Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Was discussion storage speeds with some friends over lunch....so I wondered if I could get some data comparing the performance.

vg0 is are two internal SATA drives, each on their own SATA channel, being mirrored. vg1 is the SANS Digital pair of drives, sharing a SATA channel via Port Multiplication, being mirrored.

Guess the graphs show that the internal drives are faster for small files....though for larger the difference goes away, so that things are comparable.

As it is....vg1 is mainly my MMCVideo filesystem - MMC (Momitsu Media Center). So, the files tend to be large and sequentially read/written.

Meanwhile, I've already removed the old MMCVideo logical volume from vg0 and doubled the size of /home. Even though now that I think of it, there's stuff under /home that might better go in its own logical volume(s)....now that I have room to create them.

Or later go on that HP MediaSmart Server that I've been dreaming of adding to my network....

I've been wanting to try a Port Multiplier eSATA enclosure on my Ubuntu 8.04LTS Server, known as 'orac', for sometime. But, keep getting sidelined by how much it would cost to get a 5-bay enclosure and 5 drives... it would only be a matter of time that the price of drives would come down.

But, storage has been tight on my file server and it has been causing issues, and I know I'm going to have tons more stuff to add to it. The server current is just a pair of 500GB internal drives mirrored in RAID1. So, I started looking at options to add 1TB of RAID1 storage. I considered buying two discrete external 1TB drives....or buying an external enclosure that does RAID1. When I came across the SANS Digital TowerRAID TR2UT enclosure, and a few other like it....I narrowed on this one because it was under $100 and available under Amazon Prime. But, this enclosure sat in my cart 'saved for later'.

The reason I considered the enclosure was that it purports to do various RAID configurations on its own, additional it can be just JBOD and connect to a Port Multiplier port on 'orac'. If the drive didn't work on Port Multiplier, I could resort to the other options....additionally, it does USB...so if it just doesn't work on eSATA I could use it that way. Especially, should I later get 5 bay PM eSata boxes and displace this one. And, there's that thought that I might get an Airport Extreme and do TimeMachine backups to a USB attached storage....

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