servers, among other things.My questions is:
How many of you are going to run out and get a solution like this, from liquidweb or anyone else? Why or why not?