Raid 5, 6 or 10

[karldenton]

Hi,

 

I've just purchased a server from Dave and John at ICT Direct

 

2 x SSD for OS

6 x 600GB

 

It will have 2012 datacentre on it running hyper V with 2 virtual servers, a DC and a file server (Approx 1TB of data)

 

Would you go raid 5 or 10?

 

Was hoping raid 6 but think you need a license for P410i - John is finding out

 

Data will be backed up with Veeam to a NAS

 

Thanks

[3s-gtech]

From my SE326 M1, it states:

 

HP Smart Array Advanced Pack v.1.0 Feature Support (not licensed)

Features Included RAID 6 and 60

Drive Erase

Advanced Controller Settings

Advanced Capacity Expansion

Mirror Splitting and Recombining (Offline Only)

 

So 6 and 60 is out without a key. I always use RAID 10 as I place speed and fault tolerance above capacity - that's how I have anything really capacious set up (Hyper-V hosts, ESXi hosts etc). RAID 5 is reserved for backup storage like NASs here.

[Sagima]

With those sized drives you can get away with raid5 but if you don't need easy expansion or the space then raid10 is what I recommend and set all of my servers to for performance (all my mechanical ones anyway)

[pcstru]

Would you go raid 5 or 10?

For your application I would use 10 and I would avoid RAID 5 like the plague. The issue with RAID 5 aside from the possibility of a rebuild failing (which should be important too!), is the degradation of performance if a disc goes bad and you need to backup and then rebuild.

[caffrey]

I'm using raid 6 in a similar manner with no issues, server was bought from Dave - raid 1 for os, rest of the drives in raid 6. It was one of those HP SE316M1 with a p800 and it's been fine.

[BKGarry]

I am going to throw a curve ball in there. I actually have 2 x ssd in RAID 1 for OS, 2 x SSD in RAID 1 and 4 in RAID 5 that are then teamed together with storage pools in 2012 r2 with making sure I declared them as SSD and HDD through powershell first and put as a single disk to the OS. This then does block level (using the shadow copies tech) that put the most accessed blocks in SSD and the rest on HDD and it has increased the performance speeds to near SAN levels but without the need to actually have a SAN.

[3s-gtech]

I'm using raid 6 in a similar manner with no issues, server was bought from Dave - raid 1 for os, rest of the drives in raid 6. It was one of those HP SE316M1 with a p800 and it's been fine.

 

I think the P800 differs to the P410i on this.

[TwistedHelixis]

Rebuilding a faulty raid 10 drive is like watching the clouds drift by, rebuilding a faulty raid 5 drive is like going to the dentist, not a nice experience.