On Feb 13, 2008, at 10:19 PM, Tracy R Reed wrote:
Hope this is well supported. It might be a good way to go if you don't need RAID 5. I don't recommend RAID 5 for much of anything these days anyway. The performance just sucks and offers less protection than you might think.
I tend to prefer RAID 10 if I have the drives available to support it, and at least one hot-spare for every 4-8 drives in the array.
If you really need to squeeze more space out of the number of drives you have, I'd recommend RAID 6 (double the parity, double the fun!) plus one hot spare drive per 4-8 drives in the array. At least RAID 6 can survive a double-disk failure, and with a hot-spare, you're at least already rebuilding the first failed disk when the second one goes.
At any rate, I'll only do RAID 5 or 6 if I've got a hardware controller to take care of all the caching and parity computations without having to involve my host CPU or IO.
RAID 1E was recently introduced to me, and looks like an interesting solution when you want to do RAID 10 but have an odd number of disks. Same overall performance and failure characteristics of RAID 10, too. In fact, a 1E array on an even number of disks works out to be the same as RAID 10.
If RAID 1 is your thing, though, and you're still paranoid about double-disk failures, get three drives and do a double-mirror (three copies of the same data).
Anyway... Gregory -- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
