Re: 4 x 15Krpm drives or 6 x 10Krpm drives?

Gonzo wrote:

> DELL PE2500 W2000 Server, Oracle 8.17 standard, 10 users, 500 transactions
> per day (Accounting system)
>
> Boot files, O/S, Oracle, Data, Indexes etc all residing on one logical
> volume.
>
> Which is preferabe:
>
> a. 4 x 15Krpm drives: 2 Mirrored Stripe sets of 2 drives each
> b. 6 x 10Krpm drives: 2 Mirrored Stripe sets of 3 drives each
>
> Thanks in advance!

3 sets of RAID 1 "containers" (to use Dellspeak). Its an accounting app, so have everything mirrored. The transaction load you're describing is incredibly small. You won't have anything resembling OFA as far as oracle files segregation, but its likely that you'll have most of your blocks cached in RAM. The PE2500 was specified without thinking about storage throughput.

When you need to have additional I/O, a PowerVault external storage cabinet goes for about $6000 fully loaded with 12 x 18 GB 10Krpm drives. Yum. Then you can start talking about optimal layouts.

Do not, under any circumstances, trust your online redo logs on a write-back cached volume with a Dell RAID controller. Ever. That is the quickest way to be performing recovery short of pulling drives out of a running server. The PERC that shipped with the 2300 series was not very good.

Any why are you putting everything on one logical volume?

NT/W2K page size is 4K. Swap should go on a 4K volume. Most likely your database will have an 8K block size. they should go on 8K volumes. If you are using indexes to drive lookups (nested loops) you'll be far better off with Indexes and Data on separate mount points.

check out Gaja's "Performance Tuning 101" book from Oracle Press.

Paul Received on Wed Feb 27 2002 - 02:02:01 CST