Many reponses this time. Here is a list of people with information and
advice, my thanks to: George Gallen, John J. Francini, Alan Nabeth, Richard
C. Bond, Glen Gice, Peter Reynolds and Jason Andrade.
The responses ranged from, "I have 10000 rpm disks and there has never been
a problem" to "You need to upgrade your fans." The upgraded fan part number
supplied by Peter Reynolds was BA35X-MD and the PSU may also need to be
upgraded. This is for the storageworks pedestal. He aslo mentioned that I
need to have a model BA356 pedestal or newer if I were to try the upgrade.
Alan Nabeth wrote:
As of April 1999, the System and Options Catalog chapter for
a rackmount AlphaServer 1000A listed 7200 and 10000 rpm drive
among those supported. A pedestal mounted system may have
different limits. An older system may have different limits
as well. For built-in shelves, the system typically provides
cooling. Older standalone shelves were limited both by the
fans and power supplies.
My particular system has a built-in shelf and I will explore apropriate
hardware options.
I was also reminded, and quite prudently, that faster disks may not help my
situation if I have already reached the maxium io transfer rate, which I
sure that I haven't. Mostly, I wanted to know why such limited disks were
used and I just wanted to be sure that I wouldn't do any harm, or cause
different problems if I tested with other disks. So it seems that I could
run my little test and make it permanent if successful. It would be a
relatively cheap upgrade as we have the disks already.
It was also suggested that I use a RAID level 0 or 1 to improve performance.
I have already suggested that, but the powers that be think that RAID level
5 is what they need.
Thanks again to everyone!
Original post below:
I have a question about a RAID device. The card is a KZPSC-AA, I don't know
who makes it, but I believe it was outsourced. I think that it is a fast
wide controller. It is configured to be a RAID level 5 that has, I believe,
4G 3600 rpm disks installed in the Storageworks shelf of an AS1000. It has
1G of ram and 6G of swap, on the RAID device. One of the techs on site said
that Compaq told them that they could only have 3600 rpm drives in the
Storageworks shelf as faster drives would overheat the system. Has anyone
had any experience with a similar hardware setup? They have a lot of
swapping going on and in the long run the best solution may be a new sytem
with more ram, but I was curious as to the increased performance that my be
achieved with faster drives. I have done some bench marking on a system
here, without a RAID, that would indicate that faster drives could
signifigantly increase overall performance. They are having some data
transfer issues, big data, slow transfer, and I was wondering if I may be
able to upgrade the harddrives, even just to test my completely unfounded
theory.
Any input at all would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Trevor Osatchuk
Process Solutions Canada Ltd.
Support and Integration Analyst
(780) 452-2227 Ext. 286
trevor.osatchuk_at_pscl.com
Received on Tue Jun 05 2001 - 21:45:26 NZST