Rick Gigger wrote:
I figure this would be a good place to ask. I want to build / buy a new linux postgres box. I was wondering if anyone on this list had some experience with this they'd like to share. I'm thinking somewhere in the $7k - 15k range. The post important things are write speed to the disk and good linux driver support for the raid card. Can anyone recommend a specific raid card / server vendor?
Instead of (or in addition to) RAID configurations, you may want to consider using multiple disks, connected to independent channels (not a problem if you're talking SATA), such that PG can perform simultaneous access to the various filesystems. I'm not sure which parts are critical, or how many different partitions you would need for optimal performance, but the "PG Performance" mailing list archives should prove useful to find out about this. Maybe you could use SATA Raptor drives -- the 10k RPM, which I believe has a sustained transfer rate in the order of 80 or 90 MB/sec. Do make sure that you get a MB with fast internal bus (533 or 800 MB/sec at least), so that you don't waste your money on multiple independently-connected hard drives that hit a bottleneck when the data reaches the motherboard. And don't even bother to show up again if you were planning to put less than 4GB of memory!! :-) HTH, Carlos --
