Replacing Raid 5 Disks with SSDs

Question

We are wanting to replace our current 3 drives (Dell Savvio 10K.6 300GB) in our RAID 5 with SSDs on our Dell PowerEdge T320. We run a database on our server that is accessed by 8 to 9 workstations in the office. The employees having been complaining for a while now about how slow it is using the client software on each workstation. We have checked the PCs and the network over multiple times, and found no issues, so we suspect that swapping the mechanical drives for the solid state drives on the server could finally make the difference.

What type of SSDs would you recommend for our server setup? And how would we replace them? Just replace one drive at a time allowing each SSD to rebuild itself or is there another way?

Also, if we decide to stay with the 3 mechanical drives, will adding a 4th drive likely show any perceptible performance gains? What about 15K drives vs the 10K.6 we are currently using?

DELL-Shine K · Accepted Answer

Mixing HDD and SSD on same virtual disk is not supported. Hence you can not replace HDD with SSD on a virtual disk. You need to create separate virtual disk using SSD drives then copy the data from HDD virtual disk to SSD virtual disk.

DELL-Young E · Answer

Hi, usually in this community we provide help for after sales tech support and your questions is more in the line of consulting. Anyhows, I don’t think SSD was around when T320 first came to the world.

Also I may have found a similar situation here:

https://dell.to/3V9eZIM

Wish you a good weekend.

Modify_inc · Answer

Good to know, I had no idea that would have been an issue. Wouldn't using RAID 1 with two certified 300GB SSDs be faster than our current RAID 5 with three Dell Savvio 10K.6 300GB drives?

DELL-Charles R · Answer

Hello Modify_inc,   Solid State Drives would be faster than rotational drives but I don't have any numbers comparing that scenario. I would think it would be faster.

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

Replacing Raid 5 Disks with SSDs

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