Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
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.
Uh, wtf? systemd doesn't have a monopoly on starting services in parallel. e.g. startpar is enabled by default in Debian 6. http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=startpar http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=insserv $ ls /etc/rc2.d README S02cron S03busybox-klogd S01lxc S02motd S04bootlogs S02acpid S02rsync S05rc.local S02atd S02ssh S05rmnologin S02binfmt-support S02sudo S05stop-bootlogd S02busybox-syslogd S02webfs All those S02s start in parallel. Having said that, boot speed is a bloody silly reason to pick SAS vs. SATA.