Re: new server - 8 drives, hardware RAID, how to configure?

Thanks for the detailed reply!

To provide a bit more detail, the RAID card I'm using is a LSI 8708ELP. I
will be using a battery module for the RAID card (won't be in for a couple
days).

Here's a thought... I'm using an Intel S3210SHLC motherboard for this
server. What if I installed a couple lower-capacity SATA drives (say 320GB)
on the motherboard's SATA RAID controller in a RAID1 configuration? That
would protect my system/OS partition, and leave me all 8 drives on my LSI
RAID controller for a 6TB RAID6 partition.

Thoughts?

I'm not very familiar with RAID10. Is the performance significantly better
than RAID6?


<calypso@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:gr3i6a$pmd$3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Kremlar <kremlar@xxxxxxxxxxx> kenjka:
Server will be an Active Directory server for a small LAN (5-8 users),
but
primarily a data / media server for streaming DVDs, photos, music, etc.

Using an LSI Logic RAID controller with (8) Seagate SATA 1TB drives. Most
of
the servers I configure are lower capacity with 6 SAS drives. I typically
configure 2 drives in a RAID1 configuration (system/OS array), 3 drives
in a
RAID5 configuration (data array), and leave the 6th drive as a global
hotspare. I go with 2 RAID arrays instead of 1 big array with 2
partitions
figuring there is a performance benefit (simulaneous access on 2
different
RAID arrays should be quicker than simultaneous access on 2 partitions on
the same array, right?).

With this server, I'm considering using RAID6 since I have 8 drives to
play
with and because of the capacity of the drives - even with a global
hotspare, it might take a day or 2 to rebuild the RAID5 in the event of a
drive failure. If a 2nd drive failed during that time, I lose my data.
With
RAID6 I'll have 2 parity drives to play with.

So, I'm looking for opinions. Here are the options I'm considering:

(1) - 2 drives RAID1, 6 drives RAID6, no hotspare
(2) - 2 drives RAID1, 5 drives RAID6, 1 drive global hotspare
(3) - 7 drives RAID6, 1 drive global hotspare

I'd go with option #3... For home use it's the best price/performance...

RAID1 is a big loss of capacity in this case, also in overall speed... If
you put some smaller/faster drive, it's OK to go with RAID1, but loosing
1TB
is not a good thing...

Let's see...

(1) - 1TB + 4TB = 5TB usable capacity, no hotspare
(2) - 1TB + 3TB = 4TB usable capacity, 1 hotspare
(3) - 5TB usable capacity, 1 hotspare

Then again, you could go with RAID10 option to get 4TB usable capacity
with
the best performance, no hotspare, but good redundancy overall (4 drives
could break in this configuration, but you must be lucky to loose two that
are in internal mirror :) )...


--
Policajaca maltretira ogadjen limunog mrcvarija cijeli dan ?
By runf

Damir Lukic,
calypso@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://inovator.blog.hr
http://calypso-innovations.blogspot.com/


.

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