On Thu, 22 Nov 2012, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:
Mine is six years old now (two Xeon 5140 CPUs at 2.33 ghz, 4GB RAM) and still more than adequate. The boot time is undoubtedly helped by the SAS drives. If I were buying a new machine, though, I'd consider an SSD. Incidentally, I bought it used, at a very large discount and the SAS disks were a surprise.
If you aren't using systemd then I doubt that SAS disks gain you anything. The advantage of SAS is command queuing and that's not much of an advantage if you have mostly a single process accessing the disk. It's only when systemd launches lots of daemons at the same time that command queuing can give an advantage. Also if you were to compare 6yo SAS disks with modern SATA disks at the same rotational speed then I expect that SATA would win. More data per track means fewer and shorter seeks. Also Intel SSD costs about $1 per gig. It's really not expensive nowadays, and Intel is probably the most expensive SSD. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/