Graphs! I come bearing graphs!

H

hokatichenci

Gawd
Joined
Oct 28, 2004
Messages
722
Alright, in my effort to do some heavy duty analysis on building cheap storage pools, I wanted to get some real cost analysis on all my different options. The first phase of this was to get some pretty pictures of different raid levels combined with different drives and being able to see exactly how much I can spent and how efficient it will be. Due to the suckiness of gnuplot, I had to separate these two graphs. Anyways, I wrote a set of scripts that'll handle pretty much everything, all I have to do is list how many disks I want to scale to, the prices of whatever size hard drive (its not hard coded), and what raid levels are involved (currently programmed are 0/5/6/10).

The prices I assumed for the graphs:
250GB = $75
320GB = $95
400GB = $140
500GB = $180
750GB = $380

These seemed to be roughly the going prices of Seagate drives, sure you can get cheaper but this was really just a learning run for me to figure out how I can do the more complicated graphs to come.

Warning - graphs are pretty large scalewise, but about 40kb in total.

4 disks, raid 0/5/10 included:
Per GB Cost Efficiency
Usable Disk Space vs. Cost

8 disks, all raid levels included:
Per GB Cost Efficiency
Usable Disk Space vs. Cost
 
I appreciate your effort, but I have the hardest time trying to interpret those graphs.
 
drizzt81 said:
I appreciate your effort, but I have the hardest time trying to interpret those graphs.
Click to expand...

QFT. My head hurts

I didn't see a graph for Matrix Raid :)
 
Use solid bars. You have only discrete values.

Ow.

Nice work on gathering the data, now format it well :)
 
So, let me get this straight... you're showing that the drive with the cheapest cost per GB builds the cheapest storage arrays of a given size? And that more drives in a RAID 5 gives less wasted space, and therefore a better bang for the buck?

Not flaming you, but that is obvious.
 
Bones said:
So, let me get this straight... you're showing that the drive with the cheapest cost per GB builds the cheapest storage arrays of a given size? And that more drives in a RAID 5 gives less wasted space, and therefore a better bang for the buck?

Not flaming you, but that is obvious.
Click to expand...

Yeah I know it's obvious, but its nice to sort of get a feel for the real cost of a larger raid system. For me at least, I just wanted a quick and dirty way of analyzing actual efficiency of this project, since its all about scalability and fault tolerance. The more useful of the groups imo is the size per $. It shows off a bit more of how far every time of array will scale, and how much it'll cost to get there. I thought it would just be sort of an interesting exercise. Where I think this would be really shine is if I turned it into a webscript with something to automatically/daily grab the prices and plot everything out as per requests (ie you could configure only certain disks or whatever). Maybe theres something like that out there already but it'd be neat.
 
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