Finding the best catch-all raid setup

[imported_tsniff]

Hey everyone,

I am building a new server and trying to decide what is the best method to go about setting up the drives and raid.

Here are the basics of the system:

Dual 5130 Woodcrest.
Supermicro Board and chassis.
6 250 SATA2 WD Caviars

Basically, it will need to do a bit of webserving, sql and all that related stuff.

I also want to use the sytem for development (programming), video encoding, image editing.

Now I know for the webserving, sql, etc., raid 5 would be best. But for video and image, raid 5 is not.

Here is my thoughts, I setup a raid 1 for my operating system. I can use that for video encoding and image editing.

Since I have only 6 SATAII from the controller, I was thinking one of the two methods for the remaining 4 SATA connections.

1. Set the other 4 up for raid 5.
2. Setup 3 for raid 5. Doing this, I can use the last SATA for a 500 GB backup drive.

With the 500 gig separate, I can backup all important stuff from both the raid 1 and the raid 5. Then if some crazy thing happened like 2 drives failing in one of the raid sets, I still have something to work with.

Or I can just setup the 4 drives on raid 5 and use a USB drive for backup.

What do you think?

I guess the answer really depends on how much better a 4 drive raid 5 is over a 3 drive raid 5. This I don't know so any help would be great.

T

 

[sieistganzfett]

if you could do this have a spare with raid 5 so its 3 HD and the 4th is the spare.. if do raid 5 with leaving an extra drive as a "spare" if one fails it goes onto the next to replace the failing drive... i think your board will allow that option if it allows raid 5. if you needed more details, i think wikipedia explained this all fine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks#RAID_5

edited:
if your motherboard fails, since thats doing the raid, your going to be in a bad spot with all this raid if you dont have a backup that you can really "restore." personally, i would do 4 hd in the raid 5 with the 5th as the space if you need space that bad, and that 1 extra drive to just do your backups to, but ideally you want to have backups you take off site, like a tape backup for instance that occurs every night and ejects the tape so you can take it off site in case something happened.

 

[imported_tsniff]

Actually the more and more I think about it I am thinking of getting a RAID card and not using the onboard raid. The onboard only supports 6 while I can get an 8 card and then be able to make use of all my hotswap spaces.

I'm just wondering if I should go single normal drive on my OS drive and just image it or should I go raid one with hot-spare.

I'll then setup a 4 drive raid 5 for data with a 5th hot-spare.

I've been looking at cards and I'd really like online expasion. I was looking at the Areca ARC-1120 but from what I hear, it's not true online expansion. It creates sort of an added partition. Anyone have ideas if that is true? I also hear people have had problems with this card failing.

Any suggestion on a 8 great SATAII card with hotpspare and expansion? Preferably PCI-X.