Are you still hosting apps on servers with spinning disks?

vitobotta

I guess most people use SSDs/NVMEs, but there are a lot of offers for servers with HDDs still today. Is anyone using those? How is performance with these disks these days?

dosai

I'm self hosting audiobookshelf on hosthatch storage and never faced any problems.

vitobotta

@dosai said:
I'm self hosting audiobookshelf on hosthatch storage and never faced any problems.

Is performance acceptable?

arirang

I think It's not important to run apps on NVME or HDD after apps loaded on Memory. But if your apps do frequent I/O, it's important.
I don't care Disk type but network stability.

AlwaysSkint

I run backups through Nextcloud quite happily and frugally, on HDD.
Hybrid HDD/SSD make this even better!

vitobotta

Nice, thanks all. I just bought a Hetzner server from their auction which has NVME storage, and I am gonna add more users to Nextcloud meaning that I will need more storage than I have on this server. I saw an offer on OVH for a dedicated server with a decent CPU, 32GB of RAM and 4 x 2TB HDDs for just 17 euros per month, so it's cheaper than adding the same amount of storage to the Hetzner server. 4 TB are more than enough for what I need, so I could configure the drives in RAID 10 and use that server purely for Nextcloud. @AlwaysSkint Most of my Nextcloud users, me included, just use the syncing functionality, not the web app, which we use rarely to collaborate with OnlyOffice. Do you ever see any particular slow down with these? Also what is the write/read speed of your disk(s)? Just to get an idea. Thanks!

tetech

@vitobotta said: Is anyone using those? How is performance with these disks these days?

It all depends what level of interaction is required. I have about 4 MinIO servers which store long-term archives using HDDs, mostly automated so don't care about latency, performance is fine for this use case. A SQL database used interactively would be a completely different story.

host_c

@vitobotta

it all depends on the IO performance you need.

So for OS, website with high load, or any performance oriented use-case - SSD/NVMe is the only way to fly
Backups, movies, large files that do not need constant high IO - Spinning Rust, AKA HDD, and make sure it is at least a RAID6.

HDD actually outlive Flash in terms of life, but are slow due to the writing technique and mechanical part. The have the best $/MB ratio.

SSD/NVME - well they are fast, but consumer grade is a no-go, enterprise is extremely expensive at $/MB, and the life-span of flash, for now, is much less than a HDD.

This is why, some offers of VPS/DEDI include a Flash part for OS and running IO intensive APS and a HDD part for storing large files.

Just to have an idea, values can depend on brand/model but this is a general compassion:

A typical HDD will have sub 1MB/sec at 4K random write, and up to 180 MB/sec on sequential. IOPS is ~140 to 180.
A typical SSD will have ~15 to 35 MB/SEC at 4K random write, and up to 550 MB/sec on sequential. IOPS is ~35.000.
A typical NVME will have 135 and up MB/SEC at random write, and up to 5500 MB/sec on sequential. IOPS is above 70.000

Values vary much on flash ( mostly on NVME ), due to a ton of factors that include: cell type, nvme interface and controller, brand of flash chips, targeted consumer area. Here Enterprise will blow away consumer, specially on life-span.

Did this answer your question? partially at least?

vitobotta

So for a Nextcloud install with around 10 users with moderate activity, shall I go for it or not? what do you think?

Chievo

@vitobotta said:
So for a Nextcloud install with around 10 users with moderate activity, shall I go for it or not? what do you think?

I am on the clouds. No disks

host_c

@vitobotta said: So for a Nextcloud install with around 10 users with moderate activity, shall I go for it or not? what do you think?

HDD, you will be limited rather by bandwidth for upload/download then by HDD activity. The OS does caching also, so that will help.

vitobotta

OK, I think I'll give it a try. Thanks!

dosai

@vitobotta said:

@dosai said:
I'm self hosting audiobookshelf on hosthatch storage and never faced any problems.

Is performance acceptable?

Far from acceptable. It's pretty good and I play stuff almost every day.

vitobotta

@dosai said:

@vitobotta said:

@dosai said:
I'm self hosting audiobookshelf on hosthatch storage and never faced any problems.

Is performance acceptable?

Far from acceptable. It's pretty good and I play stuff almost every day.

When I read the first sentence I thought you meant horrible

havoc

SSDs have become sufficiently cheap that HDDs no longer make sense to me outside of data centers and data hoarders.

The only HDD storage I still actively use is hetzner storageboxes. And I think maybe the oracle VMs that I'm not actively using are on hdd

AlwaysSkint

All I do is use the web frontend to periodically clear out older backups (the file retention feature never worked/works properly). End users don't see the server at all, so no 'Apps' running.
I use davfs to upload approx. 8 VPS nightly backups to them (the Nextcloud instances). Additionally 2 mobile phones and 2 laptops get uploads sent to one.
Hard disc speed isn't really relevant to me but typically backups take around 10 minutes to upload - that is the important measure. Likewise, RAM and processing power doesn't really feature and I run one on a cheapo Scaleway box (used to be a Kimsufi ARM instance), one in a Proxmox VM on a cheapo WSI dedicated server and one on a basic Frantech block storage-added VPS.

Others prefer synchthing but I get on better with Nextcloud.

c1vhosting

@vitobotta said:
I guess most people use SSDs/NVMEs, but there are a lot of offers for servers with HDDs still today. Is anyone using those? How is performance with these disks these days?

Actually HDDs are still the best choice for backups or high data storage.

AuroraZero

I still chisel my ones and zeros onto cave walls.

vitobotta

I ordered that server from OVH and it's now installing the OS. I will then migrate Nextcloud. Thanks all!

AlwaysSkint

@vitobotta said: it's now installing the OS.

Personally, I'd install debian, load Proxmox on top, then create a few VMs, one of which dedicated to Nextcloud. 4GB should be ample for Nextcloud - I run in 2GB and less.

somik

I am hosting a raspbian repo mirror from HDD. Was planning to extend it to include debian as well since newer raspberry pi runs on debians but the debian mirrors in my area are good enough. Other then that, I use HDDs for storing the server backups and proxmox backups. Rest of it runs off SSDs.

As mentioned above, most apps runs off RAM now a days so storage really doesn't matter much anymore.

vitobotta

I migrated Nextcloud and it's mostly fine. The only thing that is disappointing is the disk write speeds, not sure if it's because I configured the disks in RAID 10 (4 x 2TB drives). Is there any setting or something that could help improve disk performance with such configuration? Other than that it seems to work pretty well. Of course I can see some difference compared to a bigger server with NVME, but it's OK.

host_c

Hw raid or software?, is software, what did you use, if hardware, did you wait for the raid to initialize?

vitobotta

@host_c said:
Hw raid or software?, is software, what did you use, if hardware, did you wait for the raid to initialize?

It's the software raid configured by OVH when you install the OS. It's regular mdadm stuff. The server is all set up already and the RAID is perfectly functional, synced etc. It's just that write performance is not great

host_c

Mdadm is really bad at performance. Go with zfs instead

vitobotta

@host_c said:
Mdadm is really bad at performance. Go with zfs instead

It was configured by OVH automatically when installing the OS, I only had to chose the RAID mode and choose 10.

host_c

Please give me an idea on slow speed.

A yabs , disk test only

vitobotta

@host_c said:
Please give me an idea on slow speed.

A yabs , disk test only

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/md3):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 849.00 KB/s    (212) | 12.25 MB/s     (191)
Write      | 887.00 KB/s    (221) | 12.85 MB/s     (200)
Total      | 1.73 MB/s      (433) | 25.11 MB/s     (391)
           |                      |
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 48.28 MB/s      (94) | 50.88 MB/s      (49)
Write      | 50.75 MB/s      (99) | 54.51 MB/s      (53)
Total      | 99.04 MB/s     (193) | 105.40 MB/s    (102)

Someone on "the other forum" gave me a suggestion to disable bitmap and now it's a bit better:

```

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/md3):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 1.26 MB/s      (316) | 16.49 MB/s     (257)
Write      | 1.30 MB/s      (325) | 17.01 MB/s     (265)
Total      | 2.56 MB/s      (641) | 33.51 MB/s     (522)
           |                      |
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 67.92 MB/s     (132) | 74.54 MB/s      (72)
Write      | 71.53 MB/s     (139) | 79.50 MB/s      (77)
Total      | 139.46 MB/s    (271) | 154.04 MB/s    (149)

Any other settings I could try?

host_c

@vitobotta

I would help you out further, but my taxi just arrived, I have to go to "party" for 2024.

Have no clue on OVH drive policy, but if you do not have data on it, just do a ZFS and do not waste any more time.

Maybe someone can help you debug this, I personally, would go for ZFS on Software raid.

AA, just remembered, filesystem? try out XFS. It is much better than EXT4 at handling read and write ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS )

AlwaysSkint

I personally stay clear of XFS due to the inability to shrink that filesystem. An edge case, I know, but I have felt/had the need a few times. Bear in mind that raw speed tests only go so far in real World use: buffering & caches make a fair bit of difference.

host_c

@vitobotta

This is an excellent article for you, found it while searching for other stuff ( as usual )

https://www.arcserve.com/blog/understanding-raid-performance-various-levels