Web server SSD RAID 1 setup vs mechanical RAID 10 setu

tuprox

Member
Apr 3, 2012
63
0
61
I have a server with 6 2.5" bays which I would like to fill with 6 160GB SSD drives. The server is running an IBM SAS 3.0 RAID card (8i I believe). I'm torn between a number of different options for raiding these drives. I want redundancy so RAID 0 is not an option.

I know that if I were running mechanical drives I might run a RAID 5, 6 or 10 array, depending upon how much storage I need. I am OK with the 480 from a RAID 10, but I'm wondering what are the benefits of running a 6 drive RAID 10 array giving 480GB total vs running 3 RAID 1 arrays.

Since this is going to be a web server and the speed of the SSD's far out performs the 10k rpm and even the 15k rpm mechanical drives I'm wondering id 3 RAID 1 arrays might be better as accessing each array independently might be faster than having one large VD full of 6 disks.

What would you suggest for a setup like this for the fastest performance and redundancy?
 

LokutusofBorg

Golden Member
Mar 20, 2001
1,065
0
76
If this is truly a web server, then SSDs are going to be completely wasted on it other than for power concerns. A web server will load things into memory and serve page requests from there. Have you actually profiled your web server to see that IO is a bottleneck? Is this "web" server doing things beyond being a web server?

I would put a couple SAS drives in RAID 1 and leave the rest of the bays open. Or two SSDs in RAID 1 for a low-power option. Building up a high-performance RAID array -- especially one with SSDs -- is complete overkill for a web server.