On: Microsoft TerraServer (1998)

[frozenport]

I wonder if 324 on Lustre would have more throughput than a 1 4TB disk?

[fsckin → frozenport]

They would be leaps and bounds faster. Especially comparing random IOPS.

Let's just assume they were using a Seagate Cheetah 9LP. That's a 9GB, 10k RPM, 1MB cache UW SCSI disk that was widely available in 1998, for a whopping... $1200 each. $390,000 worth of disks... wow. That could buy 1300 * 4TB SAS drives today with a total raw storage of 5.2PB!

324 * 9LP's would have around 5.5GB/sec of total read/write throughput. That easily beats a single 4TB disk with around 200MB/sec read/write performance and terrible IOPS in comparison to even a single 9LP.

SSDs compare much more favorably here. 10 x 1TB SSDs for ~$6500 could easily reach 5.5GB/sec throughput and triple the capacity of the 324 x 9GB drives.

[mariusz79 → fsckin]

You're comparing off-the-shelf disks to enterprise-class storage.

[theatrus2 → mariusz79]

"Enterprise" 4TB disks don't have orders of magnitude more IOPs than consumer versions.

[mariusz79 → theatrus2]

But they are more expensive, so for comparison to be right one needs to take that under consideration.

[enigmo → frozenport]

Definitely... and _way_ more IOPS.