BUH Blog

Wow - even RAID 1 rocks!

February 14, 2006 on 4:19 pm | In Computer Hardware |

One of my other sites - DeepMarket - is data intensive, as it deals with stock market data. But it was running pretty well and I had not been too concerned about performance. Actually, I was more concerned about reliability, so I purchased a STARDOM-2600 from Carday Supply. The SR2600 is a two disk RAID device (both ATA and SATA) with either RAID 0 or RAID 1. The drives are hot-swappable in case of a drive failure in the RAID 1 configuration.

This was my first RAID experience, but not overly excited because the reason I picked up this solution was for the RAID 1 mirroring. I popped my web server drive (a chunky 300 GB SATA) in the top bay of the SR2600, connected it via SATA cable to the web server and booted the machine. No problems. I added a brand new version of the same 300 GB drive into the second bay and immediately the SR2600 started duplicating the first drive to create a mirror. Three hours later I had a RAID 1 setup.

My aim had been stability, mirroring, backup and all that nice stuff - not the fun stuff - performance tuning. But, I was wondering what performance “penalty” I may be paying for a RAID 1 configuration. I pulled the second drive out out (remember - hot swap) while the web server was handling a little traffic. No problem - so we can see the mirror aspect is working nicely. I used Xenu’s Link Sleuth to crawl my site completely and time how long that took with a single drive.

One drive and about 10,000 pages took about 17 minutes to be crawled by Xenu. Interesting. Okay, so I plugged the second drive back in. Oooops! SR2600 rebuilds the second drive from scratch! Okay - good to know and I guess I should have figured that. Why do I have 300 GB drives again?

Three hours later we are back in RAID 1 mirrored configuration again. I run Xenu again. Two drives running at RAID 1 only takes 9 minutes! Coool. I mean, duh. I should have figured that RAID 1 would take advange of the fact that it can read from two independent drives - that the writing process is the one that (might?) suffer a performance hit.

Just to be certain, I re-booted the server to flush any and all caching that MySQL may have done. I re-ran Xenu. This time is was 9 minutes and 15 seconds. Not bad.

Not only do I have have the safety of a RAID 1 drive setup, but I got a nice boost in performance. I recommend the SR2600 for those who feel they need it. It runs between $250 and $300 (no drives).