Re: Database storage

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 8:43 AM, John R Pierce<pierce(at)hogranch(dot)com> wrote:
> nabble(dot)30(dot)miller_2555(at)spamgourmet(dot)com wrote:
>>
>> The database server is a quad core machine, so it sounds as though
>> software RAID should work fine for the present setup. However, it
>> sounds as though I should put some money into a hardware RAID
>> controller if the database becomes more active. I had assumed RAID-5
>> would be fine, but please let me know if there is another RAID level
>> more appropriate for this implementation. Thanks for the valuable
>> insight!
>>
>
> raid-5 performs very poorly on random small block writes, which is hte
> majority of what databases do.   raid10 is the preferred raid for databases.
>
>
>
> btw: re earlier discussion of raid controllers vs software... I'm surprised
> nooone mentioned that a 'real' raid controller with battery backed writeback
> cache can hugely speed up committed 8kbyte block random writes, which are
> quite often the big bottleneck in a transactional database.

Given that the OP's usage pattern was bulk imports and reporting
queries it didn't seem very important.