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Raid 5 guestions??

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patrickl:

--- Quote from: squirrellydw on February 02, 2008, 07:37:58 pm ---Yes, I am planing on raid 6 plus 1 hotspare

--- End quote ---
Oh wow. That's some serious overhead then though. Then you have 3 disks that don't add to the total storage space.

meismr:
If you're going to have three drives that don't add to the actual disk space why not go with 3 Raid 1 arrays.  That way if you have a double drive failure you can still have the option of sending your drive out to a recovery center to get it back.  I'm biased though.  I use Raid 1 for myself exclusively.  So if you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail :)

As a late post addition to a previous question;  There are a couple of good reasons to keep your OS and data on different drives, that's why the enterprise level places do it :)  For instance, our company recently wanted to do a large OS update (win2k server to win2k3 server)  They took out the old OS drive and put in a new OS drive with the OS already installed.  If the new OS didn't take they simply had to put the old OS drive back in. 

Another reason to separate the data and OS layers is to keep the data 'clean'.  If you have drives with data and program files then the data drives have a lot more non-data files in them...  cluttering them up.

Finally there's speed to think of.  Your OS uses one drive (usually.  I've seen some people Raid 1 their OS (separate from their data) but I think that's overkill) and the data read is bottlenecked by the drive.  If you're performing an OS task and trying to get data off the drive then you're impacting the data retrieval performance.


squirrellydw:
I don't plan on doing raid 6 plus 1 right away, but add to it in the furtue

patrickl:

--- Quote from: meismr on February 02, 2008, 08:10:54 pm ---There are a couple of good reasons to keep your OS and data on different drives, that's why the enterprise level places do it :) 
...
Your OS uses one drive (usually.  I've seen some people Raid 1 their OS (separate from their data) but I think that's overkill)
--- End quote ---
When you use a single disk for the OS (as opposed to a mirrored OS array) you cannot really claim "it's what enterprise level places do" anymore, because that's not what they use :P It would create a single point of failure and they would not do that.

The choice is between a single OS drive or an OS partition protected by RAID. In that case I'm pretty sure any enterprise level place would opt for the OS as a partition on the RAID array. Besides this isn't a enterprise environment, but a home environment. Although with RAID 6 and a hot spare ...

But indeed if you want to be able to install a new OS by swapping disks or if you are worried about performance of the server (which I personally wouldn't in the case of a file server, but still) then keeping the OS on a separate disk would be a beter idea. I don't quite get the "clutter" point.

meismr:
Enterprise level places most certainly DO keep their data and OS on different drives.  I didn't say enterprise places keep their OS on a single drive. 

This may not be an enterprise solution, but a home solution can still emulate a professional one.  Our 'generic' file servers at work are 6 disk solutions.  4 data drives all in raid 1 and 2 OS drives in Raid 1.  These are in a clustered environment as well...  This is extreme for the home.  What isn't extreme is a paired down version of this.  2 data drives in Raid 1 and a single OS drive (with images on a disk or on the other file server).

File retrieval performance is also a pretty large worry for a file server in general.  If you're working with small files and your primary concern is data protection then it becomes less of one, but if you're editing movies or opening .net solutions...  it becomes a larger one. 

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