Database computer drive upgrade (RAID5/1 to RAID 10 with new drives)

So initial facts:

Cannot upgrade:
Computer with 8 3.5" hard drive slots, Intel SAS backplane and RAID controller
Older Quad core system running Windows 2k Server

Can upgrade:
running 6 SAS 15k hard drives. 76Gb
2 drives in RAID 1 (OS and Programs), 4 drives in RAID 5 (SQL database and data archive)

What I want:
Move to either a 4 or 6 drive system for $1k in drives
Change RAID 1 and 5 to just a RAID 10 or still keep the RAID 1 and change the 5 to RAID 10
Quicker performance of the database
Larger storage of the data archive
Bonus: Would love a system that I don't have to defrag every 3 months

What I need:
System uptime
resistance to drive failures
quick rebuilds

I know this is vague, but I think I can do this on this budget. Getting $1k for this is in my range. Would love to just run SATA SSDs in place of the SAS 15k drives and still get the performance needed to get this going faster without having to do much drive maintenance. For each 100Gb of archive space I get above the current 150Gb of space I currently have, I get 2 months of data archive. I would love to just purge the archive every year to a backup and start up keep a rolling year of data.

Thoughts? Questions?

Raid 10 will satisfy your needs, but capacity will be an issue. However.. Whats the work load on DB? OLTP or DWH? if the DB is OLTP, switch to Raid10, as you'll get a huge performance bump. If DB is doing batch/dwh stuff, raid5 will get you the most bang for your buck.

Defrag "shouldn't" be a thing with Raid arrays.. There is no inner and outer platter in a raid array as the should be evenly distributed across all the disks. The host OS doesn't know a volume presented to it is a raided volume, and has no concept of inner and outer platter.

If defrag actually does help, you've got a pretty chumpy raid card. To make the issue go away, switch to SSDs. No more defrag with SSDs because there is no longer the concept of the inner and outer platter anymore. Hope that helps, best of luck.

Win2K server .. not going to be too pleasant for SSDs.

As always with databases, more memory helps. If this is older (DDR3), gobs of memory is not that expensive.

How old are the drives now? I'd imagine 72GB SAS drives are freekin ancient.

Some drives have been in service since about 2010 I believe. We are replacing them with 400Gb 15k SAS drives as the older ones fail. Mixing sizes is not recommended, however getting 73Gb ones are hard to come by. The system records about 20k parameters every second. Some parameters update sooner than every second but the data is only written in every second increments, it just polls the extra data until that second is up.

What is the best way to tell what the database is? I don't know much on databases other than how to move them and shrink them. I can fumble through SQL server and get the parameters if I know where to look.

System has 4Gb of RAM in it. I do have to reboot it about every 3-5 months as the SQL server has eaten all the memory and slows the system down. A reboot only costs me about 10 minutes if I do it, about 20 if someone has to follow the procedure and never has done it before to get it going again.

I do the defrag mainly because I feel it helps but usually just a scandisk fixes any issues I have with errors or drive space reporting errors. I hate seeing the archive drive be entirely full and entirely red. Maybe that is just a me thing.

I think consumer SATA SSD will give me the best options personally, but want to go into this with as much background data as possible before the purchase. I may only get one shot at it. Spinning rust seems less appealing to me for longevity but I have no reason to not say put two large HDD in the last two slots and use them as the backup to the archive for really long term storage. SAS SSD seem way expensive to what I want, but I feel they would last the longest.

Four of those Micron 1100 2TB SSDs at 250 each will be right there in budget and in RAID-10 will cure all IO ails with 4TB of scrumptious storage

PliotronX said:

Four of those Micron 1100 2TB SSDs at 250 each will be right there in budget and in RAID-10 will cure all IO ails with 4TB of scrumptious storage

Click to expand...

Is there a comparable Intel drive as well that works like this one? I have a deal where I can get them pretty cheap. 4 is nice, would love to keep it to 6 and get 6TB of RAID-10 goodness for all drives (OS, Programs, Archive, DB). I will have to give options though. 6TB give like 5 years of active data. Cheap out to say keep the RAID 1 on spinning iron and do the RAID 10 for DB and archive and 4 TB would give 3 years and that is way past the 2 months we have now.

Also, if I did have to only get 4 SATA drives, what effect would it have on the SAS RAID 1? I understand that I shouldn't mix the drives and be either all SAS or all SATA. Is this right?