Databases are very I/O intensive. 350 GB is really small by today hard-drive standards (there are 250 and 400GB drives available). A NAS (Network attached storage) would certainly perform badly, unless you use a very high end one (NetApp FAS900).

If your need is only :"moderate storage capacity, extreme I/O power, security", I'd go for a fibre-channel enclosure with FC or SCSI drives (NOT SATA drives, like the low-end SANs propose!) and I'll configure it as a RAID-10 for high-performance and security. For instance 6x150GB 15000RPMs drives will be fine and very (very very) fast, and expandable.

Be very careful, most vendors today propose low-end FC-to-SATA RAID enclosures (like Apple X-Serve RAID, that Oracle's buying by truckloads), they're really great for file storage but not that great for database if you don't fill them up to throat with drives (14) and cache (2GB). But a filled-up X-Server RAID sizes 6 TB, not 350GB...

See what's the best bang-for-the-bucks. Sure an X-Serve RAID isn't much more expensive than a small FC enclosure, it's much bigger BUT far slower. However it may be enough for you (we don't know where you're starting from, perhaps are you using 5 years old disks with extra-low performance by today measures?) and will provide HUGE storage capacity.

In reply to Re: OT: What Hardware is important for large I/O bound processes by wazoox
in thread OT: What Hardware is important for large I/O bound processes by Anonymous Monk

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