sunhux
asked on
7200 rpm vs 5400 rpm write throughputs to backup a few NAS
My customer has several NAS which runs on reasonably good
speed SATA (heard that one Hitachi SATA HDDs can give 6Gbits/sec
throughput).
There are about 20 MAC OS X that comes with Firewire 800 ports
& I intend to perform daily backup for the customers from their
MACs using Fwire 800 ports to external HDDs.
As most of the files are image files of 3-8 MBytes (each file) & there
are about 15000-20000 files, I thought of backing up to two external
HDDs per day (for daily backups) via the network (NFS from NAS)
As the 7200 rpm HDDs costs about 17-18% more than the 5400 rpms,
will need someone to share what's their experience like in terms of
IO write throughputs. Read throughputs is not an issue as the NAS
is fast & we have a backup LAN to link aggregate two gigabit switch
ports to each of the two MAC (to get 4Gbps/sec to each MAC;
hopefully each MAC comes with 2-3 NIC ports)
Q1:
Will there be more than 15% difference in the backup timings between
the 5400 & 7200 rpm HDDs? One site/url even suggests that 5400rpm
HDDs can last longer than 7200rpm :
http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-229864.html
Or will the extra space give rise to faster writes (by formatting with
larger disk cluster/sector size?)
Q2:
Where will the IO bottleneck be? The Firewire 800 port speed of the
HDDs or the 5400/7000 rpm rotational latency/speed or the MAC's
Firewire 800 ports?
Looking at the following models of external HDDs:
LaCie 7200rpm Rugged 500Gb, USB 3 + Fwire 800 PN: 301983 : US$156 + $4 shipg
http://www.amazon.com/Rugged-Triple-Firewire-Portable-301983/dp/B0058BDFXA/ref=dp_ob_title_ce
LaCie Rugged Hard Disk Triple 1 TB USB 3.0 Firewire 800 (2x) Portable Hard Drive PN: 301984 :
http://www.amazon.com/Rugged-Triple-Firewire-Portable-301984/dp/B0058BDFZ8/ref=pd_cp_e_4
speed SATA (heard that one Hitachi SATA HDDs can give 6Gbits/sec
throughput).
There are about 20 MAC OS X that comes with Firewire 800 ports
& I intend to perform daily backup for the customers from their
MACs using Fwire 800 ports to external HDDs.
As most of the files are image files of 3-8 MBytes (each file) & there
are about 15000-20000 files, I thought of backing up to two external
HDDs per day (for daily backups) via the network (NFS from NAS)
As the 7200 rpm HDDs costs about 17-18% more than the 5400 rpms,
will need someone to share what's their experience like in terms of
IO write throughputs. Read throughputs is not an issue as the NAS
is fast & we have a backup LAN to link aggregate two gigabit switch
ports to each of the two MAC (to get 4Gbps/sec to each MAC;
hopefully each MAC comes with 2-3 NIC ports)
Q1:
Will there be more than 15% difference in the backup timings between
the 5400 & 7200 rpm HDDs? One site/url even suggests that 5400rpm
HDDs can last longer than 7200rpm :
http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-229864.html
Or will the extra space give rise to faster writes (by formatting with
larger disk cluster/sector size?)
Q2:
Where will the IO bottleneck be? The Firewire 800 port speed of the
HDDs or the 5400/7000 rpm rotational latency/speed or the MAC's
Firewire 800 ports?
Looking at the following models of external HDDs:
LaCie 7200rpm Rugged 500Gb, USB 3 + Fwire 800 PN: 301983 : US$156 + $4 shipg
http://www.amazon.com/Rugged-Triple-Firewire-Portable-301983/dp/B0058BDFXA/ref=dp_ob_title_ce
LaCie Rugged Hard Disk Triple 1 TB USB 3.0 Firewire 800 (2x) Portable Hard Drive PN: 301984 :
http://www.amazon.com/Rugged-Triple-Firewire-Portable-301984/dp/B0058BDFZ8/ref=pd_cp_e_4
SOLUTION
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ASKER
& specifically I'm using those external HDDs for sustained IO in backups, not
for database nor adhoc files copying
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ASKER
In my case I'm comparing 5400rpm 1TB HDD with a 7200 500GB HDD:
how do I go about partial-stroking the 1 TB HDD so that it uses only
certain sectors/tracks (suppose the inner tracks) to get better performance?
Does MAC OS do this automatically or I simply don't fully occupy the HDD
when backing it to it?
ASKER
Suppose I quarter-stroke the 1TB 5400rpm HDD, how do I build a
Truecrypt/encrypted partition or container to be on this quarter-stroked
portion of the HDD?
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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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ASKER
excellent
ASKER
That link is dated 2006, are the comments there reliable?