We have a 30 GB database (according to pg_database_size) running nicely on a single Dell PowerEdge 2850 right now. This represents data specific to 1 US state. We are in the process of planning a deployment that will service all 50 US states. If 30 GB is an accurate number per state that means the database size is about to explode to 1.5 TB. About 1 TB of this amount would be OLAP data that is heavy-read but only updated or inserted in batch. It is also largely isolated to a single table partitioned on state. This portion of the data will grow very slowly after the initial loading. The remaining 500 GB has frequent individual writes performed against it. 500 GB is a high estimate and it will probably start out closer to 100 GB and grow steadily up to and past 500 GB. I am trying to figure out an appropriate hardware configuration for such a database. Currently I am considering the following: PowerEdge 1950 paired with a PowerVault MD1000 2 x Quad Core Xeon E5310 16 GB 667MHz RAM (4 x 4GB leaving room to expand if we need to) PERC 5/E Raid Adapter 2 x 146 GB SAS in Raid 1 for OS + logs. A bunch of disks in the MD1000 configured in Raid 10 for Postgres data. The MD1000 holds 15 disks, so 14 disks + a hot spare is the max. With 12 250GB SATA drives to cover the 1.5TB we would be able add another 250GB of usable space for future growth before needing to get a bigger set of disks. 500GB drives would leave alot more room and could allow us to run the MD1000 in split mode and use its remaining disks for other purposes in the mean time. I would greatly appreciate any feedback with respect to drive count vs. drive size and SATA vs. SCSI/SAS. The price difference makes SATA awfully appealing. We plan to involve outside help in getting this database tuned and configured, but want to get some hardware ballparks in order to get quotes and potentially request a trial unit. Any thoughts or recommendations? We are running openSUSE 10.2 with kernel 2.6.18.2-34. Regards, Joe Uhl joeuhl@xxxxxxxxx ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match