I'm working on an application to capture a lot (10 million +) of really small blocks of data (16 bytes) every day. The data is not sequential (i.e lots of seeking about to write) and it's not a constant stream (there are periods of quiet).
The app has caching servers in front of it so reads are less of an issue and I anticpate only 1% of the data will be of interest on a given day and that 1% will sit in the cache. Only the 1st read should be slow.
I have a good but limited budget and I want RAID 1 which doubles my disk cost.
My choices are:
- Fast SAS Disks in RAID 1 - expensive not much storage but fast.
- Big Near-Line disks RAID 1 + 1gb NVCache on a controller (PERC H700)
What would you do? Or put another way, does a large cache on the controller compensate, in terms of writing, for a slower seek time?
We're a DELL shop and I'm looking at the R410/R510.