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6049
December 13th, 2012 08:00
RAID Configuration and Partition Configuration Question
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the following?
I have a MD1200 unit with x12 3TB drives. I need to create four volumes. Should I
1. Create 4 RAID-5 groups (3 disks for each set) then add this volume to the attached server or
2. Create one large RAID-5 group and create 4 windows partitions?
What is the trade offs? One of our MD3200 units was configured like this, with x4 RAID-5 groups. Not understanding why it wasn't just wont RAID-5 group, then four partitions.
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sketchy00
203 Posts
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December 13th, 2012 08:00
First, I would suggest removing this notion of there always being a correlation between RAID group, and volume/partition. A single RAID group might have several volumes.
Creating multiple very small RAID 5 groups means that you will be committing signifigant amount of space for parity (N+1). At the same time, I'd never recommend a huge strip set of drives set to RAID 5. It is really a balance between your storage (capacity and performance) requirements, and the level of fault tolerance dictated by business requirements.
FrostyAtCBM
57 Posts
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December 16th, 2012 14:00
Not sure if this helps or not.
I have an MD1200 loaded with 2TB drives (it is controlled by an MD3200 dual controller) and I use it for bulk storage ... file servers ... also I backup all my VMs using Veeam Backup and Replication and I store those backup images on a VM which stores its data on this MD1200.
I chose to split into two disk groups: dg1 is 5 disks RAID 5; dg2 is 6 disks RAID5; plus 1 disk as a Hot Spare
I then split those Disk Groups up into LUNs of approximately 2000GB each.
So I lost 1 drive (2TB) as my Hot Spare and another 2 drives (4TB) to Parity for the RAID5 disk groups ... leaving me 9 drives (18TB) of usable storage.