On 2008-11-05 08:13, Christian Schröder wrote: > If I have 5 disks available, how should I use them to get best > performance without the risk of severe data loss? What percentage of your usage are writes? What do you need the most: high throughput or minimal latency? > How important is data integrity for the WAL? If the WAL > disk fails, can this corrupt my data? Or would I just lose the data > after the last checkpoint? It is important. With corrupted WAL IMHO your database will not get up. > Or maybe I should use 2 disks as RAID1 for the database, 2 disks as > RAID1 for the WAL and the remaining disk for the tempspace? I'd go for 3 disks as RAID1 for database, OS and tempspace, 2 disks as RAID1 for WAL. The reasoning is that on a dedicated server OS will rarely write or read. A commit will only sync WAL, and checkpoints can be smoothed so they will not cripple reads. Reads by separate clients will not wait for each other, as they can use 3 disks concurrently, so read latency will be very good. If you do not have a disk controller with battery backed cache remember to disable hardware write cache on all disks ("hdparm -W 0 /dev/sd[a,b,c,d]" for ATA on Linux). And use smartd for periodic checking health of drives (for example in /etc/smartd.conf for ATA on Linux): /dev/sda -H -C -U -l selftest -m root -s (S/../.././01|L/../../7/03) /dev/sdb -H -C -U -l selftest -m root -s (S/../.././01|L/../../7/03) /dev/sdc -H -C -U -l selftest -m root -s (S/../.././01|L/../../7/03) /dev/sdd -H -C -U -l selftest -m root -s (S/../.././01|L/../../7/03) Regards Tometzky -- ...although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were... Winnie the Pooh -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general