>> I agree - you can get a very good one from www.acmemicro.com or
>> www.rackable.com with 8x 400GB SATA disks and the new 3Ware 9550SX SATA
>> RAID controller for about $6K with two Opteron 272 CPUs and 8GB of RAM
>> on a Tyan 2882 motherboard. We get about 400MB/s sustained disk read
>> performance on these (with tuning) on Linux using the xfs filesystem,
>> which is one of the most critical factors for large databases.
>>
>>
>
> Spend a fortune on dual core CPUs and then buy crappy disks... I bet
> for most applications this system will be IO bound, and you will see a
> nice lot of drive failures in the first year of operation with
> consumer grade drives.
>
There is nothing wrong with using SATA disks and they perform very well.
The catch is, make sure
you have a battery back up on the raid controller.
> Spend your money on better Disks, and don't bother with Dual Core IMHO
> unless you can prove the need for it.
>
The reason you want the dual core cpus is that PostgreSQL can only
execute 1 query per cpu
at a time, so the application will see a big boost in overall
transactional velocity if you push two
dual-core cpus into the machine.
Joshua D. Drake
> Alex
>
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