http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com Storage Solutions for Real World IT Professionals Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:20:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Does the number of disks in a RAID-5 array affect the performance of the array? Received a question from a reader wanting to know if the number of Drives in a RAID set affect the performance of the Array. The short answer is yes it most certainly does! Commonly referred to as ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/09/07/raid-stripe-width/ Question to the Storage Advisors, from Dean: What are the practical limitations on the number of disks in a RAID-5 set? I understand that a larger number of disks worsens the probabilities of bad things like a failure or paying the worst possible seek/delay cost in random accesses. ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/07/10/effect-of-drive-count-on-raid-5/ I wanted to let you fine folks know that I’ve recorded a few webinars on many of the topics that I routinely discuss here in this blog. Each one is about 15 minutes long and comes with smorgasbord of tasty slides. The biggest downside is that my delivery ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/07/02/raid-webinars/ Question to the Storage Advisors, from anonymous: Which is better: (a) backup battery for cache as found on OEM RAID controllers or (b) writing cache content to one or more disk drives? Good question. For those not verse in the dark arts of cache write-back strategies, we’re talking about ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/06/28/write-back-cache-battery-vs-disk/ Question to the Storage Advisors, from John: I have several large SCSI arrays ranging in size from 600 GB to almost 2 TB. They add up to about 4.5 TB in total. They are currently seen as separate drives in Windows 2003 server R2. I’d like ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/05/18/combining-multiple-arrays/ Question to the Storage Advisors, from John: The age old question…RAID 5 vs. RAID 0+1 with a twist on spindles. Here’s the deal: Multiple Progress databases. Much more read intensive that write intensive. Which is faster: (2) RAID0 sets of 4 disks that are ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/04/17/yet-another-raid-10-vs-raid-5-question/ Question to the Storage Advisors, from Chris: Need some quick insight if you have a moment. This is for an Oracle db server btw. We’re buying 2 cages that use a PCIe interface and 24 146G 15K drives. We’re going to use RAID 10. Each cage ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/03/21/databases-cages-and-raid-10-oh-my/ Question to the Storage Advisors, from Neal G.: How many disk IOs does it take to write one file? I have a RAID10 array writing a 120KB file. Is this one IO for the entire file, or is it one IO per sector on the disk/write cache (which ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/03/20/fun-with-disk-monitor/ Question to the Storage Advisors, from Darwin: I just wonder, what kind of storage solution that can saturate 10Gb Ethernet backbone. If I assume I have a file server (of course equipped with 10GbE NIC on PCI-E 8x), can an external SAS/SATA-II JBOD box (using 4xwide SAS link) produce ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/03/20/bottlenecks-from-disk-to-backbone/ Question to the Storage Advisors, from Michael K.: I’ve heard great things about SATA based DASD and JBOD devicess. I’ve found tons of information about the data transfer rate, but haven’t been able to find any hard data on how many sustained and bursted IOPS such systems can ... http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/03/20/sata-iops-measurement/