[K12OSN] SATA drive for server with 25 users?

[Joe Guenther]

I run a LTSP server with 2 SATA drives on RAID 0 - striping and it seems 
to run just fine.  I have had up to 37 clients on at one time.  Usually 
there are a lab of 25 clients plus 6 stations in the library running all 
day.  Home folder storage is done on a Novell server though.  But the 
LTSP system runs on this box with dual Xeon 2.4GHz and 4 Gb RAM with 
these 2 - 120Gb 7200rpm SATA in RAID 0 on Adaptec 1210s RAID (a real 
cheapo).

The ONLY time there is a noticable slowness is when all 25 boot 
simultaneously and then when they all start OpenOffice simultaneously.  
Once they are all up nobody notices any slowness.  I think the SATA RAID 
make great little budget servers personally.

Joe Guenther

Calvin Dodge wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Petre Scheie <petre at maltzen.net> wrote:
>> We haven't had any discussion for a while now as to how well SATA 
>> drives scale up in a
>> K12LTSP server.  It used to be, back in the PATA days, that an ATA 
>> (also known as IDE)
>> drive would handle up to 10 clients, but going any higher than that 
>> resulted in poor
>> performance that could be addressed only by going to SCSI with its 
>> ability to re-order
>> queues and so forth.  But SATA has been out for a while, it now has 
>> many of the features
>> of SCSI, and I see that 10K RPM versions are available, and so I'm 
>> wondering if the
>> consensus now is that SATA is good enough for small and even mid-size 
>> servers, where by
>> 'midsize' I mean roughly 25 clients hanging off of it.  What about 
>> 7200RPM SATA drives?
>
> With 25 users it would be worth trying.  FWIW, a local Linux-based
> hosting facility (tummy.com) swears by Hitachi drives, and the newer
> Hitachis feature "Native Command Queueing", which I believe is
> equivalent to the queue reordering you mentioned.
>
> If I was putting together a new server, I'd probably try one of those
> Hitachis. They're cheap enough that you could try, say, a 250 gig
> model, then relegate it to some other task (like backup storage) if
> you found you had to replace it with a SCSI drive.
>
> Yes, you could get a 10K RPM Maxtor drive, but they're much more
> expensive, and currently Maxtor reliability is suspect
> (http://www.hardwareguys.com/picks/harddisk.html).
>
> Calvin
>
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