Storage array: Bare drives, SSD, RAID, SS, or other?

[Viceroy]

Obviously the basic hierarchy would go SSD(Intel x25-m; OCZ) > 10k(Velociraptor) > 7.2k(Spinpoint F3; Caviar Black; Barracuda) > 5.4k(Caviar Green), but I am curious to see the relative performance of these drives when short-stroked or put into a RAID array so that I can better decide which combination of storage devices would be of the greatest benefit to me, with price and hassle of course factored in. General ideas are welcome, but I believe what would help me the most are benchmarks and numbers and graphs.

Thanks.

 

[Emulex]

put the boot into fast SSD and rock raid-0 or jbod with the cheap consumer high density drives. and backup your isht on a regular basis.

 

[pjkenned]

Just as a thought... skip the VRaptors at this point. SSD is your OS/Application drive. For data storage, just do raid 5 or 6, or run raid 5 or 6 in a network. If you have 6-8 1TB+ drives you will see transfer rates in the 500MB/s range (i.e. faster than your SSD).

I had a 8x 2.5" 15k SAS array as boot earlier this year, with a 3.5" SAS array as midrange and then an 8x 1.5TB array as the big storage earlier this year. Each had its own Raid controller. The fastest array was 800MB/s the slowest 500MB/s.

Now: SSD Boot + OS and all spindle drives all in servers. Much quieter! Over the network I get at least 150MB/s with jumbo frames enabled, and that has absolutely no problem streaming HD video or anything else I need.