i need your opinions (server specs and drive type)

[bloodalien]

i acquired a few servers from my work that were on their way to a shredder. one of them is an hp proliant dl580 g5 with 4x X7350 2.93gh quad cores 30gb ram and 3 failing 146gb sas drives running under raid 1 on a p400 controller and centos 6 os. my questions are
1 how does this compare to an average setup for use with running a ftb server.

2 i get a few small lag spikes from time to time in a test ftb ultimate server that i suspect is being caused by the failing sas hdd.
i have plans to replace the entire array and would like to know what you guys would recommend. smaller sized sas hdd or ssd, a medium sized hybrid ssd, or larger sized sata drives. the current controller will support all options.

3 i have a spare raid controller that i am thinking a bought swapping in. the only real difference in the controller is the new one supports 16 drives instead of 8 and it also has a battery backup ram cash built in basically turning any hdd i plug into it into a hybrid drive. down fall the cash card is in it but the battery is not and i don't think it will run with out error with out it.

any input is appreciated thanks.

 

[cjm721]

Well for how loading and unloading works in minecraft an SSD is going to be the performance route as there are alot of calls for saving and loading. Now size wise is not to much of an issue for most if your only going to be running a single server on it and you are going to run out of ram/CPU capability before you be activity using 120GB (This is not including if you wish to make daily/weekly backups and that sort of thing). That processor is going to be better then most servers that are running FTB and that is definitely more RAM. Take a look at ftbservers.com and you notice that your on par with alot of the top ones.

Before going on to 2/3 make sure you isolate that is it is a harddrive issue not something in the network/firewall that is bunching the packets. In game look to see if mobs are physicaly responding slow or seem to jump from spot to spot.

With it being on a linux OS (woot woot) there any many programs out there (and one built in that I can't remember the name of) that can check the hard drives and not use damaged areas (now if it is the controller or read/write heads well then your going to need new harddrives anyways then) and see if the problem continues.

As for 16 drives as I said before your likly not to use more then 120GB so you could use them in a data redundancy raid setup but even then I don't see you using more then 8 unless you wish to get cheaper and smaller SSDS and make up for that with raid formats.

 

[bloodalien]

current config is every night the map is backed up to an onsite nas. i already know the drives in it are failing the raid array in it was originally 5 dives when i got the server one had a head crash while wiping the array another one week later. if i run multiple servers i will probably reload the server and setup separate virtual servers for each instance or just get the other 3 servers i have running. network speed is most likely a problem ranging from 13 to 20 mbs up and down but most the people that play on it are near the server and don't notice much if any lag most the time.

thanks for the quick response and the helpful info.

 

[cjm721]

Your upload is going to be much more important then your download. but 13mb/s (assume meba bits) is fine for a small to medium sized group. Most of the spikes in upload are going to be during teleports which can theoretically use your entire upload speed (usually client maxes first)

 

[gkid117]

i run
Server Specs

Intel Xeon 1270v2 3.8ghz
32gb DDR3 Ram
500gb raid hard drive and 250 gb ssd
1gps port

 

[bloodalien]

nice setup. the net port in my server is also 1gbs but the connection speed is supposed to be 20

Mbps but can go as low as 13. in the long run i will probably go with a ​

ssds as the main array and normal hdds for a backup array. i have a few ssds 10k and 15k sas drives so i may do some benchmarking just to see what differences i get. im also playing with the idea to build one of the older servers and seeing what it will take to get it to self destruct.​