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RAID array questions

M

markrb38

Senior member
I have had an Adpatec 3805 controller for a few years and have never lost data in RAID 5, even with a drive loss. I recently lost an array and was able to get the data moved before it died completely. This has scared me enough to look into alternative RAID methods with my current controller as I can't afford a new one.

My current running setup is 4 Caviar black 1tb drives (older 32mb cache version) in RAID 5 and I will be adding 4 Samsung f4 2tb drives as a separate array. I have never had a dropout with the WD blacks in the entire time I have used this setup, over a year.
Since the stuff on the black setup is what I would call need to have better then a single drive backup, but not super critical I will leave that as is.
However the stuff that will be going on the Samsung drives is a little more important to me.

My card supports RAID levels 0, 1,1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50, 60, JBOD. Of these what would give me the best balance of performance, drive space and protection? I do not have a battery backup on the card, but the computer itself has one and if it doesn't cost a bunch I think I will pick one up.

I currently run my Raid as one partition using 2 dynamic disks. Would I be better changing over to GPT on both or either drive arrays?

Thanks,
Mark
 
i'd stick to raid-10. Especially without a battery/flash backed write cache.

the extra costs of disks is small these days. and the lack of computing (raid-5-6 use a double read/write combo). without cache you will cripple your performance - even with cache you will cripple your performance.

I consider raid-10 means that you take all yours drives, stripe every 2 days together in raid-1 for protection, then stripe those (raid-0).

Usually servers like the hp dl380 will place half of the drives (4 2.5") on chassis 1 with a cable and the other 4 drives on chassis 2 with another cable. so in the event that you lose the channel/chassis/cable/power to that chassis the other will continue to operate with a 50% loss of disks.

the real win however is rebuild time since a pair of drives that have failed will only need to write out one replacement drive.


Raid-5 or similar are very very dangerous or expensive.

Now i have a san that has 8gb of cache plus 1gb flash back write cache - you can negate alot of the effects that hurt raid-5 (writing) versus raid-10.

You'd need GPT to deal with partitions >2TB that is for sure.
 
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