Server choice.

[Michael Vince]

Paul Halliday wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I am in the process of building a new database server and after
>pricing up 2 Dell models I thought I would throw this out just to see
>which choice would be better suited for FreeBSD.
>
>The demands on the system will be mostly network -> disk I/O with a
>hope of best performance on quickly servicing numerous reads; for
>example when reports are generated using the data in the database.
>
>The 2 choices (we dont have that much money and they have to be Dell)
>are a poweredge 1850 and a poweredge 850.
>
>850 specs.
>----------------
>Procsesor: Pentium(Dual Core) 830 @ 3.0GHz/2X1MB Cache 800MHz FSB
>Memory: 2GB DDR2, 533MHz (2x1GB) Dual ranked DIMMs
>Disks: SATA
>
>1850 specs.
>------------------
>Processors: 2 @ Xeon @ 3.0GHz/2MB Cache 800MHz FSB
>Memory: 2GB DDR2, 400MHz (4x512) Single ranked DIMMs
>Disks: Ultra 320
>
>The pricing is really close.
>
>Thanks.
>  
>
I have yet to buy a SATA based Dell server where the drives were hotswap 
or even easy to take out.

I have mostly Dell 1850s and 2850s, and all are RAID, they all use the 
amr driver and are hot swap.
I don't recall ever trying the hot swap as I am yet to have a bad drive, 
but I am pretty sure I have tried just pulling out a SCSI drive while 
the machine was running and putting it back in and it was fine.

For the SATA stuff I have bought 750s with SATA RAID 1 and they are 
fully hardware based, I never dealt with any drivers, I have them on 
less important services and also have never had to get a HD replaced, if 
I did the server would have to be shut down.

As for IO performance I have never done any real testing, I have noticed 
that Raid 5 is slower for writes but thats just the standard rule for 
Raid 5.

Mike