Chris asked:

Of course, one just begs to ask: WHY is it that we continue this absurd notion that bigger is always better? Who the hell needs a 72GB BOOT DISK? Sure, maybe when Windows(tm) 2004 comes out... :-)

This is a detail that is unnecessary to sweat. Large drives don't have to be full. The cost of capacity is dropping -- at a given time in product life, a 72GB disk is not 8x the cost of a 9GB drive. It may well be 1x the price, this 1/8x the cost!

Leave the disk space empty if its use is not appropriate.

If you need extra spindles for performance, buy them. Don't get caught in the raw capacity trap.

I cannot imagine that it is economical to continue to sell relatively smaller disks, when for the same outlay the disk manufacturers can provide more capacity. The factories can provide X disks (or disk platters) per week. They will optimize appropriately. And they would go out of business if they did not, because the competition will!

As a system administrator we (you and I) all have to exercise judgement on how to best manage these resources. If your boss or your customers override your judgement then something should change. But it won't be the manufacturing economics of disk drives!

Yes, it is a fundamental law of computing that files and databases will always expand to fill the available disk space, but why is it that you can't even buy a 9GB drive anymore? A 20-30GB database, even if you double or triple it in size, is still going to fit on *one* shelf with 9- or 18GB drives.

If I had a 30GB database, I'm sure my DBA would agree - striping 5-6 9's together makes way, way more sense than throwing piles of higher-cost 36's or 72's at it, only to waste massive amounts of space in an effort to keep performance up. Of course, our database grows at over 30 million rows per week, so adding 36's makes sense for us. :-) Still! I echo the call for using appropriately-sized drives where it makes sense. :-)

All of my production servers have ridiculously huge boot drives because that's the only way Sun (or anyone else) sells them these days. So I mirror / & /var, interleave swap, and even after sizing things to some absurd degree, there's usually a chunk of 8-10GB of free space - 'cuz all the good stuff lives on the filers. Having that local disk space there just means that someone is going to want to USE it, and that's bad - it means I'd have to actually back up those machines, and I *hate* backups. (In the exceedingly rare case where both drives of a mirrored boot volume are corrupted or destroyed, it's always going to be faster to re-Jumpstart and cfengine the machine from scratch than to restore from tape anyway. Local data just messes up all that beautiful automation. :-)

A long time ago I was going to recommend that filers come with a pair of internal boot drives - like a mirrored pair of 4GB or 9GB drives _strictly_ for use as the boot volume, with some space for logs, etc. There's plenty of room inside the big filer heads for a pair of drives. But the move to Flash RAM cards in the newest machines is even better - fewer moving parts. :-)

-- Quentin Fennessy Quentin.Fennessy@amd.com Office: 512.602.3873 Cell: 512.694.7489