So, our current server is having some issues with iowait during busy times where it hovers in the 30% range. I want to move MySQL to a dedicated server to speed things up, average QPS is 73 but higher during busy times.

Current setup: Dual Xeon 5130, RAID1 (2) 10K RPM, 2GB ram


Considering: Xeon 3060 (less cores than current but dedicated to db only), 4GB ram and...

RAID1 (2) 15K RPM drives

RAID10 (4) 10K RPM drives

RAID10 (4) 15K RPM drives [pricy]


DB is under 5GB and growing slowly, currently all MyISAM but I'm considering switching some tables to InnoDB.


The server does about 33% SELECT, 3% UPDATE and 3% INSERT so it's mostly reads. It would be nice to do 4 15k rpm drives in RAID10 but thats pricy, how would these compare in terms of performance and what kind of boost can I expect from them?


Thanks

Use SCSI/SAS for best preformance, 15K best than 10K of course ....

The RAID 10 has an increase in write performance over the RAID 1. The read performance is about the same on both.

The 15k drives will seek faster but I don't believe the performance of a RAID 10 of 10k's will be much less than a RAID 1 of 15k's.

Once upon a time, I had a good benchmark matrix that showed the performance benefits of each level but I'm unable to find it these days.

Really? I've been reading around and it seems 4 disk RAID 10 should be quite a bit faster for reads than 2 disk RAID 1.