Apologies if this kind of question has been addressed before, I would happily go to directed threads or links for answers.
Basically, I am trying to get a linux box with up to 3.4 GHz and 25MB Cache (fairly expense) from Dell. I want to use the box for scientific number crunching applications, e.g., flow simulations so I need optimum performance because some of the calculations can run for months.
The dell guy suggested I get two hard drives on the box, the 600GB @10000rpm for the OS and then a 2TB one @7200rpm for everything else. Initially I had selected a 3TB @ 7200rpm. Will there be a huge performance gain between this two configurations.
I plan to install Opensuse on everything (wiping the windows that comes with the machine). I need help in understand if the above configuration is possible because I recently returned a box that came with 2 3TB hard drives but I could only see one when I was install Opensuse (box was returned for another reason though).
What else should I do to get better performance. I just want to use this box for calculations, with not much day to day stuff.
Sorry if this thread is a little confusing, the dell guy is trying to get me to buy but I wanted to do some research considering the cost of the box,
Thanks,
Jay
It’s hard to answer, based on the minimal information.
I’m not sure why you would have had trouble with the two 3T drives.
If you want two drives and maximal performance, make one of those an SSD and put the most frequently used files on the SSD.
Apart from that, unless what you are doing is particularly disk intensive, you might not see a lot of difference between two drives and one larger drive.
I’m typing this on a Dell Inspiron 660 with 3 drives (600G, 1T, 1T). But I’m only doing that, because the computer that originally had the 600G drive failed, and moving the drive was the easy way of doing things.
More Important is the amount of memory more is always better. If you expect data to over flow to a drive then the fastest today is SSD. And that is where your data storage should go.
RAID 0 will stripe data alternately between 2 drives in effect doubling speed. But if you lose one drive all data is lost. Also I’d avoid FAKE RAID (BIOS assisted) Which comes for free on some mother boards. Use either software or true hardware RAID Some FAKE RAID can be problematic on Linux. Could have been the problem with the 3T setup you said. Or if true hardware RAID the OS would only see a single drive
I’d max out memory most non-commercial boards max at 32 gig
SSD for OS fast drive for DATA or a bunch of SSD if your wallet can stand it
Not knowing the full specs of the application it is a bit hard to do a real tight analysis
Yes, ssd for the stored and manipulated arrays, the most important thing (assuming much RAM already).