coreykeeling Posted March 13, 2015 Posted March 13, 2015 Hi Everyone, I have been using EduGeek for a few months now since I first started working as a IT technician in a high school and was wondering if you could help me. We currently have two windows servers 2008 which store staff and students network drives and for a few years other technician have been able to keep the storage under control but it is getting to a point were it is no longer a viable option and are looking to upgrade some of the hard drives in the servers. We currently have SAS drives in a RAID 5 configuration but the servers do support SATA. I have looked at Enterprise SATA and SAS drives and see that SAS drives are more expensive for not a lot of capacity where I can get a 2TB Enterprise SATA drive for just over £100. Do you guys from experience have any recommendations on hard drives for windows servers? Anymore information you need please ask. Thanks.
FN-GM Posted March 13, 2015 Posted March 13, 2015 You will probably find the SAS drives are 15K RPM where the SATA drives are 7.2K RPM. For file servers for performance you will want the faster discs.
xenonive Posted March 13, 2015 Posted March 13, 2015 Just quick bit of input . You could look at nearline SAS drives , not as fast as SAS drives but more capacity than SAS at same price
mjs_mjs Posted March 13, 2015 Posted March 13, 2015 How many users are we talking about and what's the concurrent access (data transfer rates) levels like? (Have a look in the resource monitor to log this over time). Note that increasing storage capacity also means changing back up cap also... Dell have moved to SATA for the SME type servers and a Google white paper showed a while back that access speeds and MTBF are actually not so bad on consumer drives when used in a datacenter environment. Really, high end SATA should be OK, but there will be a limit and that limit is lower than SAS generally. (saying this I'm about to move from SAS to SATA myself in my test servers).
coreykeeling Posted March 13, 2015 Author Posted March 13, 2015 How many users are we talking about and what's the concurrent access (data transfer rates) levels like? (Have a look in the resource monitor to log this over time). Note that increasing storage capacity also means changing back up cap also... Dell have moved to SATA for the SME type servers and a Google white paper showed a while back that access speeds and MTBF are actually not so bad on consumer drives when used in a datacenter environment. Really, high end SATA should be OK, but there will be a limit and that limit is lower than SAS generally. (saying this I'm about to move from SAS to SATA myself in my test servers). We have around 180 users on one server and 64 staff I think on a second server but it is something I will have to double check on Monday as well as monitor the concurrent access levels over the week. Thanks for that tip with resource monitor. Blackblaze have similar statistics that customer drives in a datacentre are not that bad. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/ Keep me updated on your SATA drive testbed if that is OK.
mjs_mjs Posted March 13, 2015 Posted March 13, 2015 how many client workstations? and how many are desk/classrom lab enviroment?
coreykeeling Posted March 13, 2015 Author Posted March 13, 2015 We have 114 desktops and 40 laptops. 14 rooms which are general classrooms which have 5 computers in each except one that has 3 computers and are used everyday. One ICT suit of 16 desktops which is used less often. Science lab with 6 computers in. Staffroom with 5 computers. Then 16 computers used by SMT, Admin Staff, Nurse and Comms etc.
MatthewL Posted March 13, 2015 Posted March 13, 2015 Rather than replacing drives in a server what about looking along the lines of say a QNAP NAS and mount the storage to the server by having that in RAID if one server fails you can quickly make it available to the other without loosing data and downtime as a recommendation?
coreykeeling Posted March 13, 2015 Author Posted March 13, 2015 Rather than replacing drives in a server what about looking along the lines of say a QNAP NAS and mount the storage to the server by having that in RAID if one server fails you can quickly make it available to the other without loosing data and downtime as a recommendation? The issue with that is costs. We do currently have a NAS BOX from RM but it has been used as a mass storage location were media and other content are dumped. I like the idea of having another NAS/SAN and have direct network connections from it to the two servers and use it to store students & staff network home folders which would offer us some flexibility in the future when we need to expand storage space again but I think that is unlikely to happen because of money.
3s-gtech Posted March 13, 2015 Posted March 13, 2015 We have a pair of Hyper-V host with a mix of SAS (for VM OS) and SATA (for VM storage) in them. Works well as a mix - the OS and files are on different RAID sets so speeds stay high even when other VMs are being heavily used. No complaints about access speeds - these are 2.5" 7200rpm drives (can't remember which brand I went for, have a feeling it was WD). If you can move to RAID 10 from RAID 5 you should also find a significant difference in speed - offsetting some of the loss due to slower access. However, you only get 50% of total capacity with RAID 10. 1
mjs_mjs Posted March 13, 2015 Posted March 13, 2015 A RAID5 array of SATA disks would easily cope with that demand really. Don't remove the SAS tho - keep thoes for system and profiles if you can. Users home area's will get less read/write requests. If it is purely storage you're after and you want to go the NAS route, then just add it as a 'member' server to the domain and provision network shares from it. That way all operations are offloaded and you can use OS level tools to improve group file management on shares. Another thing potentially to think about is spreading your users out so that staff don't all sit on one storage array. That way if a server fails - at least half the staff can work as usual, and do the same for students so that when class starts and there is a peek usually, it's spread and not all on one server again. (tho with this many workstations thoes peeks will be minimal really.) Hypothetically, if you were to go the SATA route - would you be adding SATA drives or replacing the existing SAS drives? IF the latter, then a NAS might be the better option in terms of managing RISK. OR just get a third server that's completely SATA based with enough storage for the next 3-5 years and use it as part of the improvement plan - with a view of removing an older server once it's in place. This gives you the opportunity to view exactly the difference with your actual network load, and you can resort to it being a file server only if it's not suited to being a DC ect. 1
dhicks Posted March 14, 2015 Posted March 14, 2015 Do you guys from experience have any recommendations on hard drives for windows servers? We have around 400 pupils, 150 staff and 200-ish workstations. Our main storage array (where user home folders and shared drives are kept) is a RAID array of 4 4TB 7,200RPM drives. Performance is fine - not so much from the sustained read performance of the drives, but from the large amount of RAM that we assign the Windows file server to use for caching. Our storage array does slow down if multiple users try to write large video files to it, but for most day-to-day operations it works okay. 1
coreykeeling Posted March 14, 2015 Author Posted March 14, 2015 Thanks everyone for your suggestions and tips. I will discuss this with my colleagues next week and see what happens. Thanks again. Corey
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