Performance of single server with 5TB disk space (5 disks): how bad will it be?
 

Hi,

I would like to build a web server which can serve photos stored on disk. Typical size of a file is 1-3MB. In order to minimize costs I was planning on buying a dual quad-core box with 12GB RAM (i will need some caching for java app) and five 1TB disks (would you recommend SAS or SASA for box like PowerEdge 2900 III). The concern I have is what would be the bottleneck if the volume on the site increases? How well will OS scale the IO operations among the disks? Will LVM be ok? What other hardware options would you recomment to keep the budget within 10k if my plan is no good?

Thank you.
R.

So you are going to do RAID 0? The performance shouldn't be a problem, but I couldn't recommend running a server of that size without redundancy of some form.

Yes, I will need RAID 0, at least for the volume storing non-essential server data (i.e. uploaded pictures).

Given you are primarily storing and serving files, you will most likely find the bottleneck is with the network connection before you end up with disk i/o issues. If you are doing some image resizing and manipulation on the uploaded images, then cpu and memory loading may be an issue but it does not sound like you are doing that.

J