your advice on vinum, RAIDs

[fluffles.net]

Jim Pazarena wrote:
> Could someone please advise my best course of action for RAID?

If you're building a database server, you dont need MB/s but IOps. Have
you considered an SSD for this cause? The Intel SSD that arrives in Q4
2008 is said to do about 4.000 random write IOps, much more than the
100-200 a HDD will do. If you put two 256GB SSDs in RAID0 (geom_stripe)
you have a 500GB volume with capable of lots of IOps. Just make sure
there is no stripe misalignment, so pick stripesize 64KiB and label
directly on the RAID device. Thus no partitions on the RAID device; this
is the simplest to avoid a misalignment.

You can put the SATA disks straight on the motherboard so you don't need
a hardware controller. This saves cost and compensates for the high cost
of SSD disks. But you don't need many! And unlike HDDs, an SSD would be
quite safe to use in RAID0 mode. You should always have backups,
ofcourse. RAID can never replace those.

- Veronica