[K12OSN] SATA drive for server with 25 users?

[William Fragakis]

We've used 10K Raptors in a RAID 1 for up to 35-40 users with no issues.
We used RAID 1 because of the redundancy and since most critical disk
activity is actually reads not writes (ie opening programs), the
performance difference is either negligible or favors having the data on
2 disks.

The large caches of the new drives (16mb are supposed to be killer) also
help.

regards,
William



On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 23:18 -0400, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:
> Message: 20
> Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:02:52 -0600
> From: Joe Guenther <jguenther at chinooksedge.ab.ca>
> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] SATA drive for server with 25 users?
> To: "Support list for open source software in schools."
>         <k12osn at redhat.com>
> Message-ID: <45342BBC.6050404 at chinooksedge.ab.ca>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> 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?