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Drive speeds in RAID with Dell external MD1200

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PaulMThomas

IS-IT--Management
Aug 2, 2004
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I have a Dell VRTX blade server with 4 blades and a full array of internal drives, this runs Hyper-V clustering. We now need more capacity so are looking at the Dell MD1200 external drive chassis.
We would have two internal SCSI cards in the VRTX linked to the chassis and all drives would be shared across all nodes as Cluster Shared Volumes.

This chassis provides 12x 3.5" drive slots and I am now trying to pick my way through the choices of drives to make best use of this space.

We run a number of VM's on the cluster from A-Virus management to virtual File Servers.
I have used ATTO disk benchmark so test all of the existing drives from within VM's (VRTX has a number of different speed and capacity drives, RAID etc) and to be honest they all perform very similarly, whether they are a RAID 10 with 600GB 10k SAS or a RAID 5 with 1TB 7.2k SAS, all giving speeds of around 4-5.5 GB/s read and write.

I have SSD available as a more affordable option now as well.

With 12 slots, would it best to go with say 12 x 2TB 7.2k SAS in RAID 10, or a mix of SSD and HDD's?
Would 12 spindles help increase performance?

I can obviously choose which VM's go onto which drives.

 
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