Do you Raid?

[FelixDeCat]

After 30 years of computing, I officially started using hardware RAID 1 on two 1tb drives instead of manually copying data. Windows boots 1 second faster and things go better with Coke.

I like it.

 

[Lifted]

At work yes. Not at home. RAID 1 is used for high availability. It's not a backup solution as any inadvertent deletion or changes to data, or corruption of data, is mirrored across both disks.

If you work from home and your time is valuable, then it's probably worthwhile as long as you have some other storage or a cloud solution for backups in place.

If you have an alternative backup solution in place, and are looking for speed, then go with RAID 0 or SSD, though RAID 0 in a 2 SATA disk home user scenario will have little speed benefit IME.

 

[FelixDeCat]

At work yes. Not at home. RAID 1 is used for high availability. It's not a backup solution as any inadvertent deletion or changes to data, or corruption of data, is mirrored across both disks.

If you work from home and your time is valuable, then it's probably worthwhile as long as you have some other storage or a cloud solution for backups in place.

Hmm...being new to raid, I hadn't thought about that. That was one advantage to manually copying was the existence of older copies if an undesired change took place.

Having had this system in place for a year, I found the third drive (of a three drive system) was used maybe once a month or less. I also have the most important files burned to DVD/ BluRay for the worst case scenarios.

I use SSD as my primary drive. These other drives store MP3s, shows, movies, recovery / installation files, projects, etc.

 

[Baked]

RAID 0 a pair of SSD for the boot drive. Another SSD for programs. Conventional HDD for files.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Linux md raid 5 at home for data. In fact with today's very low QC on hard drives and the fact that hard drives are so big now, I'd never go without raid. Too much is at stake. Only place I don't do raid is OS drive as I usually go with a SSD, and the OS drive should not have any data on it anyway. I'll usually take an image of the OS drive in case I have to restore to a new drive. I also have single drives I treat like tapes, for backups. But all "live" data drives are raid.

Building a storage server, might setup a raid 10 array too. One nice thing with using software raid is the ability to do a live grow of the array without taking it offline.

 

[Soccerman06]

Wrong kind of raid for me

 

[KlokWyze]

My current storage setup:
Primary computer (always on)
1st SSD --> OS/programs
2nd 500GB HDD --> Media Share/programs
3rd 1TB HDD --> network backup share

I just image the all system drives using Macrium to the network backup share. It's only my primary computer and 2 laptops so the 1TB is more than enough. I do a daily backup of my primary OS drive. I do a weekly backup of the 2nd drive.

Looking into setting up a faster standalone network storage server so I just installed and am testing a NexentaStor appliance which is very cool. I have 4x40GB drive setup as a RAIDZ1 and IF I decide to go with this I will just upgrade the drives 1 at a time to bigger drives and add another drive to RAID1 the OS drive. Need to upgrade my home network with an electrical socket adapter (already ordered) as that is a major bottleneck for backup up large amounts of data and streaming.

 

[Jadow]

raid 5 on the servers I manage at work. at home? no

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I hit two small wasp nests with Raid this afternoon.

Oh... you mean RAID? Nah. Used to have RAID-0 spinners for my boot volume, but a single SSD makes that kind of a moot point. Sure, you can RAID SSDs, but 400+ MB/sec is good enough for me.

It's better to have two computers with one SSD each, imo, than one computer with two.

 

[ch33zw1z]

2x2TB RAID1 on Ubuntu. Backup of the RAID1 to a couple external drives.

 

[skyking]

RAID 1 on everything from servers to desktops. Not always the fix-all, though. My desktop has died, motherboard style

 

[smitbret]

I cannot figure out why people still use RAID 1 for home use when RAID 5, RAID 6 and other parity solutions will give 99% of the reliability much more cost effectively and real 1:1 backups are more secure.

I cannot figure out why people would use RAID 0 at all when SSDs are faster for nearly the same price. I suppose if you just had the HDDs lying around.......

 

[Red Squirrel]

I cannot figure out why people still use RAID 1 for home use when RAID 5, RAID 6 and other parity solutions will give 99% of the reliability much more cost effectively and real 1:1 backups are more secure.

I cannot figure out why people would use RAID 0 at all when SSDs are faster for nearly the same price. I suppose if you just had the HDDs lying around.......

Only place I find raid 1 might be useful is an OS drive, but for actual data storage, if you're going to lose half your disk space, may as well make it count and do raid 10. Raid 5 is usually good enough though and as spindles increase so does speed.

Though I recently heard that raid 5 has lot of issues now, but I don't really get how raid 5 itself can have lot of issues, maybe specific implementations of it? Been running raid5 myself for a long time with no major issues. The issues I do have are hardware related, and I'm finally building a new server so hopefully those problems will go away.

 

[ch33zw1z]

I cannot figure out why people still use RAID 1 for home use when RAID 5, RAID 6 and other parity solutions will give 99% of the reliability much more cost effectively and real 1:1 backups are more secure.

Cost. Follow the money. I can only plug so many drives into my mobo. RAID1 is sufficient for my needs. And I can allocate funds to offline storage for a more effective critical data storage solution.

When I was running windows, I didn't raid. I used Create Synchronicity to mirror do incremental backups. When I went Linux, RAID1 fit the bill.

My future plans, funds permitting, will be a FreeNAS server with ZFS.

 

[Zap]

RAID 1 is used for high availability. It's not a backup solution as any inadvertent deletion or changes to data, or corruption of data, is mirrored across both disks.

This is why I often mention the obligatory "RAID is not a backup" in many threads. Bickering usually ensues.

Been running raid5 myself for a long time with no major issues.

Have you had to rebuild the array due to a failed drive? That might be where you find the issues, ranging from "not working at all" to "works, but spent a whole day rebuilding while I couldn't use my machine."

 

[Cerb]

I cannot figure out why people still use RAID 1 for home use when RAID 5, RAID 6 and other parity solutions will give 99% of the reliability much more cost effectively

That that 1% matters. It can reduce performance below usable levels. In addition, error rates are correlated with utilization. IoW, an array streaming MP3s is less likely to encounter an uncorrectable error than an array rebuilding itself by performing semi-random reads across all the drives.

RAID 1 and RAID 10 do not have these problems. They'll be usable while rebuilding, rather than snail-slow, and will rebuild far faster. A RAID 5 array, with healthy drives, can be null and void for hours, or maybe even a couple days, if you get unlucky with a shutdown, FI.

The cost difference is minimal, and is often made up for by not needing to buy a controller card, which can be a necessity for good RAID 5 or 6 performance (1 1TB drive is only $70, 1 4TB drive is only $150, and you don't need REs for software RAID, while a good RAID controller will typically be around $150 used, or $200+ new).

and real 1:1 backups are more secure.

Backups are the only way to secure data. RAID saves you from downtime due to drive failure.

I cannot figure out why people would use RAID 0 at all when SSDs are faster for nearly the same price. I suppose if you just had the HDDs lying around.......

8 times the cost is not nearly the same (compared to 1TB HDDs).

A 16GB RAID 0 array, FI, made up of 4TB drives, would offer around 600MB/s, and cost the same as a single 1TB SSD, offering 550MB/s. So that's 16 times better, in terms of cost, using higher-capacity drives. Sure, you get random performance with the SSD that's worlds better, but good uses of RAID 0 are for space and sequential (desktop tweaker types never needed RAID 0 or SSDs, but they have to feel they have something better than other players).

 

[Red Squirrel]

This is why I often mention the obligatory "RAID is not a backup" in many threads. Bickering usually ensues.



Have you had to rebuild the array due to a failed drive? That might be where you find the issues, ranging from "not working at all" to "works, but spent a whole day rebuilding while I couldn't use my machine."

Many rebuilds. Takes bloody ages, yes, but no issues. Raid6 would make me less nervous that another drive fails though. I think my disk controller might be killing drives as a recent drive I replaced is already failing, thankfully that drive is now the hot spare so it's not part of the array. I'll have to RMA it sometimes but I will test it in my new server first once I get the rest of the parts.

Raid 6 + hot spare is probably best way to go for mass storage. Though I'm also kinda leaning towards raid 10. More wasteful, but higher performance and faster rebuild times (I think?).

 

[thecoolnessrune]

No RAID on my end machines since they are all Laptops currently.

Linux MD RAID 1 on my Xen boot drives on my VM box.

ZFS Mirror (RAID 1 with proper scrubbing and checksumming) on my Storage array boot drives.

ZFS Mirror (RAID 1 with proper scrubbing and checksumming) on my Storage array LOG drives

ZFS Mirror Tank (RAID 10 with proper scrubbing and checksumming) on my Storage array drives (3 sets of 2 3TB drives)

No redundancy on my ZFS cache SSDs. It makes no difference if one or all drop out of the tank. Just lower read speeds until they are replaced and the cache is filled again. The SSD's are still checksummed so no worries about data errors.

Of course all of this is complimented by an exhaustive set of backup routines.

ZFS array except for other computer's Crashplan backups -> Crashplan

Laptops -> Crashplan
Laptops -> ZFS array via Crashplan

(the above allows multiple backups whether I'm at home or not)

VM's -> Built in backup routines to ZFS array

(the above goes to a directory that then gets included in the ZFS array's Crashplan backup set)

I've lost data back in the day, but I'm pretty well set to not only have to worry about going down, but also being able to recover readily in the case of end devices going down (such as a laptop SSD failing).

 

[FalseChristian]

Yes, I use RAID. It kills bugs dead!

 

[JBT]

I have some old 1.5TB drives in RAID 1. I wouldn't do it again though.

 

[Charlie98]

No need for RAID on my desktop, my needs are not that demanding... and then there is the issue of backing up. I just went with a decently sized SSD and put everything on it, and back that drive up X3 with spinners.

 

[fleshconsumed]

I'm using Hardware RAID5 at home on Adaptec 31605. It was good solution until I ran out of space. It's not easily upgraded, there is always a chance of something going wrong during upgrade, so the safest way is to just to build a new box with totally new hard drives and controller, which costs a lot of money. Because the cost is so prohibitive, especially after the flood, I've been forced to store my data on JBOD.

I'm not cool with no redundancy of any kind, and I'm tired of hardware RAID5 that I cannot easily upgrade. So I'm thinking at the end of the year I'm going to build a new box and just use JBOD with SnapRAID or FlexRAID for redundancy backup.

 

[Evadman]

20 disk RAID 60 array on an Adaptec 52445. It's decently fast, but not fast enough.

 

[smitbret]

I'm using Hardware RAID5 at home on Adaptec 31605. It was good solution until I ran out of space. It's not easily upgraded, there is always a chance of something going wrong during upgrade, so the safest way is to just to build a new box with totally new hard drives and controller, which costs a lot of money. Because the cost is so prohibitive, especially after the flood, I've been forced to store my data on JBOD.

I'm not cool with no redundancy of any kind, and I'm tired of hardware RAID5 that I cannot easily upgrade. So I'm thinking at the end of the year I'm going to build a new box and just use JBOD with SnapRAID or FlexRAID for redundancy backup.

I love my FlexRAID setup. unRAID is a great option for this kind of thing if you don't need Windows or main OS. Its hardware requirements are very low, too.

www.lime-technology.com

 

[Mushkins]

Did the raid thing years ago for a gaming system before SSDs were anywhere close to affordable or large enough. The extra speed was kind of nice, until one of the drives shat out and I lost it all. Not to mention the integrated controller was sketchy and gave me years of headaches.

IMO not worth it for everyday home systems, the speed gains are negligible considering the prevalence of SSDs today, and the chance for failure is that much higher.