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Raid or no raid
I was reading some other posts on here and someone made mention that raid 5 is a thing of the past. I am just setting up a little home file server and was debating using raid or just go with the hard drives as is. I understand that with raid 0 you don't get any data safety and with raid 1 you get data safety but you don't get larger volumes. With raid 5 you get a larger volume and data safety. I do realize that there is a read and write penalty because of the parity but for a home server it should be fine.
What I have: T110 II with i3, 16gb udimms, Radeon 3450 video card, SAS controller card, a small ssd for the OS and 4 3tb SAS drives.
torresfvr
13 Posts
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June 18th, 2020 02:00
Hi, as home server - raid 5 is ok in terms of space and safety. You will be prone at some point to RAID degradation because of usage, just remember to have a spare just in case. If the data of the server is of sentimental value I'd stick with a Raid 1 as a mirror backup and of course in any case have a further backup.. I've learnt this the hard way!
cj8281
71 Posts
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June 18th, 2020 16:00
@torresfvrThank you for the reply. I actually bought 5 drives, one is still sealed. This server doesn't have the space for a hot spare unless you only use 3 drives and leave the 4th as the hot spare. My old servers generally held 6 drives, the 4400 has a backplane that can mount 8 1 inch drives and another one that can mount 6 1½ inch drives. This server is to backup the 3tb WD MyBook drive that is plugged into the router as a "personal cloud" drive. As far as Raids go, since I have 4 drives, do you think a raid 10 would be better than a raid 5? I haven't heard of raid degradation before, what happens when that happens??
torresfvr
13 Posts
0
June 21st, 2020 10:00
Hiya, don't bother with hot spare use all 4 bays so its better redundancy. Since you have the spare drive any non-hot spare will only mean you remove the faulty drive - replace and plug the new drive back in to rebuild the array. Its good to hear you have a backup. So really you are covered either way
For 4 drives I would go raid 10 - its better fault tolerance + speed gain anyway but both 5 and 10 will only allow 1 drive failure. Raid 5 would give you more space overall. I have never EVER had multiple drive failures (unless someone breaks into the server room and nicks the drives for some reason!)
Degradation - Amber warning for imminent failure - so usually goes back to physical drive failure but manifests by slow loading/sluggish access behavior. It can be controller failure (mostly battery), power surges (get a UPS for any critical servers). So you get boot problems, missing partitions/corrupted or stop working, missing files etc. This needs to be attended to ASAP so that you can rebuild rather they wipe down and restore from backup.
Hope this helps.. all the best