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What RAID Level for backup server?
What RAID level would you suggest for a backup server that has 12 x 3TB HDDs?
Comments
One of the following: RAID5/50/6/60
@serverian what resilience vs. capacity do you need? how does the value of the backup change over time? e.g. older stuff archived off disk...either to 3rd party cloud storage or tape/single disk
With 12 disk I would go raid50 personally.
Are these drives that will perform well in a RAID?
why not raid-z2 with one or two hotspare? I did something like that on a small backup nas using zfs
+1 for raidz. However, last time i checked was not very well supported under linux.
Maybe things changed @marrco ?
Raid 6 if you can afford the drives.. Raid 6 should be able to suffer 2 drive failures.
@Maounique i never said linux. Just use a BSD system. If all you need is just a cheap small home server to store your backup try to freenas (or nas4free). Just get a HP microserver n40L (less than 200 usd), install 2x4gb ecc ram and 5 wd red drives with 3TB each and freenas on a usb stick. You can have 11 TB in raid-z1 for less than 1500 usd.
I just found a small presentation on my computer about ZFS storage design: http://chilp.it/a0a244
I know that, there are not many bsd ppl here and personally i would have loved to see raidz in linux. There are implementations but didnt look promissing last year or so when i checked. I thought that you have more info about this.
Actually there is raidz for linux, but it doesn't work well with OpenVZ. The quotas don't work. I haven't tried it personally, but a friend of mine tried and this was the result.
Where are you buying these from?
If you know BSD (FreeBSD for example), and setting up hardware directly, I would set up RaidZ with dual-parity if you have enough drives. Otherwise Raid-6 in my opinion.
RAID 6 or Z. RAID 5 it's a very bad option for 12 large disks.
I'm between RAID6 and RAID50
@Nyr awwww come on, you can't just say that and not give some kind of explanation. (but yes I've heard Raid5 tends to get very sluggish the more full it gets, plus it only has 1 disk parity)
@kbeezie sorry, I am so lazy today.
Here you have a short and concise explanation: http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2012/10/raid6-or-die.html
@Nyr cool...
RAID6
Raid-6 loosing only 2 drives.
We picked RAID60. Performance has still been great.
Even if you don't know BSD, there's FreeNAS, which is straightforward enough. Also, 8.3.0 came out recently which provides FreeBSD 8.3 base and ZFS ver. 28.
8.3 is recent? (9.1-Release gona be out any day now).
I was referring to FreeNAS 8.3.0, not FreeBSD. The FreeNAS release is recent (while it is true based on the 8.x FreeBSD line)
RAID0
Live life on the edge yo!
A properly managed system functions very well on RAID50, 12 disks. RAID60 is typically overkill and the performance loss is significant.