RAID Questions
I know a bit about Raid, but I am just wondering what types of Raid does everyone if you use it.
I four 320GB hard disks and looking for the best way to set them up.
I was thinking of Raid5 but then someone mentioned to me Raid 1+0 or Raid 10.
What are your thoughts and experiences?
I want performance, but want to make sure that nothing is lost.
Raid 5 will only use the space of ONE drive out of however many you have for parity information. Actually IIRC, it spreads parity information over all the hard drives in the RAID array, but all together you lose the equivalent of one drive of space. This guarantees you against failure of one drive, as it can rebuild the array through the parity information stored accross the array. This is the setup I would go with. I think write/read performance is a little slower than RAID10, but look that up to be sure.
If I’m correct, the only upside to RAID10 is the slight boost in performance. The downside is that you have half your drive space lost. I think RAID10 has your data striped accross two drives (like RAID 0) and then its mirrored on the other two drives (like RAID 1). I’m pretty sure thats how it works, but you can double check.
I would go with RAID 5. Or you can do a RAID 0 setup (one drive fails, lose everything), and use an external drive or another drive to make a backup of your important stuff. That’s what I do in case I can’t boot my computer for other reasons, at least all my stuff is on the external.
raid 5 is going to slow down your writes but if your just going for backup or some other shit that is not write intensive its the best bet. reads should be a little bit faster then raid 0 but you will have more space.
I run a RAID-5 with 5 320GB disks. I am in the process of getting it going with my new 1TB disks. Performance is noticably higher than just a single disk. As for comparing to other RAID levels I have never run any other.
You may want to read this:
+1 for Raid 5. If you’re really anal, Raid 5 plus hot spare.
I pretty much run only RAID 6 (or RAID-DP) now but it only make sense for setups with 6 or more drives. 8 is the sweet spot.
Run RAID-5 if you have some way of backing up or of the data doesn’t matter.
You’d be an idiot to be running RAID-6 and not backing up the data anyway.
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