3 ms·

No RAID, and I am guessing, no ECC RAM.

ericd 17y ago
True on both counts, though they offer RAID for a fee (40-100/mo for controller, then drives). Instead I'm planning on going SSD for 60/mo more + aggressive backups (bad idea?) I'm planning on using this for things where performance matters a lot more than 100% data integrity.
- lsc 17y ago
  SSD is not raid. get a second drive; you should be able to setup software raid without their help, and for a mirror, there shouldn't be much performance difference between software and hardware raid. ECC ram is a larger problem, at least in my mind. having wrong data without knowing it is about the worst thing possible. ECC at least has the courtesy to crash my box when it gets an error it can't correct.
  - ericd 17y ago
    My rationale is that random small block read/write perf of a single SSD is greater than that of RAID 0 of traditional disks, so I was going to go that route. If I notice that there's still an IO bottleneck, I'll consider adding another.
    - lsc 17y ago
      Oh, if performance is the problem, sure, a SSD is great. I was thinking of the redundant part of RAID.
  - ericd 17y ago
    Oops I seem to have misread this comment... you did say "mirror". As for ECC, how often does corruption occur? 100% Data integrity is not hugely important for the main app that will be sitting on this box, so a cosmic ray here or there isn't a big deal, but persistent unknown errors would be a problem.
    - lsc 17y ago
      if the ram is good ahead of time, bit flips are pretty rare. I mean, not unheard of, but if you are storing a bunch of mpegs, or tweets or what have you, it doesn't matter that much. when your ram goes bad, you will have lots of random crashes (and at that point, boy howdy, any data that was written gets screwed royally. You are really best off loading from backup at that point, on a new box.) That is the other problem; because it's not 100% clear it's the ram (without ecc) it's easy for the service provider to push around 'half bad' modules without really fixing them. I know at all the big places I've worked, it was an incredible pain to get people to take a hardware problem seriously enough to get them to let me fix it, rather than just re-imaging the box and putting it back on the 'available box' queue.
      - ericd 17y ago
        Hm yeah, promo prices on these makes me think they might have had a large "available queue" of these things... I'll kick the tires before I switch everything over. Know of any good memory tests? :-)
        lsc 17y ago
        there is no substitute for memtest86. but without a KVM over IP (or flipping a bit in memtest86 and a serial console) that's pretty useless to you. At one point I had a set of patches to memtest86 that made screen scraping the pass/fail off a serial console much easier for one of the larger companies I worked for. But it'd be serverbeach that would need to implement that, and very few dedicated server providers give you serial consoles. I did at one point, but it doesn't look like it makes sense for me to host dedicated servers for less than super premium prices, and frankly, I don't feel like providing the level of support that would be expected with such pricing.

ericd 17y ago

True on both counts, though they offer RAID for a fee (40-100/mo for controller, then drives). Instead I'm planning on going SSD for 60/mo more + aggressive backups (bad idea?) I'm planning on using this for things where performance matters a lot more than 100% data integrity.

lsc 17y ago
SSD is not raid. get a second drive; you should be able to setup software raid without their help, and for a mirror, there shouldn't be much performance difference between software and hardware raid. ECC ram is a larger problem, at least in my mind. having wrong data without knowing it is about the worst thing possible. ECC at least has the courtesy to crash my box when it gets an error it can't correct.
- ericd 17y ago
  My rationale is that random small block read/write perf of a single SSD is greater than that of RAID 0 of traditional disks, so I was going to go that route. If I notice that there's still an IO bottleneck, I'll consider adding another.
  - lsc 17y ago
    Oh, if performance is the problem, sure, a SSD is great. I was thinking of the redundant part of RAID.
- ericd 17y ago
  Oops I seem to have misread this comment... you did say "mirror". As for ECC, how often does corruption occur? 100% Data integrity is not hugely important for the main app that will be sitting on this box, so a cosmic ray here or there isn't a big deal, but persistent unknown errors would be a problem.
  - lsc 17y ago
    if the ram is good ahead of time, bit flips are pretty rare. I mean, not unheard of, but if you are storing a bunch of mpegs, or tweets or what have you, it doesn't matter that much. when your ram goes bad, you will have lots of random crashes (and at that point, boy howdy, any data that was written gets screwed royally. You are really best off loading from backup at that point, on a new box.) That is the other problem; because it's not 100% clear it's the ram (without ecc) it's easy for the service provider to push around 'half bad' modules without really fixing them. I know at all the big places I've worked, it was an incredible pain to get people to take a hardware problem seriously enough to get them to let me fix it, rather than just re-imaging the box and putting it back on the 'available box' queue.
    - ericd 17y ago
      Hm yeah, promo prices on these makes me think they might have had a large "available queue" of these things... I'll kick the tires before I switch everything over. Know of any good memory tests? :-)
      - lsc 17y ago
        there is no substitute for memtest86. but without a KVM over IP (or flipping a bit in memtest86 and a serial console) that's pretty useless to you. At one point I had a set of patches to memtest86 that made screen scraping the pass/fail off a serial console much easier for one of the larger companies I worked for. But it'd be serverbeach that would need to implement that, and very few dedicated server providers give you serial consoles. I did at one point, but it doesn't look like it makes sense for me to host dedicated servers for less than super premium prices, and frankly, I don't feel like providing the level of support that would be expected with such pricing.