On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 6:47 PM, Rory Campbell-Lange <rory@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'd be grateful for comments on whether to go with a server with the A > or B spec. Both servers have the following in common: > > E5620 Quad-Core / 4x 2.40GHz > LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i with BBU (6Gbps) > 48 GB PC3-10600 DDR3 / 1333MHz / registered ECC RAM > > Server A: > > 4 * 300GB 10K WD raptors in a RAID10 configuration > > Server B: > > 2 * 500GB 7.2K SATA disks in RAID 1 > 2 * 100GB Intel 710 Solid State SATA 270MBs read, 170MBs write > in RAID 1 ** I just purchased up a big DB server... I went with the Intel 320 SSDs because they were cheaper, and I needed 8 of them. I also splurged for the 9265 LSI card, and added the FastPath option for speeding up the SSDs. This will probably add a bit over $150 to your SSD server. I have some servers now using 320s as boot drives, and they are *wicked* fast. All that aside, if your DB is 40GB now, it doesn't matter so much what your disks are since you're going to end up running primarily out of server disk cache. Is your workload heavily read or heavily write? If you are not writing so much, then your RAM is going to make the difference in these drives pretty insignificant. And personally, I avoid WD drives like the plague. Nothing but bad experience in my large disk arrays. I prefer Hitachi or Seagate. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general