If I add a secondary hard drive to my dedicated server, will it increase performance

[szvwxcszxc]

This is for a dedicated web server.

So I added a second hard drive to my cpanel/whm setup. One of my accounts uses the bulk of my space and probably a large amount of read/write speed - it is constantly reading and writing files.

So I moved this account, 500gb account, to a second hard drive. Primarily actually because I needed more space.

But I was wondering if now that it is on a separate hard drive, do you think that read/write performance for other sites on the first hard drive will improve?

None were really slow, I have a fast processor (2 quad core processors), and tons of ram. And unlimited bandwidth with 100mbps uplink.

I was just curious if adding the new hard drive, could, theoretically, improve read/write performance on the first drive now that that read/write load as far as the hard drive is concerned is now on a separate drive.

 

[frowertr]

Sure. If you moved that content to dedicated drive(s) that serve nothing else, performance will be better on the original drive that had other resources on it. Will it be noticeable? Depends on how loaded the system is/was to begin with.

If I may ask, no RAID for a dedicated server??

 

[Red Squirrel]

Guessing this is a leased server, they usually charge like $40+ per month extra just for raid. I think that's stupid, raid should be standard... but the industry tends to like wanting to price gauge everyone.

I tend to shop around for deals though when it comes to dedicated servers as it's incredible the pricing discrepancies between different places. OVH actually does software raid for the OS drive, no idea how that even works considering you need the OS and the raid system to be active to even initialize the raid, and if the OS is *ON* the raid.... but somehow, it works.

As far as performance, naturally there will be a bit more performance on one drive if IO heavy stuff is moved away from it. In a web server situation though you probably won't notice much of a difference.

I would keep checking OVH though, they sometimes have good deals for raided servers. Much better than going with no raid.