Need opinions to select on RAID options .

[abhaybhegde]

Greetings

I am having an Asus P7P55D mobo, which can support 4 Raid levels.. RAID 0,RAID 1,RAID 5,RAID 10

I plan to have a RAID server in my college Intranet which currently has around 50-75 computers connected through LAN and hosted by only one single server.(non RAID)

My primary intention is to improve the file transfer speed from the Server to a local computer and also to have some sort of backup.

1.Among the RAID 0,1,5,10 which option to go for.? I am more inclined towards
RAID 5 .. but please give your opinions on any.

2. Will implementing a RAID 0 or RAID 5 in the server see any improvement in the file transactions from the Server to a computer?

Thanks 🙂

 

[Emulex]

sure. but make sure you use a good caching controller otherwise writes to raid-5 will severely degrade the Server to Computer .

Raid-10 (0+1) would yield higher write speeds with very little additional cost.

Regardless don't expect cheap to be reliable. you know its the same post over and over here.

 

[abhaybhegde]

sure. but make sure you use a good caching controller otherwise writes to raid-5 will severely degrade the Server to Computer .

Raid-10 (0+1) would yield higher write speeds with very little additional cost.

Regardless don't expect cheap to be reliable. you know its the same post over and over here.

Thanks Emulex, could you please elaborate on it?. I am totally new to RAID concept (practically as well as theoretically).

From googling so far i have narrowed down to these conclusions
RAID 0 - Highest speedup, lowest secure
RAID 1- Lowest speedup,Highest secure
RAID 5 -A blend of both
RAID 10- Again a blend of both.

Am i correct?

Could you lead me to any tutorial which gives a step by step process to setup a RAID system? (from selecting in BIOS to OS installation)

Thanks 🙂

 

[sub.mesa]

If you're new to RAID then don't bother with RAID5/RAID6; just my advice.

If you mainly care about speed just go RAID0; assuming you have a good backup. If you do need redundancy, it would mean RAID0+1/10.

With a 4-disk RAID10 you have the same speed as a 2-disk RAID0.

 

[abhaybhegde]

Is it necessary that for a RAID system the drives need to be from the same vendor? like either 2 WD hard drives(RAID 0) or 2 Seagate. Can we have hard drives of different vendors.?

 

[pjkenned]

Is it necessary that for a RAID system the drives need to be from the same vendor?

🙂 So... most home/ small biz users use the same drives. A big advantage is that if you had something like a Samsung F3 and a WD green, the entire array would work at WD green speed (read slow). As people store more critical data (aka become more paranoid) they start doing things like mixing batches of drives since there is a high correlation of failure times within batches of the same drive, and there's a chance that one firmware that will have a bug. Some people will take the batch thing to the next level and start using different drive manufacturers. Personally, I use Seagate, Hitachi, and WD drives in my server (OCZ/Intel/Patriot in my systems).

Bottom line though, it is probably best to at minimum keep all drives 7200rpm since you have a decent number of users.

Also, in your application, think strongly about raid 5, raid 6 (assuming you get a cheap dedicated controller), or raid 10. They all will scale nicely with additional spindles, and you really don't want to lose 50-75 people's data.

 

[RebateMonger]

Before you do anything with RAID, I'd suggest you set up a reliable, ongoing, backup system. What that means depends on how much data you have and whether offsite backups are required.

Once that's in place (or if you already have it), then you can consider redundant RAID if uptime is a big concern. For most non-business servers, the downtime associated with failure of non-RAIDed disks is not a big concern as long as backups are available.