To RAID Or Not To RAID

[Terrahertz]

Well I run Raid 5 at home and we also run it at work on our servers[Raid 5 have saved many a network]. Anything can fail at anytime that's the nature of the environment we work in. The point of all this is what works for you. Like it has been mentioned many times a backup of your data [A proper backup] is crucial.

3 Samsung F1 Raid drives 320gb each.

 

[LordOfLA]

I was looking at the wikipedia raid article and came to the conclusion that raid6 was probably the best option of all of them. However you loose 2 discs to parity storage rather than 1, but you can sustain more disk failures before the whole thing dies.

 

[fitz]

RAID 6 is nice in that it provides redundancy for dual drive failure. It's NOT always the best choice though as the write penalty in RAID 6 is even higher than in RAID 5. There are basically six I/O operations for every write in RAID 6 vs four I/O operations for a write in RAID 5. This can be a significant performance issue in random disk writes so it is generally not recommend for a server that has a high random write characteristics.. It is works well in mostly read based scenarios. Rebuild times on RAID 6 can take forever as well due to the 6x penalty on I/O during the rebuild process.

RAID 6 is very useful for certain situations.. RAID 1 and RAID 1+0 are very useful for certain situations.. RAID 5 can be very useful (but is losing usefulness as disks get larger and larger). Raid 5+0 and RAID 6+0 is also gaining some favor out there in larger arrays. RAID 3 is actually very useful in certain situations as well..

Drobo does some very neat things and I'm starting to become a big fan of them in the smaller market spaces. Now, if only their prices would come down a bit...