> It really is up to the final customer. I prefer raid 5 over
mirroring
>for maximum up time in the commercial products I've seen.
I have to agree here. 0+1 is a cheaper and faster solution but when it
comes to stability RAID 5 is the biz. We've had a number of crashes
(which proved to be a bad channel on our RAID controller in the end) and
with hot-swap and RAID 5 we never needed to take down the system until
we had to replace the controller.
As for the initial question (have to at least try to stay on topic 8)
I'd say go for RAM too. It's fairly cheap nowadays.
Come to think of it, has anyone any experience from running MySQL on a
Celeron CPU? It'd be fun to see how much impact the smaller on-die cache
has. And a K6-2 CPU would be interesting too. A Celeron could be an
option if it's smaller cache doesn't hamper performance too much.
-- Martin