Do I need 10,000 RPM Hard drives

[Terry Evans]

My IT guy gave me specs for a new server to include (2) 2.0TB Western Digital Red RAID Drives (SATA).

The AppliedSystems config guidelines show minimum 10,000 RPM.

Is this really necessary?  I have an option to do this for an extra $250, but then they are 1TB instead of 2TB.

I'm sure it would be nice to have 10k, but do I need it?

Any input is appreciated!!!

[Mark]

How many users are going to be hammering this server?  Personally I would recommend 15k RPM unless it's a non-critical machine or simply has very little usage.

I'd agree with the 10k minimum recommendation, though.  Read/write speed is a common bottleneck.

15,000 RPM is basically twice as fast as your 7200RPM SATA drive in your desktop or laptop, 3x if you only got the 5400 RPM.  Just for comparison.

[Terry Evans]

Small office 5-8 users.

[Mark]

Ok, I can see why you are questioning it, but I'd still personally go with the 10k drives if this is a TAM server.  To me, the difference is noticeable.  The server boots faster (less downtime should you need to reboot) and read/write is of course faster.  Noticeably faster to me.

I even have 10K drives in my fax server.

[Joshua Conner]

Ok, I can see why you are questioning it, but I'd still personally go with the 10k drives if this is a TAM server.  To me, the difference is noticeable.  The server boots faster (less downtime should you need to reboot) and read/write is of course faster.  Noticeably faster to me.

I even have 10K drives in my fax server.

I agree with all of that.   I have 15k drives on most servers and 7k on slower long term storage devices.

[Jeff Golas]

How much data is really being stored?

5-8 users can't be much...depending on what you're current config really is, and what your growth is, and what that server is doing, I'd be looking at a pair of server-grade SSD's in a Raid 1 to run tam, and likely either 10k or 7200rpm NLS drives for larger amounts of data. You will scream, and for 5-8 users, you're not going to see any noticable slowdown whatsoever on even 7200 rpm near line sas.