I guess since this is a public thread I will explain in more detail for the less computer savvy. Kip and Nickname *should* already know this. What happened in the past was that the Virtual Machines (we would be substituting additional servers for VMs, so again you can’t call this argument invalid because there are no VMs) would demand a huge chunk of read or write space. Typical I/O on the drives is relatively low and it streams along reading and writing data in a pretty quick fashion because of it’s striping capabilities. The idea behind a stripe is that it’s faster for 2 hard drives to store half a file at the same time than one drive to store the whole thing at one time. (That’s simplified but basically how it works, and the theory makes perfect sense.) The setup they are proposing will read/write an ENTIRE file or request to EACH disk. While this does give us data redundancy it’s pretty *edited*ing slow. Anyways, back to the VMs. What would happen is that the VMs (or new servers in our case) would request a larger than ordinary chunk of read/write. Then what happens is that the disk cannot fulfill that request immediately so it hangs up other read/writes and queues them up so that it can process the large request. It creates sort of a bottleneck until the large write (up to 200GB/s I’ve seen) gets shoved through, then it can continue on with the requests that it had to queue up until it catches back up. So what happens when that fat file blocks up the proverbial bottle? You get lag spikes and poor shot registration because a lot of that data getting queued up is your 1.6 and CSS server.
That in a nutshell, is the problem with going with a mirroring set over a striping one. While a stripe may require occasional backups, it would be worth the gain in performance.
EDIT 1: I hope dear Bitey, this fulfills your request.
EDIT 2: Just thought of another problem which would be the way Windows Server likes to page every *edited*ing thing ever rather than use the 16GB of RAM. While Linux server would eliminate this I am 100% against putting Linux server on the new box. (Even being a Linux user myself). It’s simply hit or miss on whether or not our successors will be able to use it and it’s minimal teaching them to do things in Windows Server.