• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

3 x 15kRPM SAS RAID5 vs 4 x 7200RPM RAID 10

Status
Not open for further replies.
A

AmongthechosenX

Senior member
Silly mistake I made in building my home server. Want to get everyones opinions on this, because I think I've been heading in the wrong direction.

I went ahead and bought 3 x 146GB 15k SAS Drives for a Dell PE2950 Gen II running 2 x Xeon E5345's and 16GB's of RAM.

I have 2 additional 1TB 7200 Seagate disks that I had planned on picking up a 3rd disk to match.

With 6 disks, I was going to make 2 RAID5 array's. a 288GB Array for the OS Partition and a 2TB Array for the Data Partition.

BUT, i didn't quite consider how slow RAID5 actually is, and now that I'm processing it, I'm looking at the 4 x 1TB SATA disks on my desk and considering changing the setup I had in mind to the following

2 x 146GB 15k SAS Drives in RAID1 for OS
4 x 1TB 7200RPM SATA Drives in RAID10 for Data

So I guess the real question is:

3 x 1TB 7200RPM SAS Drives in RAID 5

vs

4 x 1TB 7200RPM SATA Drives in RAID 10

I'm leaning towards the RAID 10, especially since I can sell these two particular SAS drives for over $100 each, and then only spend 3/4's of that money on SATA Drives for a backup server I'll be building beyond this server.

Thoughts?
________________
 
RAID 10 on the SATA drives will be faster and have better redundancy sort of (you can lose 1 disk out of each RAID 1 set, but you can't lose two disks from the same raid set, so it's a roll of the dice there). In the business world we rarely use RAID 5 anymore except in the lowest budget of situations. We start at RAID 6 for redundancy, 10 if performance without as much redundancy is needed. We still prefer RAID 50/60.

This of course assumes you're mainly writing data.
 
Also you'll probably get better answers if you ask a moderator to move you to the storage forum, their are alot of gurus there (including my brother who is a storage engineer)that help with storage related performance questions like this.
 
I do agree that this isn't highly technical by any means. I don't agree that RAID5 is dead. It is actually all over the place in business. However comparing 15k RPM SAS drives SATA disks not exactly apples to apples. RAID5 does have write overhead. It will be far more apparent in that very old and power hungry 2950 series that is likely at best a PERC6i with only 256MB of write cache. Worse still if the BBU is dead and not replaced as the PERC will disable write caching.

Also please tell me where I can sell 146GB 15k SAS drives for $100 each. I have a box of about 150 of them I will basically sell as scrap.... I mean they are all over Amazon for sub $30 with a Dell tray.

Personally I would likely dump that 2950 and go with a Synology unit based on power usage alone or build a small i3/i5 system and use that. It will likely be more powerful and cost less to run.
 
Last edited:
Even if the 15k drives are higher performance you have to ask yourself if it's worth the extra cost for the little extra performance you may get/notice in real life usage. With the same money you can get more spindles and more disk space with regular 7.2k sata drives.
 
RAID-10.

That said, if you cared about performance, you'd probably be using 7200rpm drives in RAID-5 and an SSD for cache. *hubbahubba*
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top