Do you Raid?

[bigi]

Desktops - SSDs no raid.

Server/Storage - RAID6 8HDDs.

 

[xeledon20005]

desktop: 2 ssd in raid 0

no other raid setup yet but probaly going to do something like raid1 or 5 in the future for storage.

 

[smitbret]

OK, so this questions pops up in my head:

For Home Users, why would you use RAID 1 instead of RAID 5 or 6? Ease of setup? Hardware/Software limitations?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

OK, so this questions pops up in my head:

For Home Users, why would you use RAID 1 instead of RAID 5 or 6? Ease of setup? Hardware/Software limitations?

If your primary fear is HDD failure, then a RAID-1 is "safe." And it'll fit in one of those ubiquitous 2-bay NAS enclosures.

If I had a 4+ bay NAS box, heck yeah I'd be running -5.

 

[aigomorla]

Raid-0 on 2 x 256gb Corsair SSD's as main OS.
Raid-0 on 2 x 74GB Raptors for temp file.

And i have 5 x 2TB R5 on my NAS / Server.

 

[Rio Rebel]

I am surprised so many people feel raid 0 is useless. I am admittedly not an expert in raid, but I recently bought a new laptop and converted my desktop to a file server (first nas4free, then Ubuntu) and tried several raid configurations. I already have an ssd for the OS, and I ended up putting two 2TB drives in raid 0 with a 4tb external drive backing up. For me, it's the best combination of performance and cost. If I were starting from scratch, maybe buying several 1tb drives in raid 5 would make the most sense, but I already owned the 2tb drives. Running raid 5 only starts getting cost efficient at 4+ drives - at three drives, you're basically getting 50% of the space for storage and the performance hit of redundancy.

 

[finbarqs]

if you use RAID-0 You better be doing backups consistently. Because if your MOBO or RAID controller goes south, it's pretty difficult to pull data out of perfectly good drives.

When I was younger I used raid 0 until my mobo did just that: it died. Lost all my data due to having faith in my PC not dying on me. Now, it's any RAID but 0. 1 is probably the easiest to deal with.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

I am surprised so many people feel raid 0 is useless. I am admittedly not an expert in raid, but I recently bought a new laptop and converted my desktop to a file server (first nas4free, then Ubuntu) and tried several raid configurations. I already have an ssd for the OS, and I ended up putting two 2TB drives in raid 0 with a 4tb external drive backing up. For me, it's the best combination of performance and cost. If I were starting from scratch, maybe buying several 1tb drives in raid 5 would make the most sense, but I already owned the 2tb drives. Running raid 5 only starts getting cost efficient at 4+ drives - at three drives, you're basically getting 50% of the space for storage and the performance hit of redundancy.

RAID 5 can only write to one hard drive per pool, which is the biggest problem with it. That being said, no one said (or should be saying) RAID is a backup. It isn't. It's high availability. The question is how often would you like to have your system crash due to a hard drive failure, and have to rebuild from backup? And that is, of course, assuming that silent corruption did not happen to your hard drive and your backups in the course of failure.

For me, another $150 for an extra hard drive is well worth the high availability of the system.

I'm not sure why people are even bringing in comments about RAID 0 and comparing it to other RAIDs. This is a topic about RAID, so feel free to mention it, but RAID 0 is not redundant, all it is, is a striping method to boot sequential writes and reads. Comparing cost efficiency of RAID 0 and RAID 1 is like saying we can treat cancer by lopping an arm off instead of chemo. They both solve the problem, but both have completely different risks and consequences..

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I find raid 5 is way better than raid 0 and you can still get good performance as spindles increase, with only losing 1 drive worth of space. Though with 10+ drives raid 6 is probably a better choice. Not sure what the performance is compared to raid 0, but I rather sacrifice a bit of performance for redundancy. Backups are that, backups. Idealy you should not have to use them if a drive fails because that is lot of downtime and grief even for something not serving other people.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

The question is how often would you like to have your system crash due to a hard drive failure, and have to rebuild from backup?

To which my usual response, also in the form of a question, is, "With the average lifespan of a HDD exceeding the lifespan of the average desktop computer, why is HA even a consideration for the home PC?" Replacing a defective HDD is New Drive + Backup Restoration Button. It's an overnight process. I can live with a nonfunctional "video library" for 12 hours. (*wink* *wink*)

Servers, even home servers, are obviously a different story entirely, since they generally support multiple users and may be accessed externally. It's a bigger inconvenience.

The only reason to use RAID in a workstation / non-server is striped performance. So RAID-0 or -5 is pretty much what you're there to do.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

To which my usual response, also in the form of a question, is, "With the average lifespan of a HDD exceeding the lifespan of the average desktop computer, why is HA even a consideration for the home PC?" Replacing a defective HDD is New Drive + Backup Restoration Button. It's an overnight process. I can live with a nonfunctional "video library" for 12 hours. (*wink* *wink*)

Servers, even home servers, are obviously a different story entirely, since they generally support multiple users and may be accessed externally. It's a bigger inconvenience.

The only reason to use RAID in a workstation / non-server is striped performance. So RAID-0 or -5 is pretty much what you're there to do.

RAID 5 is for anything BUT performance. The RAID 5 write hole makes write performance sub-single hard drive without extensive cache algorithms, aggregated pools, and proper work loads.

And if you can live without a proper machine that's perfectly fine. That's why I it is a question. Making a statement for one side or the other would be abysmally stupid since we don't know an individual's use case.

For me, An extra $100-$200 for an additional Hard Drive or SSD is well worth the cost of not having to try and get a machine up and running again after it goes down, especially considering that if I'm on my desktop (where I do actual work), it would be incredibly inconvenient for me to break that work, while waiting for my machine to rebuild. This would be in addition to losing whatever work I was doing between the failure and the most recent backup.

So for me, RAID 1 (a 2 drive mirror is all I choose to use) is all I need to give me extra reassurance and ensure that my backups are indeed only for catastrophic events (I lose my house or something like that).

 

[nk215]

RAID 5 is for anything BUT performance. The RAID 5 write hole makes write performance sub-single hard drive without extensive cache algorithms, aggregated pools, and proper work loads.

I disagree, my RAID 5 of 5 2TB disk can write much faster than a single disk alone. I do use hardware RAID card however. I've not tried the software RAID yet so I have no idea.

 

[smitbret]

I disagree, my RAID 5 of 5 2TB disk can write much faster than a single disk alone. I do use hardware RAID card however. I've not tried the software RAID yet so I have no idea.

This should be true since the data can be striped across mulitple disks on a Hardware RAID 5.... at least that's what I've always been taught.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_5#RAID_5

unRAID, FlexRAID and other software solutions are not the same.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Making a statement for one side or the other would be abysmally stupid since we don't know an individual's use case.

I agree completely, except:

And if you can live without a proper machine that's perfectly fine. That's why I it is a question.

"Proper" machine?



If you're using your home computer for work, and it's uptime-critical, that's different then most home users.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

I agree completely, except:



"Proper" machine?



If you're using your home computer for work, and it's uptime-critical, that's different then most home users.

I think you misunderstand me. What happens if you use your machine and your only hard drive fails? You are now working without a proper machine. If you can live on with that, that's fine.

As for whether or not its uptime critical. That's not really the question to ask. The question that should be asked, and is asked all the way from the home user, to the enterprise, and everything in between, is what is a certain amount of protection worth?

In other words, is doubling your storage cost (assuming a basic RAID 1 array, but this question arises with even more complex setups in environments all the time) worth the added high availability, as a function of stability, ability, and convenience. Whether or not this is worth it to you involves a host of factors, which is why we see so many different people on this board with so many different answers.

For me, and my situation, the additional $200 spent on an additional SSD is worth that additional amount of security and high availability. For others, that additional cost isn't worth it, and I don't begrudge them that at all

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I think you misunderstand me. What happens if you use your machine and your only hard drive fails? You are now working without a proper machine. If you can live on with that, that's fine.

Ah, I see. Sorry.

 

[Emulex]

just setup two machines, spend $75 on a brocade 1020 dual 10gbe nic, and run starwind iscsi target on each machine - you create a cluster of HA storage with 40gbe of bandwidth (more than core2duo DDR2 can go!) - if one machine craps itself, you still have all your storage.

with hyper-v if one machine fails, it can restart on the other machine (hyper-v assumption) so you have both storage HA and o/s HA

 

[FelixDeCat]

What is HA?

 

[thecoolnessrune]

HA = High Availability, or resilience against a machine going into an unusable state.

 

[kmmatney]

Well, I got rid of my RAID 1 arrays (using windows built-in RAID) last night in my WHS 2011 server, and am using Stablebit DrivePool instead. The Pros over RAID for me are:

1) Flexibility: Able to add new storage to the array one drive at a time
2) It uses regular formatted NTFS basic partitions, which can be read in any computer. Increases chance of recovery, even beyond the duplication
3) Able to add drives containing data on them to the drive pool. Existing data is not touched, and remains out of the drive pool. Copy the data into the drive pool and the drive pool gets the space back.
4) Being able to remove a drive from the array without needing to wipe out the drive.
5) It has the ability to "stripe" data reads, for a small performance boost

I like it better than the old drive extender.

 

[Red Squirrel]

One good way to justify the cost of raid and backup solutions is to ask yourself, if you lost the ability to access your data (ex: main drive failed, need to wait for another to come in so you can restore backups), or worse, lost all your data, how much money are you willing to spend to get back to a working state? Spend that money to prevent it from happening in first place with a proper raid setup and backups. Raid (except for 0) will allow you to keep on trucking if a drive fails, while backups will ensure your files are not lost if you delete something, or the raid completely fails (rare but can happen). I think both are very important and I'd never go without.

That said for a workstation I tend to just put a SSD and that's it. If the workstation goes down my data and services etc are fully intact on the server and I can access it with my phone or another computer in the meantime. I'm a fan of "the cloud" as long as "the cloud" is in my basement.

 

[Blieb]

Raid 1 for data. Pics, videos, etc. Things I don't want to lose. A simple hardware failure would be emotionally devastating. I have thought about getting cloud backup, but it might be expensive, talkin' 500gb not 5gb.

As far as "backup" - I have a 3rd drive I cycle in periodically, and I keep that drive off-site. This contributes to why I'm not doing 10 or 5 ... I need lower cost and simple.

I've been notified once in 4 years about a pending drive failure. Not sure if it saved me, but let's just say that it did!

 

[Old Hippie]

You will find the answer at the intersection of Cost-Is-An-Issue Street & Lots-Of-Capacity Ave.

It's down the block from the Data-Integrity-Is-Less-Important building, and across the street from Our-Application-Is-Primarily-Limited-By-Sequential-I/O, Inc.

It's on the second floor, right over the bakery. They have these awesome rolls, called "Pane de Parity–Calculations–create-CPU-overhead-and-most-non-enterprise-users-are-using-software-RAID." They're almost as delicious as the "Creme de data-integrity-doesn't-matter-because-I-do-frequent-backups."

Admittedly, it's not as great as the food at Chez SSDs, but the price per plate is way lower. It's totally "real."

Perfect. :biggrin:

 

[Batmeat]

Raid 1+0.....4ssd's. Why? Because I demand performance and reliability

 

[BigDH01]

Not that long ago, I had an 8x2TB RAID 6 (with hotspare) array attached to a hardware controller with RAID 1 for separate OS drives. This was backed up to a machine running FreeNAS with a RAIDZ array. I was about to expand to a RAID 60 array then I asked myself why I wanted so badly to be a digital librarian. Now I buy the movies I want on Amazon and let them worry about redundancy.

I will say that running a bunch of consumer drives in a RAID 5 array is rolling the dice a bit. I was running RAID 5 before upgrading and rebuilding the array could take 24+ hours. That's lots of activity while praying that another drive didn't fail.