What kind of Server do I need?

[justsexxx]

Hi,

A comapny I know offers me dedicated server hosting with a good bandwith price. But, I can choose 4 servers. I think I'll have 350 GB. Should I choose:
128 MB
1 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD
1 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 866 Mhz processor

or

256 MB
1 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD
2 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 866 Mhz processor

or
512 MB
4 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD (hardware) RAID 5
2 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 933 Mhz processor


Thanks already,

Marc

[pooky]

None of the above

[justsexxx]

Why not? What is wrong with them?

Marc

[Energy Hosting]

Are they all for the same price? http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/wink.gif

I would take the
4 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD (hardware) RAID 5
2 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 933 Mhz processor

[gse]

it's always a good idea to use one drive for hotspare on raid 5.
raid 1 you get away with less drives, but I had bad experience with raid 1, which made me think if raid 1 is good for nothing.
Energy, can you confirm that?

[ProgGod]

Actually with RAID 5 you get away with less drives. You calculate your diskspace by multiplying the number of drives minus one times the smallest drives capacity. So basically if you have 5 9 gig drives, you get 36gigs of space. Disadvantage of raid 5 is its SLOWER. Raid 5 works by spreading out files across mutiple drives, so there are always 2 copies of each bit.

RAID 0+1 is the fastest way to go. You lose one drive for every drive in the system. So if you have 4 9gig drives, you will only have 18gigs of space. This is by far the fastest way, and its also the easiest to recover in case of failure.

For RAID5 I recommend the use of an external controller, since its slower and more complicated. RAID 0+1 you can use the OSes built in raid functions, and get just about the same performance of an external controller.

[ProgGod]

Btw my recommendation would be a server w/ 2 fast IDE drives, and 512 megs of ram.. MUCH cheaper, and can handle atleast 15megabits of traffic.. which is 4800gigs. These days SCSI drives don't have that much of an advantage over IDE. Its true IDE uses a bit of CPU, but they are just as reliable as SCSI as long as you stick with the good brands, IBM, SEAGATE, WD..


www.hiendservers.com (http://www.hiendservers.com) if you want some awesome prices on equipment.

[gse]

well, I had disc failures on raid 5 and I was able to rebuild no problem.
On raid 1 I had crash also, and for some reason the linux filesystem got corrupted on all the drives - main and mirrored. Go figure, the only way to fix was to reformat and reinstall os from scratch then restore files from backup. So I no longer like raid 1, but I could be wrong

[Energy Hosting]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by gse:
Energy, can you confirm that?</font>

Confirm what? Justsexxx is not one of our clients (yet).

http://energyhosting.com/ide.html has a good comparison between IDE and SCSI raid.

ProgGod, get some 3Ware IDE RAID cards, they provide hardware raid (unlike the software raid you use) and work faster than many SCSI configurations.

[ProgGod]

Heh thats ok, the 1% of CPU while doing full disk access is alot cheaper then an external card http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/smile.gif

Btw if you want the best internal scsi raid cards you can't beat the DPT SmartRaid V (now millenium), oh and now owned by adaptec http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/smile.gif

I have also had no problem rebuilding an RAID5, but technically speaking if you dropped 2 drives, you would lose everything, on a RAID 0+1 you would not

[gse]

two drives would rarely go down at the same time. what I also had problems with was raid card lose it's configurations, like loses array from it's bios and shows like 2-3 drives down, which confused the hell out of me first time it happened. Raid is pretty much vulnerable thing, i say

[gse]

hey and what's DPT SmartRaid ?
can you post url

[gse]

oh and about this:
"I have also had no problem rebuilding an RAID5, but technically speaking if you dropped 2 drives, you would lose everything, on a RAID 0+1 you would not"

getting back to that my raid 1 crash. On the main drive the linux fs got corrupted, note - linux fs, not the drive got bad, the second drive didn't find errors and continued to mirror. And the bitch wouldn't come up after reboot.The end of this ordeal - I had to reformat all drives and reinstal os, works fine again. Go figure

[ProgGod]

Not sure about linux, there are lots of things like that i don't like about it, so I use FreeBSD http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/smile.gif

As for dpt go to www.dpt.com, (http://www.dpt.com,) or www.seagate.com (http://www.seagate.com) look for the SmartRaid V or millenium.

[Brisom]

Hey b4 u jump on a dedicated server check out our pricing for the same apple to apple we will give you better service and better rates on your bandwidth...Hell if you burn enough we will give you the server free..

E-Mail me for a quote and details....

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by justsexxx:
Hi,

A comapny I know offers me dedicated server hosting with a good bandwith price. But, I can choose 4 servers. I think I'll have 350 GB. Should I choose:
128 MB
1 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD
1 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 866 Mhz processor

or

256 MB
1 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD
2 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 866 Mhz processor

or
512 MB
4 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD (hardware) RAID 5
2 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 933 Mhz processor


Thanks already,

Marc</font>

[Brisom]

Hey b4 u jump on a dedicated server check out our pricing for the same apple to apple we will give you better service and better rates on your bandwidth...Hell if you burn enough we will give you the server free..


Talk to real engineers toll free...


E-Mail me for a quote and details....

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by justsexxx:
Hi,

A comapny I know offers me dedicated server hosting with a good bandwith price. But, I can choose 4 servers. I think I'll have 350 GB. Should I choose:
128 MB
1 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD
1 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 866 Mhz processor

or

256 MB
1 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD
2 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 866 Mhz processor

or
512 MB
4 x 9 GB – Ultra 3 SCSI HDD (hardware) RAID 5
2 x Intel ® Pentium ® III 933 Mhz processor


Thanks already,

Marc</font>