Best hard drive cost, performance bang for the buck combination?

geekalot

I have "older" hardware to be colocated at various providers, example: 4 x quad core L5420 with either 2.5" SAS or 3.5"SATA).

One configuration has 8 x 2.5" SAS slots (it is actually a "twin server," two server nodes in a single 1U, each having 16GB, 4x2.5" SAS, 2 Gigabit, IPMI etc)

I am not planning to host VPSes for customers, but will be hosting Applications(Drupal, Joomla, Piwik, Ad Serving, aStore Proxying, APIs)/Sites/custom PHP/MySQL Replication, etc in custom VMs.

Can you suggest best enterprise-quality "bang for the buck" drives/configurations to populate this, given how costly 2.5" SAS are? Maybe combine with SSD for OS/Boot?

For example
Node "1a"
2 x 120GB SSD (sRAID1) -> Boot, OS (Debian 64), Swap
2 x 900GB SAS (sRAID1) -> VM/File store

Node "1b" (inside same physical box as "1a" but independent server)
2 x 120GB SSD (sRAID1) -> Boot, OS (Debian 64), Swap
2 x 900GB SAS (sRAID1) -> VM/File store

Yes, I have heard of RAID5,10 etc but as far as I am concerned, I can replicate 1a to 1b (through a dedicated Gigabit port) and have node to node "failover", if I want to go that way.

Question is: how would you populate/configure the HD's in this scenario at a reasonable cost?

Thanks in advance

EDIT: feel free to point me to specific HD models here:
store.masterofcheap.com/node/496
or, here:
www.thebestssdstore.com

Thanks!!

Maounique

I am not sure SAS will be worth here. Single or mirroring SAS drives wont do good enough to make a difference for the price tag.
I would go for some large enterprise SATA models and I will have backup space too for the same money.
Unless your setup really needs every IOPS they can get and in this case you wont do good with mirroring unless you will use one of the SSDs for cache.

geekalot

@Maounique thanks.

The "twin server" has 2.5" drive trays (part of the reason, besides speed, for considering SSD as well).

What brand/type hard drives do you recommend then?

pubcrawler

Sounds like you have a 4 drive bay server.

Question is how many drive channels does the server board support? I have a case as shipped that supports 1 drive in the 1U. The motherboard has 6 available SATA connectors.

So if you have a similar situation, then I'd advise:

4 big SATA drives, create a RAID for redundancy and survivability sake... or try to.

If you have extra channels on the motherboard, then look at 2.5 and 1.8 inch SSDs and bundle those inside where drives weren't meant to go originally but is now dead space. Usually I find this space in empty expansion card areas and in the area where IPMI and other remote control cards are.

There are few of us on here known for smuggling SSDs in our servers like this.

Otherwise, if limited to what you stated, get the biggest SSDs you can and RAID them and call it a day.

Maounique

For SSD Samsung 830, for SAS Toshiba...
Look at this article, it may give you some hints: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2739
It is old but the principles still apply.

pubcrawler

+1 for the Samsung 830's. The 840's are also quite fine.

geekalot

@pubcrawler lol, we think alike.

yes, I already do this (stuffing SSD in servers), but this "twin server" is a bit odd and only gives you the 2.5" form factor ... in 8 drive trays.

I have been thinking of stuffing it with just SSD, but I would like to have approx 1TB data area (i.e., RAID1 mirror of 2 x 1TB for data for each "node" in the twin) ... because 500GB won't be enough for long. But the SSD's get expensive in that size range.

So, should I do 4 x 512GB SSD for each node in the "twin" and call it a day? What models do you recommend?

A quick scan of http://www.thebestssdstore.com/node/25 shows:
approx $345 - $449.95 each for 512GB SSD

geekalot

oops, you beat me to the submit button.

Thanks @pubcrawler and @Maounique ... I'll read it and look into the SSDs.

Jacob

I stay away from 2.5" bays due to the cost of hard drives.

3.5" and 900GB SAS will cost you a heap load.

What about WD raptors, or 4 x 300GB 10/15K SAS.

Maounique

@Jacob said: I stay away from 2.5" bays due to the cost of hard drives.

If you go with 8x 1 Tb toshiba SATA drives at 50 eur a piece will cost you 400 Eur and you will have a lot of storage and a lot of spindles, will come close to 4x3.5 SAS in terms of price and performance but will give much more space especially if you insert a small SSD for read cache, then will probably do much better than the 4xSAS 3.5 variant in many usage scenarios.

geekalot

@Jacob yeah, lesson learned there for sure.

But, I have also been trying to avoid drives < 500GB ... may have to reconsider them to fully populate this puppy.

8 drives at any cost is ... well, not lowend LOL

geekalot

@Maounique said:

If you go with 8x 1 Tb toshiba SATA drives at 50 eur a piece will cost you 400 Eur and you will have a lot of storage and a lot of spindles, will come close to 4x3.5 SAS in terms of price and performance but will give much more space especially if you insert a small SSD for read cache, then will probably do much better than the 4xSAS 3.5 variant in many usage scenarios.

The problem is that this one is 2.5" form factor ... no 3.5" option.

In my 3.5" servers, there are loads of possibilities.

This one is more restrictive due to the 2.5" only layout.