Best Storage Setup for HEM + PostgreSQL

[yankees31]

Sorry if I missed another thread about this but I couldn't find one. The performance thread started to delve into it but never really reached a conclusion.

I am getting a new system with two 30GB SSD's and one 500GB WD Caviar Black HDD. What is the best performance setup for these drives? Should I put the SSD's in RAID0?

Thanks,

Yankees31

[Patvs]

SSD in RAID0.
Preferably Windows + SQL database on the SSDs. (it might be a challenge to keeo your database under 45 GB, so purge often and disable logging)
All movies/music/games, etc. on the normal HDD.

Are you getting 2x 30 GB OCZ Vertex?

[yankees31]

That was my plan although I agree that 2x30GB might not be enough and spending an extra few bucks isn't an issue, but I would like to keep it reasonable. Would you have a suggestion for a capacity upgrade?

[Patvs]

Just pick one 80 GB Intel X25-M G2 Postville.
+20 GB bigger
+Faster 4K read/write speeds than 2x 30 GB Vertex in RAID0!
+TRIM enabled since you're NOT using RAID
-Lower sequential write speeds.

[yankees31]

So a couple more questions.

1.) when you say TRIM enabled since your NOT using RAID, does this mean that if I RAID 2 drives that TRIM is rendered useless?

2.) Is it just a coincidence that one intel x25-G2 80gb is faster than 2 OCZ 30gb in RAID0? Or is one larger drive generally faster than 2 smaller drives in RAID0? It was my understanding that RAID0 was much faster.

3.) If I put two x25-G2 80gb in RAID0, would this be faster than one x25-g2 160gb? If so, do I just install postgres and HEM on the RAID or would creating partitions and installing them on separate partitions make the performance better? Excuse my ignorance, not all that familiar with RAID setups.

[Patvs]

-1 TRIM is not supported for RAID.
So there are a lot of horror stories of terrible performance degradation.
Though I've never experienced that. Also OCZ came up with "garbage collecting" which has close to the same effect as TRIM and DOES work in RAID.

-2 The larger SSDs ARE slightly faster than the smaller ones. The 160 GB Intel is faster than the 80 GB. But 2x 80 GB will still be a LOT faster than one 160 GB SSD. And you can't compare the INTEL with OCZ SSDs. OCZ has good sequential and OK 4K speeds. Intel has mediocre sequential write speeds, good sequential read speeds and really good 4K speeds.

The Intel X25-M G2 only beats 2x OCZ Vertex with 4K read/write speeds.
Surprisingly RAID has hardly any effect on the 4K speeds. Even if you put 4x drives in RAID. It only has a big effect on sequential read and write speeds.

-3 So 2x 80 X25-M G2 is faster than 1x 160 GB. The creation of partitions has no effect on speed. But (see 1) you don't have TRIM and NO garbage collecting, so basically if performance degradation takes place you have NO option to restore it to its original state. Therefore, I really like the option of either going with one (80+ GB) Intel, or 2x OCZ (cheap and fast) or 4x OCZ (the fastest, but reaches the bottleneck when NOT using a RAID controller).

[yankees31]

Do I install Holdemmanager itself on the SSD as well? Or just postgres?

[Patvs]

If you're installing Windows on the SSD + the Program Files directory, it makes sense to just install ALL important programs on the SSD: HoldemManager, Microsoft Office, iTunes, etc.