(02-22-2010, 03:49 AM)SaintGTR Wrote: I know that RAID 5 is a combo of performance and redundancy, my question is how would 3 x 1 TB hard drives in RAID 5 perform as far as srcds goes?
I got some eventscripts and sourcemod plugins so I am curious how plugins like RPG mod which have to record player stats will work.
Since I put together a dual CPU box and hosting 8+ 32-slot (TF2/CS:S/GMod) with it, and Windows 2008 R2 has implemented TRIM, I got my box a 30GB SSD, and I really like the result.
I am just hosting for fun, so I didn't bother to do any extensive performance test.
(It was troublesome for me doing the initial test. In order to get enough pub players, I set up a couple idling servers, a couple instant respawn servers, as well as sending out announcements to a few Steam groups for getting players...)
My other box from a hosting, I have 4x TF2 32-slot, and SATA 3.0Gb/s 7200RPM is fine, but I am not sure how it would perform with 8+ 32-slot.
With the SSD, during the game, myself & my friends didn't experience any stuttering. I didn't check with the pub players, as they might have a better or worse machines (one of my friends was having lag, yet it was the real-time scan of his anti-virus). Yet, since TF2 server caches most of the needed stuffs in memory, during the game it doesn't access the HDD much, I guess it wouldn't help the in-game performance.
The main benefit is when caching during the level change. Consider you are hosting 8+ 32-slot, and 4 of them are changing level.
Again, since HDD nowaday is pretty affordable, and setting it up for testing isn't hard, you really should try for yourself, instead of taking my words for it.
You can try something like hosting an instance of SRCDS, and do some video editing/file backup/file compression.
I personally don't think RAID 5 is necessary, since you are not hosting any critical data, like database, or hosting a commercial shopping site. For SRCDS, just a weekly backup of the configuration would be enough.
Then again, either way is fine, especially it isn't going to cost you much extra, nor hard to set it up.