Need advice in upgrading my hard drives

[rootkid]

Hi Everyone!

I'm running Proxmox on a HP ProLiant DL360 G5 Server:
Serial Number / Product ID: CZJ713035W / 399519-421
2x dual core xeon 3,2GHz
7 GB RAM
1x HW-Raid-Controller "Smart Array P600"
5x HDD (SAS, 146 GB, 10.000 RPM, Model HP DG146ABAB4, PHY Transfer Rate: 3.0GBPS) forming RAID 1+0 (with spare drive).

It should be able to run about 3 KVM and 5 OpenVZ guests simultaneously without performance problems (not much database activity or i'll give her a seperate disk).
I'm planning to upgrade my hard drives to HP Model 507127-B21 300GB disks but they are really expensive (List price 540.55 USD).
Before buying cheap, old drives i suppose it's better to buy any (new / not-so-old) 3rd-party devices?
Has anybody some information / suggestions / advice which hard drives do a good job (--> performance is most important) for moderate money?
I have 1 free HDD lot so i could also use 6 drives (and maybe change to RAID-5 to get more space for my money).

Best regards,
Heiner

 

[udo]

Hi Heiner,
i have good experiences with "HITACHI HUS154545VLS300"-Disks. 4 (or better 6) in raid-10. With an areca raidcontroller i got over 440MB/s with 4 disks and pveperf (read).
If you need huge speed, take 6 disks as raid-10 and use an cold-spare instead. But i don't know the performance of your raidcontroller...

3 kvm and 5 openvz sounds not so much... perhaps you need a littlle bit more ram?

Udo

 

[rootkid]

Hi Heiner,
i have good experiences with "HITACHI HUS154545VLS300"-Disks. 4 (or better 6) in raid-10. With an areca raidcontroller i got over 440MB/s with 4 disks and pveperf (read).

Thanks for sharing! I'll keep them in mind and wait for more suggestions to compare.

If you need huge speed, take 6 disks as raid-10 and use an cold-spare instead. But i don't know the performance of your raidcontroller...

Just to get it right: RAID-0 out of 3 Disks, 2 times, then mirror them (RAID-1), if 1 drive fails i'll have to redesign the Raidset or exchange the faulty device? The system is located in a professional datacenter where i have 8x5 access / technician support...

3 kvm and 5 openvz sounds not so much... perhaps you need a littlle bit more ram?

Udo

You're right, it's really not that much. I have 4 CPU Cores which can do 2 threads each (proxmox tells me in GUI i have 8 Cores). So I plan not to have more than 8 VMs running simultaneously. And i don't want to do much overbooking in RAM (i think an average of 512 - 1024MB is enough for my VMs - i assume they hang around having fun with their idle process most of the time). So HDD I/O is the only thing that i can't really control (besides Network connectivity, but i don't expect so much traffic and have bonding of 2 1GBit interfaces).

Thank you very much for helping! Any other suggestions?