DAndrew3

updated

13 years ago

D

DAndrew3

1 Rookie

•

32 Posts

0

58685

December 24th, 2013 05:00

RAID -vs- StableBit DrivePool

System: PowerEdge T320, 8 Hot Swappable 3.5" bays

OS: Windows Server 2012 Essentials

RAID Controller: Perc 710


I need to have multiple physical drives show up in the OS as one large drive to hold 4+tb of backup data.

I was going to use RAID 5.

On a different forum a number of people are making a convincing case that I should use StableBits DrivePool instead. 

What do you experts think of that?

Thanks,

Andrew

  • theflash1932

    11 Legend

    •

    16255 Posts

    2892

    0

    Posted December 24th, 2013 08:00

    I think StableBits is not designed to replace hardware RAID on servers.  I personally would not use it in a production environment without first testing its robustness in real-world application.

    Also keep in mind that the PERC does NOT support non-RAID, so the only way to present StableBits with individual drives is to first configure each of your physical disks as single-disk RAID 0's.

    Personally, I would skip StableBits and configure your disks in a RAID 10 or a RAID 6.  For a 4TB RAID 10, you could use 8x1TB disks (or 4x2TB) - it would give you great performance and good redundancy.  For a 4TB RAID 6, you could use 6x1TB disks (or 4x2TB) - the performance would be about the same as RAID 5, but would give you better redundancy than RAID 5, particularly important when talking about storage in the amount you are talking about; performance would be less than RAID 10, particularly on writes.  I think StableBits might be a good replacement for RAID 5, given the reliability and performance history of RAID 5, but I'd probably only consider that if I needed the storage capacity of a RAID 5 (over RAID 10) AND my controller didn't have the ability to do RAID 6 (or was JBOD only).

    Either way, do yourself a favor and don't get consumer/desktop/laptop class drives.