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March 7th, 2011 13:00
Help on deciding which RAID for a file server
R510 PERC 6i
Windows 2003 R2 x64
50 shares with most likely no more than 20 users acccessing files at the same time
I have four WD RE4 1TB 7200RPM drives (Enterprise) that I can either put in RAID5 (2.7TB) or RAID10 (1.8TB). I won't have more than 200GB of data on it at first, so this either configuration will last me for years and years.
I'm leaning towards RAID5 since the read performance should be acceptable and I won't need the fastest write times.
Any thoughts?
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gregoryagu
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March 9th, 2011 15:00
I am no expert but since no one else has answered this, I would suggest NOT using RAID 5. The issue is the long rebuild times for large disks means a large windows of opportunity for a second drive to fail which will mean your data is toast. When drivers were smaller, then it wasn't really an issue. There is much info out there available on this. If 1.8 TB is enough space, go with RAID 10, it is much safer for your data, and I believe the perfomance is acceptable as well.
Greg
theflash1932
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March 9th, 2011 16:00
I would second the recommendation for a RAID 10, for three reasons (two of which were mentioned already by Greg):
1. Higher degree of data protection. By no means should any RAID setup replace a backup plan, but you do have (up to) a 2-disk fault tolerance with RAID10.
2. Better performance. Whether reading or writing, in most cases, RAID 10 will perform better than a RAID 5, due to the parity calculations involved and the geometry of a RAID 5.
3. (And probably most importantly...) You cannot have a single RAID 5 array of 2.7GB and use it all. Windows (any OS for that matter with any MBR disk) cannot see greater than 2TB. You would have to convert the disk to GPT in order to use more than 2TB, but Window cannot boot to a GPT disk, unless installing 2008x64 or greater on an EFI-enabled system (the R510 is EFI-capable).
So, you can do RAID 5, but you would have to create two RAID 5's across the disks ... one big enough for the OS, and the other for data. Each RAID 5 would appear to Windows as a separate "disk", the data disk could then be converted to GPT to use >2TB.
Best option, in short ... create your RAID 10.