From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jan 14 7: 6:58 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0241737B401 for ; Tue, 14 Jan 2003 07:06:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.adelphia.net (pa-plum1b-166.pit.adelphia.net [24.53.161.166]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1CCEE43F3F for ; Tue, 14 Jan 2003 07:06:51 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Received: from potentialtech.com ([172.16.0.95]) by mail.adelphia.net (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id h0EF7xAg005431; Tue, 14 Jan 2003 10:08:00 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Message-ID: <3E241BB6.5080304@potentialtech.com> Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 09:16:22 -0500 From: Bill Moran User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20021127 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ion-Mihai Tetcu Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Vinum over (2xSCSI, 1xIDE) ? References: <5.1.0.14.0.20030114123344.036b0b68@pop31.xnet.ro> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Ion-Mihai Tetcu wrote: > Hi, > > I have to setup a database (MySQL) server this days. > The machine will be a AthlonXP 2000+, 1G RAM, 2x Cheetah X15 36LP series > drive of 18GB. > And I could spare a 20G ATA100 IDE drive. > > I have no experience with vinum, so i want to ask you if it is a good > ideea to add the IDE drive. I was thinking to use it as a backup drive > in case the SCSI controller fail. I'm courios about what impact will > have on the performance of the system and as the server will have to > enter in production in a few days I do not have the time to play with. I'm not going to take the time to research the specs on each of those drives. However, if the ATA drive is slower than the others, and you configure the three in a striping configuration, the total speed of the array will be limited by the slowest drive. (The same would be true of a mirroring config, but you don't generally do that with 3 drives) If you config them as concatenated, or with different partitions, the speed will depend on which drive is being accessed. So the answer is: whether or not it's a good idea depends on how you configure it. If you configure the ATA as temp space, and the Cheetahs as database storage space, you'll probably see better performance than if both were on one drive, since writing to both ATA & SCSI simultaneously should go faster than trying to write temp and data to one drive at once. However, even this depends on your motherboard and controller, so your actual performance is going to depend. Unless someone else has used your exact config and done benchmarks, there's no way to be 100% sure. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message