Re: Hardware advice for scalable warehouse db

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 11:49 AM, chris r. <chricki(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> Thanks a lot for your very helpful feedback!
>
>> I've tested MD1000, MD1200, and MD1220 arrays before, and always gotten
>> seriously good performance relative to the dollars spent
> Great hint, but I'm afraid that's too expensive for us. But it's a great
> way to scale over the years, I'll keep that in mind.
>
> I had a look at other server vendors who offer 4U servers with slots for
> 16 disks for 4k in total (w/o disks), maybe that's an even
> cheaper/better solution for us. If you had the choice between 16 x 2TB
> SATA vs. a server with some SSDs for WAL/indexes and a SAN (with SATA
> disk) for data, what would you choose performance-wise?
>
> Again, thanks so much for your help.
>
> Best,
> Chris

SATA drives can easily flip bits and postgres does not checksum data,
so it will not automatically detect corruption for you. I would steer
well clear of SATA unless you are going to be using a fs like ZFS
which checksums data. I would hope that a SAN would detect this for
you, but I have no idea.

--
Rob Wultsch
wultsch(at)gmail(dot)com