Running a Linux web server off one Raid 1 array

[HeroOfPellinor]

I'm just wondering to what degree I can increase performance through faster hard drives and partitioning when I'll be running CentOS, MySQL, ColdFusion and a couple game servers. Would hard drive speed even make a difference, first of all. Or, second, with all those things on one Raid 1 array, am I going to be bogged down regardless and might as well save the money and get more capacity?

 

[Blain]

* Are you asking about a striped RAID array using four HDs or some kind of striped/mirrored array using four HDs?
* You're asking about HD rpm speed vs performance also?
* RAID 1 is for redundancy not capacity or performance.

 

[jtrnix]

Honestly, running game servers and a mysql database (with i'm assuming a web app through apache such as drupal, plone, or the likes?) I'd be more concerned about your network bandwidth before your hard drive performance although it never hurts to be concerned about data redundancy and overall system performance.

For what it's worth, we have two servers at work, neither of which runs raid, and both of them run anywhere from 4-6 instances of tomcat on separate ports. We've handled up to 400 users on one tomcat instance.