On 10 December 2014 at 17:33, James Harper <james@ejbdigital.com.au> wrote:
On 9 December 2014 at 20:22, Tim Hamilton <hamilton.tim@gmail.com> wrote:
If any of you had my hardware, how would you construct your storage layout?
The more disks you have, the higher the chance of having a disk failure. The older the disks you have, the higher the chance of having a disk failure. I like low-maintenance, high-reliability solutions where they fit well, so I would aim for a system that uses a few, large, disks, and plan to replace them in 2-3 years.
Your 7200RPM disk gets very likely gets under 100IOPS. More like 75. If you are aiming for capacity with no regard for performance then fewer, larger disks is likely a good solution, but if you have any performance requirements at all then a greater number of smaller disks is a better option. Performance should scale pretty much linearly with an increasing number of disks for RAID10.
Failing that, get a couple of small SSD's in a RAID1 configuration and run bcache in front of your rotating disks. The performance difference is amazing.
I suspect the OP (and most home users) are thinking more of large-file (probably AV media) archives, and for larger files, spinning disks provide adequate performance. I agree, for real performance, SSDs are the way to go. Half-terabyte SSDs are affordable and have been for a while, so I don't bother with bcache or similar; I just go direct to SSD if performance matters.