if your going with a dedicated server and can configure the disks as you want, this option will give you the best performance with the maximum space at the cheapest price
ssd drive estimate 40% of your sites size to allow for growth and cache space partition with 500 mg boot 2 gb temp and therest reserved for home (or var or whatever your servers account space isstored in)
satas are far cheaper for far more space get 2 large satas at roughly 3 times your sites current size
mount the 1 sata at /youraccount/public_html?data/media this will alow for plenty of growth space most ofyour sites growth will be in media, images, videos and music. important! do not symlink your media folder to a media disk mounted outside your account space...it can be done but may cause massive hassles in the long run, instead mount the media disk in the data/media location within your site!
use the second sata as a backup drive
since all images will be resized and cached andserved off the ssd drive this setup will keep your site fast as can be
since sata drives are far far cheaper your overall costs would be about 1/2 of what it would be if you tried to run the entire site including the media directory off the ssd drive
this will alow plenty of space for lots of media growth, and retaining multiple backup copies
i'm running a large site, currently i had 2 650 ssds (raided) and a 1 tb media drive 1 tb backup but the media drive was at 86% and since adding the media drive the 2 ssds were wasting most of the space (added the media drive because the ssd was always around 92% moving media off there it now runs 26-42% depending how full the image cache is)
so reducing the ssd to a single 800 gb still alows plenty of space and alowed the 2 sata drives to be trippled in size to 3 tb each... at a reduced, not increassed price!
conclusion
1 use ssd for main site content...not media storage alowing space for growth and plenty of room for image cache
2 mount a media disk in data/media do not suymlink to it outside the sites account space!
3 media space is cheap plan ahead for double or triple what you need now...especialy if you do not limit uploads and alow large file uploads (like 3 gig videos)
4 don't discount the value of having space for multiple backups.. you may not notice a problem for afew days and without sufficient backup space you may not have a restore point to go back to before the problem began
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soaringeagle
head dreadhead at dreadlocks site
glider pilot student and member/volunteer coordinator with freedoms wings international soaring for people with disabilities
updated by @soaringeagle: 04/30/15 08:32:39PM
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