Suggestions, single 15K, RAID or other?

[budec]

I run a game server (NWN) with a few other people and we're wondering what the best disk setup would be for this. The main goal here would be performance.

The data we are working with looks like this:

Total Size: 3,273,386,562 bytes (3.2 gigs)
Directories: 12929
Files: 91242
Average number of files per directory: 7.057
Average Size of file: 50-250KBs a peice

So basically a bunch of directories with about 7 files in each of them. It's is very HEAVY on the random access. The ratio of read/writes is about 1/3... meaning we'll write a file out 3 times for everytime we read it (just the way the game works). The server runs Linux.

What would be the best way to work with this to get good I/O performance? We're going to put it on it's own disk and have another disk for the OS/server process so that should help some.

The primary goal is performance, with reilablity second and amount of space at a distance thrid (it's only 3.2 gigs, so even a 20 gig disk would be more then enough).

What I was thinking is just throwing a 15K cheetah in there. I thought about Raid level 0, but thinking that since there is so much random access that it won't help much (plus I heard that perfomance for Raid 0 is more hype then fact).

Any ideas? Single 15K SCSI?

 

[unhappy_mage]

if you can afford 4gb of ram, that's the way to go. then put in a cheap ide disk and use linux's tmpfs to use ram for your filesystem; cp it all over at boot. This will probly be a bit more than a controller and a disk, but it'll wipe the floor with SCSI.

The real problem with this is expandability. If you need a game thats 5gb, you're SOL. It will be fine++ for this, though. DDR is getting cheap.

edit: nwn has a linux client, right?

 

[Synful Serenity]

That's a great idea...but if you can still afford anything else after that, I'd still go for the 15K if reliability is 2nd. Hell, I think I'ma go get 15k!

 

[zandor]

Raid-0 could easily degrade your performance with those file sizes. You could possibly pick up a little benefit from it if you could do something really twisted, like setting your stripe size and cluster size to 256KB. Of course, then you'll need at least 22GB or so for all of those files due to massive space wasting.
Otherwise you'll just end up losing performance since your server will be waiting for both drives to seek when doing a lot of IO operations, since the filesystem probably isn't smart enough to avoid spanning files across more than one stripe.
So skip the Raid and just get a 15k.
I just got a couple 36GB refurb 15k.3s from www.unityelectronics.com for $90 each. Of course, one of them died after a week so I'd give the drive a month or two of burn-in before trusting it. My experience with refurbs has been that if they last a while they're usually good to go, but you do get a lot more short-lived drives that fail within a few weeks. Of course, at $90 a pop they're cheap enough to run a Raid-1, which will cost you very little speed.