On 8/9/07, Arjen van der Meijden <acmmailing@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 9-8-2007 23:50 Merlin Moncure wrote: > > Where the extra controller especially pays off is if you have to > > expand to a second tray. It's easy to add trays but installing > > controllers on a production server is scary. > > For connectivity-sake that's not a necessity. You can either connect > (two?) extra MD1000's to your first MD1000 or you can use the second > external SAS-port on your controller. Obviously it depends on the > controller whether its good enough to just add the disks to it, rather > than adding another controller for the second tray. Whether the perc5/e > is good enough for that, I don't know, we've only equipped ours with a > single MD1000 holding 15x 15k rpm drives, but in our benchmarks it > scaled pretty well going from a few to all 14 disks (+1 hotspare). As it happens I will have an opportunity to test the dual controller theory. In about a week we are picking up another md1000 and will attach it in an active/active configuration with various hardware/software RAID configurations, and run a battery of database centric tests. Results will follow. By the way, the recent dell severs I have seen are well built in my opinion...better and cheaper than comparable IBM servers. I've also tested the IBM exp3000, and the MD1000 is cheaper and comes standard with a second ESM. In my opinion, the Dell 1U 1950 is extremely well organized in terms of layout and cooling...dual power supplies, dual PCI-E (one low profile), plus a third custom slot for the optional perc 5/i which drives the backplane. merlin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org