On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Carlos Mennens <carloswill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I built a new home server this weekend & am ready to load my O.S. >> (Arch Linux) on it today. It has 4 x 320 GB Seagate Barracuda's >> (SATA). I don't really have a specific function of this server at home >> beyond holding my data reliably and decent read / write performance. >> My question to you experts is what do you recommend I configure for >> this particular configuration? Should I run RAID 5 or RAID 10? To >> spare or not to spare? I really appreciate any best suggestions for >> general over all function on this matter. >> >> -Carlos > > I'm not an expert so take my input with a grain of salt but you don't > state how much space you need on the machine. Is 320GB enough? If so > consider a 3-drive RAID1 and save the 4th drive as a spare. That's > what I run using 3-drive 500GB WD drives. Works well over the last few > months. > > Keep in mind that as a newbie, if you repeat any of my learning curve, > booting from RAID is more difficult. I chose to not use RAID for the > /boot sector and just duplicated the grub setup and kernel + grub > files. If my Drive 0 goes down and I cannot I can reset the boot drive > in BIOS and boot from the second or third drives. > > Hope this helps, > Mark > -- Besides that you have these options RAID 5 with 3 drives and 1 spare - Gives you 640GB (320GB x 2) usable space RAID 5 with 4 drives - Gives you 960GB (320GB x 3) usable space RAID 6 with 4 drives - Gives you 640GB (320GB x 2) usable space RAID 10 with 4 drives - Gives you 640GB (320GB x 2) usable space If you need more than 640GB of space then RAID 5 across the 4 drives is the way to go. Otherwise it comes down to performance and risk. RAID 10 gives you the best performance and protects you from 1 disk failure, possibly 2 if the correct drives fail. RAID 6 will protect you from any 2 drive failures, but with more parity overhead than RAID 5. I'm a big fan of RAID 10 if you can afford the space and need the speed. Otherwise for smaller drives and spindles RAID 5 is great. If you are using TB+ size drives across 5+ spindles RAID 6 is great for reliability. My home setup consists of 3 x 1TB drives in RAID 5. With hdparm I get around 85MB/s on the drive and 130MB/s on the RAID 5. The array resyncs at 85MB/s, which takes around 3 hours to complete. From my Windows desktop over SMB I am getting around 30-50MB/s. Gigabit Ethernet in a perfect world maxes out around 110MB/s. Ryan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
