Re: software or hardware RAID? - Mailing list pgsql-general
From | Andy Colson |
---|---|
Subject | Re: software or hardware RAID? |
Date | |
Msg-id | 6f3482a8-160c-748c-32ad-4fff7671e8a8@squeakycode.net Whole thread Raw |
In response to | Re: software or hardware RAID? (Rory Campbell-Lange <rory@campbell-lange.net>) |
List | pgsql-general |
On 3/23/19 11:51 AM, Rory Campbell-Lange wrote: > On 23/03/19, Andy Colson (andy@squeakycode.net) wrote: >> On 3/23/19 7:09 AM, Rory Campbell-Lange wrote: >>> On 17/03/19, Rory Campbell-Lange (rory@campbell-lange.net) wrote: > ... >>>> We're buying some new Postgres servers with >>>> >>>> 2 x 240GB Intel SSD S4610 (RAID1 : system) >>>> 4 x 960GB Intel SSD S4610 (RAID10 : db) >>>> >>>> We'll be using Postgres 11 on Debian. >>>> >>>> The MegaRAID 9271-8i with flash cache protection is available from our >>>> provider. I think they may also have the 9361-8i which is 12Gb/s. >>>> >>>> Our current servers which use the LSI 9261 with SSDs and we don't see >>>> any IO significant load as we are in RAM most of the time and the RAID >>>> card seems to flatten out any IO spikes. >>>> >>>> We use MDRaid elsewhere but we've never used it for our databases >>>> before. > >>> Has anyone got any general comments on whether software RAID or an LSI card >>> is preferable? >>> >>> We will be replicating load on an existing server, which has an LSI 9261 card. >>> Below is some stats from sar showing a "heavy" period of load on vdisk sda >>> >>> 00:00:01 DEV tps rd_sec/s wr_sec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util >>> 14:15:01 sda 112.82 643.09 14986.24 138.53 2.09 18.50 0.25 2.86 >>> 14:25:01 sda 108.52 270.17 15682.94 147.01 1.87 17.22 0.25 2.73 >>> 14:35:01 sda 107.96 178.25 14868.52 139.37 1.70 15.73 0.23 2.53 >>> 14:45:01 sda 150.97 748.94 16919.69 117.03 1.83 12.11 0.22 3.28 > >> I have run both software and hardware (though different than the card you listed), and had good success with both. Incases where I had little money, just drop 6 drives into a md raid 10, and run happy for years and years. I run productionPG 11 on software raid 10 as we speek. >> >> I personally prefer software raid, for a few reasons: >> 1) you'll probably be running on a batter backup anyway, so missing raid card battery isn't that much >> 2) 100% compatible with any other hardware you wanna run. Sucky thing about hardware card is your on that one forever. >> 3) tooling is much better and simpler. I really hate the crappy bios raid screen. I never know if adding an HD to anexiting raid will wipe it or maintain it. >> 4) I setup smartctl to watch and report on drives. Even a 50% chance it detects before failure is a net benefit. Youcant always to that through hardware raid >> >> You can always start with software raid, see how it runs for a while, then buy hardware raid if its not working out. > > Thanks very much for the comments, Andy. > > If money was no object, would you choose a fancy hardware RAID card? > > You are right that the SSDs we are purchasing have enough cache + power to not need a BBU, and I agree that the managementtools for software raid are much more convenient. > > Rory > That's a tough question. I don't even have SSD's yet. I can't say what performance is like on HW Raid SSD vs SW Raid SSD. If money where no object, and I wanted performance over all else, I'd benchmark both. If usability were >= performance, I'd go with extra ram, and SW Raid SSD. And a BMW. :-) -Andy
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