That was my impression. I've been recommending to the boss that we stay with hardware raid 5. It hasn't burned me yet.
[Carroll Wrote]
As all things in life, the good stuff is never cheap. RAID 10 requires at least 4 harddisks at 50% capacity and can be terribly expensive to migrate upwards without an intelligent RAID controller that supports RAID extending.
Lately I have been a bit disappointed with IDE RAID at least with backplanes. Ah well, we will see. My desktop based RAIDs are fine and I recently broke my RAID10 into a RAID1 with 2 JBODs for much easier migration and backups.
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- Carroll Kong
Well, RAID5 is susceptible to the same RAID extending issues I mentioned as well. Those are just general RAID controller issues one has to consider. The RAID 10 has never burned me. It's just expensive. With RAID10 the problem is exacerbated due to the larger requirement of 4 disks at a minimum which means more money up front.
I only mentioned RAID extending since it is logical to wish to upgrade your entire RAID array from say 360 GB to 720 GB. If you get a controller which does not support RAID extending, it means buying a temporary HDD to backup the data, then buying 4 fresh new disks, rebuilding the array, restoring from backup. Repeat the same issue but with 3 disks for RAID5. The problems are the same.
RAID10 is superior to RAID5 in every way but price. RAID5 tends to have significantly inferior write performance compared to RAID10. As usual, you should do your own cost analysis to see if significant writes are worth the cost of going to RAID10 (extra disk).
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- Carroll Kong
