[maximage]

Heya all! I have access to a G4 Xserve with 2x 60GB hard Drives and 2x 180GB HDs in it and am looking at running a LAN session for a bunch of kids in the surrounding suburbs during the school holidays here as bit of an outreach type thing.

Any ideas on how best to set up the drives for optimum performance when several games ar running at once, should i stripe the 2 smaller ones for the system and then stripe the 2 bigger ones for just the games ... OR ...

Should I stripe them ALL together and just chuck everything onto it ... OR ...

Put a different game on each individual drive?

The main reson I can think of using the last method is that you can access each different game at the same time without one really slowing the other, or does that rarely happen so best to stripe for optimum speed?

Thanks heaps for any input!

[Scotttheking]

It doesn't matter.

[maximage]

As in you dont think the drives speed won't make a huge difference, so striping wont give much advantage? I will be serving around 60 to 80 computers, but not physically gaming off the unit. Still wont really matter? Or, coming from another angle, would it be safer to mirror, or is one days use pretty safe?

[Spliffdaddy]

I don't think the hard drive's read speed is going to make any difference for hosting games. The speed & latency of the network is probably more important than anything else.

Even if it doesn't matter, I'd still stripe a couple of those drives just for kicks. Then I'd overclock the processors and the system bus...but that's just me.

[Link]

So basically your method is to totally ignore the problem and then try to shorten the lifespan of a $3000-4000 dollar server? How efficient

[geekwagon]

Optimizing disks layouts for different IO patterns can be an interesting challenge, but there's not much you can do with 4 disks (of 2 different sizes.)

You won't be able to stripe all 4 into one volume (well, I guess you could, but you would lose 100GB of each of the 180GB drives...) because OS X doesn't have a LVM that can handle that kind of thing, so your best bet is probably to either:

if you care about the data create two mirrors, one with the 80GB drives and one with the 180GB drives.

if you don't care about the data and want performance, make two stripes, one with the 80s and one with the 180s.

As for what goes where it probably doesn't matter too much. When laying out volumes for DB servers, I always try to separate things out will use the disks at the same time onto different sets of disks as much as possible. This cuts down on the amount of head seeking the disks have to do. For simple file sharing there isn't much you can do there, though.

[maximage]

I'm not terribly fussed about losing a chunk of storage by striping all 4 into one partition if neccessary, ie, making them all the smaller size as I will only have a system and a bunch of games, no need for huge spaces. I think I will just stripe all 4 and be done with it, unless someone comes up with a better idea in the next day or so! Thanks all for your input. And to the person suggesting the overclocking, I have never seen anything on the web regarding OC'ing the Xserve, any pointers?