Using 18GB drives

[Jim Mickens]

I've heard that using 18GB drive or larger can cause performance problems, and that HP doesn't really recommend it. Anybody know anything about this? I need to increase my disk space on my K220, I'm running out of room on my bus(es) and will have to start swapping my 4GB drive for larger ones.

I also need to start mirroring. Running without drive redundancy on such a critical machine makes me exceptionally nervous. I'll probably have to change out all my Jamaica drives for larger ones and mirror/duplex across boxes, but need to know if going to 18GB drives is a good idea.

Running HP-UX v10.20, 512MB RAM, dual processors. Primary apps are Oracle 7.2 (looking to upgrade to 8), SAS and Quantum. Any input would be appriciated.

[Anthony Goonetilleke · Accepted solution]

This is the first I have heard of it I run 18GB drives and larger and dont see any problems.

[Dave Wherry]

Coming up we were taught not to use the large drives. You get too much head movement and performance does suffer. You were better off spreading your data around on several smaller drives.
The newer drives run at higher RPM's offsetting a lot of that head movement. The data comes around and is under the heads more often. There is also more caching happening on these devices so performance really does not suffer.
Another thing to look at is putting that much data on one spindle. A single drive failure can hit you pretty hard. You need to consider what data you place on which drives and have some level of Raid protection. Either Raid-1 or 5 really helps.