Which raid level to take, is raid still relevant?

Necuno

Necuno

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Which raid level to take, is raid still relevant?

Its a basic file storage server. It had raid1 on it, but I was curious if raid is still relevant and what raid should one normally setup for a small business file server.

So yeah I'm raid n00b... please help :D

Thanks.
 
Wikipedia has a few pages to explain the raid levels, but if this is gonna be a file server , it's IMHO a good idea to use RAID 5. It provides you with redundancy without too much loss of performance or capacity. Minimum number of drives is 3 but get a hardware raid controller.
However, don't only rely on raid. Make sure that you also do regular backups that are not kept on site. Alway ask the question , "can I get all of this back if the building burns to the ground?" Or more likely in SA, if the building is cleaned out by sticky fingered criminals.
The cheapest and most reliable solution that is easy to recover are external hard drives.
 
Raid 10, good performance and no parity to worry about. Only catch is the usable space penalty as you won't get as much usable logical disk space compared to other levels. On the other hand keep good backups of your data as Raid is nothing close to backups.
 
kianm said:
Raid 10, good performance and no parity to worry about. Only catch is the usable space penalty as you won't get as much usable logical disk space compared to other levels. On the other hand keep good backups of your data as Raid is nothing close to backups.
Click to expand...

for a basic file server raid 10 is overkill, id stick with raid 5
 
Raid is very very relevant.

What raid you wants depends on how many hard drives you have and how much space you want.

If I have unlimited funds I generally do straight 1 to 1 mirroring with raid 1. If I have a limited amount of disks and and trying to maximize disk space then I go raid 5.
 
Necuno said:
Which raid level to take, is raid still relevant?

Its a basic file storage server. It had raid1 on it, but I was curious if raid is still relevant and what raid should one normally setup for a small business file server.

So yeah I'm raid n00b... please help :D

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Go for RAID 5 with hot spare if you have enough disks.
 
I'm guessing we're referring to software RAID here?

If so then if you're going to redo a file server then go with ZFS. Install a distro like FreeNAS or ZFSguru. For software raid it will give you much better data protection over your conventional software raid.

As ghoti says it depends how many drives you have. If you have 4 or more disks go raidz2.
 
Depending on the size of droves and the amount of drives, raid 5 is even not good enough nowadays. The time it takes to rebuild a 4TB drives array, mean you could lose the whole raid if another fails before a rebuild completes. Which is why raid5 nowadays is almost as bad as JBOD.

As for software raid, nothing wrong with it, nowadays CPUs are powerful enough to not have to worry about hardware raid, unless you go over 12 hard drives, in which case you will need it to work with a backplane or expander. That side, small business server will typically not go over 6 drives, in which case raid6 starts becoming a good standard if 6 drives, raid5 will work with 3-4 drives. I would just go with smaller drives if I had to go with raid5.
 
Necuno said:
Which raid level to take, is raid still relevant?
Click to expand...
Quite the opposite - ever more relevant. With the increased capacities you're pretty much forced to do something.

Though I'd go for a software solution...heard to many horror stories about not being able to find replacement controllers etc.
 
Extension question to OP's to the experts here...

How well does ZFS deal with adding more drives of say a different size later? (not hotswap)
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
I'm guessing we're referring to software RAID here?

If so then if you're going to redo a file server then go with ZFS. Install a distro like FreeNAS or ZFSguru. For software raid it will give you much better data protection over your conventional software raid.

As ghoti says it depends how many drives you have. If you have 4 or more disks go raidz2.
Click to expand...

Software RAID = ZFS must have. You can do snapshots and roll back, you can also replicate snapshots to a mirrored NAS - so if the first one blows up you still have all your data!

I'd recommend it!
 
Tinuva said:
Depending on the size of droves and the amount of drives, raid 5 is even not good enough nowadays. The time it takes to rebuild a 4TB drives array, mean you could lose the whole raid if another fails before a rebuild completes. Which is why raid5 nowadays is almost as bad as JBOD.

As for software raid, nothing wrong with it, nowadays CPUs are powerful enough to not have to worry about hardware raid, unless you go over 12 hard drives, in which case you will need it to work with a backplane or expander. That side, small business server will typically not go over 6 drives, in which case raid6 starts becoming a good standard if 6 drives, raid5 will work with 3-4 drives. I would just go with smaller drives if I had to go with raid5.
Click to expand...

I work on many networks and often have to implement or take over raid systems. Frustrating working with hardware raid and not been able to purchase out of date cards. The uniformity of software raid is also a positive for it.
 
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