Herman Bos open source guerilla

Commodity hardware++: Storage server

Great what you can do with commodity hardware these days:

storage-mc:/data# dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img bs=1M count=102400
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 698.145 seconds, 154 MB/s

4 x WD 500GB RE2 disks in RAID1+0. With a 4-port Areca 1210 hardware raid card. Sure beats Linux software RAID1 with performance.

Nothing bad about Linux software RAID1, we use it in many places. Just when you need that bit more I/O and SAS/SCSI is not really justified hardware SATA RAID can really make the difference. The Western Digital RE2 (Raid Edition 2) disks are also pretty good. These disks have 92MB/s buffer to disk and NCQ (Native Commandline Queuing). No complains so far!