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Raid or Raid 1?
Hello,
I bought a new 4TB server from online.net and I can choose whether I choose Raid 0 or 1. I am planning to upload some large files and share them with a 30-50 people. I don't know what to do for, basically space is important, but I guess 2TB is enough, but with 4TB I feel better.
I plan to keep some files for few years, while I'll keep deleting some other files.
I don't know what to do. What do you suggest?
Thanks!
Comments
Only you'll know what will work best for you.
RAID 0 for 4TB usable space.
RAID 1 for 2TB usable space.
Thanks,
But if I go with RAID 0 Will I lose the data after few years? (2-3 years) or something? What do you think?
RAID 0 has absolutely no redundancy so if you have drive failures, good luck.
It's based on your requirement and backup. If you already have another server to backup your files, go with RAID 0, it brings you faster and bigger storage.
If you want your data safer, go with RAID 1, it's slower and only has 1/2 storage compares to RAID 0.
Yes you will.
RAID 1 is faster than RAID 0. And RAID 1 provides redundancy, not backup.
????
or 2 weeks, disks can fail at any time, I have had super budget disks that simply have never failed and I have had expensive ones fail in just weeks, while the odds are they wont fail on day 1 it 'could' happen.
Isn't RAID1 supposed to be faster for non-sequential reads? I assumed so, but have zero real world experience with RAID0 to be honest. Writes are obviously faster on RAID0, but OP wants to serve files.
I would not recommend RAID0 in any situation. Go with RAID1. Some reads will be faster while writes are a little slower. But you have reliability. You have 1/2 chance of data loss with RAID1 while with RAID0 you have 2x data loss possibility.
In a sequencial read scenario, both Raid 0 and Raid 1 should have the same speed.
But random reads (and usually this is what you should care about) in raid 0 aren't predictable, you can have an application only reading from disk 1.
With Raid 1 you have the same data in both disks, so md/raid card can use both disks in a read operation.
tl;dr; Raid 0 = Raid 1 speed only in the best case scenario, in most real world usage Raid 1 read speed > Raid 0.
I can't think any usage scenario for raid 0 with HDD now that we have cheap SSD. And if you care a bit about your files, don't use raid 0.
Thanks, I guess you learn something new every day!
@JoeBiss - Remember online.net provide very nice backup space, but it will take time to restore from backup if disk failure and no mirroring...
Thanks a lot guys. I decided to go with RAID 1
I remember seeing something on here that said: "Friends don't let friends RAID-0".
Have to disagree a bit. With SSDs, I'd agree, but with spinning disks:
In the "best case" scenario (sequential read), RAID0 should outperform RAID1. This is because both disks in RAID0 are doing a sequential read, and the controller multiplexes the data coming from both, so you should get close to 2x the speed of a sequential read on one disk. This can't really be done as easily in RAID1 because seeking ahead is a relatively expensive operation.
In a typical random read scenario, where the targets are spread evenly across the disks, RAID0/1 should yield roughly the same speed. In a "worst case" scenario, where all/most of the data gets striped to a single disk in RAID0, then yes, RAID1 is faster.
The other option not mentioned here is no RAID. This gives full 4TB capacity and slightly better resilience than RAID0 since one disk dying won't bring down all your data (and hence makes restoring from a backup a bit quicker).
Should choose RAID 1 for redundancy and more safe.
Should choose RAID 0 for performance and don't care about data redundancy.
For me, I would choose RAID 1.
Thanks.