The FreeBSD Diary

I am in the process of building up a 2U server. Its primary purpose will be to run my websites, which includes the one you are reading now (The FreeBSD Diary), FreshPorts, FreshSource, and BSDCan.

The server in question is pretty awesome. I have iXsystems to thank for that. The 9550SX-8LP RAID controller donated by 3Ware arrived late last month. The server is configured to use SATA and contains eight hot-swappable drive bays. The plan is to stock it with eight SATA II drives and use the 3Ware RAID card in a RAID-1+0 configuration, with a few hot spares. This will provide plenty of disk space, combined with redundancy and speed.

The server will primarily be a web server and a database server. The database server exists to feed the web server, and most of the disk I/O will be reads.

A very good question. At present, this server is sitting at home and I'm running benchmarks on it. It pumps out a bit of heat, so when not in use, it is powered off. Right now, the major thing that's missing is SATA drives. This is where you come in. I'm hoping that Hitachi, Seagate, or Western Digital will hop on board and become a sponsor by donating eight high end SATA II drives. I'm looking for SATA II drives that are robust, reliable, and fast. I've been looking at drives, and these ones seem to fit the bill:

• Caviar SE16 by Western Digital
• ST3250624NS by Seagate
• Deskstar T7K250 by Hitachi

Only the Hitachi has NCQ (Native Command Queuing). It also has a 8MB buffer, versus the 16MB buffers on the Seagate and the WD. The above list was compiled after a brief search.

Many people have suggested the Raptor... That would be an interesting benchmark.

We are looking for a sponsor (or sponsors) who would like to supply the hard drives and/or CPUs. If you are interested, please contact dan at langille.org.