A guru's world: raid craze

Rand

Lifer
Oct 11, 1999
11,071
1
81


<<

<< It's sad that I'm strangely entertained by the RAID math. Thanks for the link. >>



And i thought I was the only one.
>>



Unfortunately no, it's sad that I actually bothered to do the math to work out the last question.
 

jonnyGURU

Moderator <BR> Power Supplies
Moderator
Oct 30, 1999
11,815
104
106
Adul, Don't forget to tell everyone how off your first guess was. ;)
 

ChrisIsBored

Diamond Member
Nov 30, 2000
3,400
1
71
eh... he talks a lot about RAID 6, I don't know of anyone who actually supports or regularly uses RAID 6. It would be a waste of space, 2 drives left for fault tolerance rather than 1 such as in a RAID 5, you might as well just leave one drive as a hotspare so it's not in use. Less chance of it going bad if the drive isn't actually in use and is there to backup a failed drive on the fly.
 

jonnyGURU

Moderator <BR> Power Supplies
Moderator
Oct 30, 1999
11,815
104
106
eh... he sure does. /me looks around

The only good thing about RAID 6 is the fact that the data is striped twice over the array. This means that 2 drives can die. Let's just say that the server is left unattended over the weekend and two drives die.

Hey... Could happen. ;)

When spending that much money on data storage, do you think the price of one more drive is really critical?
 

Pariah

Elite Member
Apr 16, 2000
7,357
20
81
Good luck even finding a RAID 6, AKA RAID 5+, capable adapter let alone finding someone using one. Controller design is extremely complex for RAID 6 and the performance is pretty poor accordingly. There are better and cheaper solutions vs RAID 6 when you factor in the cost of RAID 6 capable adapter.
 

jonnyGURU

Moderator <BR> Power Supplies
Moderator
Oct 30, 1999
11,815
104
106
That's why I said "the only good thing". ;)

I find that RAID 5+1 is quite accomodating and controllers are readily available.
 

Pariah

Elite Member
Apr 16, 2000
7,357
20
81
I don't know about readily available, I don't think I've ever seen one. The only RAID levels I would consider readily available would be 0,1,10,0+1, and 5. 3, 30, 50, and 0/5 are available on most highend cards. Using multiple RAID controllers, RAID5+1 would be pretty easy to implement.