Quote Originally Posted by Strelok View Post
Interesting that my (only) VelociRaptor dies around the time that one of the TWC server's is diagnosed faulty.
I am honestly not impressed with these. Thor (main TWC server) originally had 2 Raptors. About two weeks ago one (dev/sdc) of them threw an error and we had to rebuild the RAID array. It did rebuild and pass the SMART testing but it still concerned us and I planned on replacing it. When I ordered the drives for the second server that we are building, I ordered five. Four for the new machine and one to replace sdc in thor. The day before they arrived /dev/sdd in thor completely failed. I cant get into it at all.

We replaced that one (dev/sdd) with the drive I bought to replace /dev/sdc, which meant that I was now a drive short for the new server since /dev/sdc still needs to be replaced. I can get it replaced under warranty and run the new server on 3 drives, which was the plan, but it still threw a kink in our plans.

So since we were kind of hosed anyways we decided to go ahead and swap out the slower 500 gig drives with the faster Raptor drives. We were doing this one at a time so the array could rebuild. That is what we were doing Friday night. I pulled one of the 500 gig drives and replaced it with the Raptor and we were moving files when it locked up. This is now the third Raptor to have issues, and its a brand spanking new one. The other two were brand new in January.


Quote Originally Posted by Strelok View Post
How necessary are VelociRaptor's for the server anyway? I'd presume the system would have a lot of memory and that the VelociRaptor's would mainly save time when the server initially boots when it's caching into RAM and reading more data from the disk but after that have a minimal effect.
The read/write speed is ridiculously faster on the Raptors, and we do a TON of database writes.