What level of RAID do you use?

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HostaPolis

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Out of curiosity, what level of RAID do you use?

RAID 0 for speed, RAID 1 for fault tolerance, RAID 5 or 10 for both, or something else?

Also do you use hardware or software RAID?
 
Hi.

Instead of RAID0, I will use LVM... both of them will be almost the same, join the disks to give one array or Volume group to use..

RAID-0 has good write speed, however, you will get more read speed on RAID-1 (less write speed)..

Hardware RAID will be first choice...
 
If you think of a 2 disk array.

RAID 0: will give you twice the read speed and twice the write speed of a single disk.
RAID 1: will give you twice the read speed and the same write speed as a single disk.

So for reading, RAID 1 will give you the same read speed as RAID 0.

However, RAID 0 will make the loss of the array 2 twice as likely, whilst RAID 1 will make the loss of the array half as likely.
Therefore RAID 1 is 4 times as likely to be available as RAID 0 (with a 2 disk array).

Whether this is done with HardWare or Software doesn't matte on a modern machine, there are pros and cons for both.

(Of course, RAID 0 is giving you twice the capacity when compared to RAID 1, just included for completeness).

LVM is advisable for use regardless of which type of raid you are using. It's far more flexible than disk partitioning and allows for the addition of further disks at a later stage.
 
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. In general, a RAID-enabled system uses two or more hard disks to improve the performance or provide some level of fault tolerance for a machine.
- Fault tolerance providing a safety net for failed hardware by ensuing that the machine with failed component, usually a hard drive, can still operate.
- Fault tolerance lessens interruptions in productivity , and it also decreases the chance of data loss.
You can setup a single disk with two partitions: one to boot from and ohter for data storage and have the data partition mirrored.
- It also matters whether you have hardware or software RAID, because software supports fewer levels than hardware based RAID. Different controllers support different levels of RAID and also dictate the kinds of disks you can use in an array- SAS, SATA or SSD
 
RAID0 with LVM is actually recommended and best practice. What stuff are you looking to host on the server ?
 
Do you mean RAID 10? Raid 0 has no fault tolerance, in fact, it's more likely to fail than a single disk.
 
We used to run RAID-5 on a number of our machines, and ran RAID-50 on our ecommerce systems. Lots of redundancy. All was on a hardware RAID.

If I remember right, the Software Raids didn't allow a hot-swap of drives should something fail. I don't know if that has changed, but I remember that was a reason we went for Hardware RAID many many years ago.
 
bigredseo said:
We used to run RAID-5 on a number of our machines, and ran RAID-50 on our ecommerce systems. Lots of redundancy. All was on a hardware RAID.

If I remember right, the Software Raids didn't allow a hot-swap of drives should something fail. I don't know if that has changed, but I remember that was a reason we went for Hardware RAID many many years ago.
Click to expand...

Do you use SSD's or standard hard drives for your RAID 50 setup? I'd be interesting in what kind of speeds you are getting.
 
We ran with SATA drives - at the time SSD was still only being introduced.

I do not recall our read/write times on the drives, but it was a very reliable setup. We had a number of drives fail over the years, but with the hotswap ability, it rebuilt the image on the fly and never had an issue.

Here's some base information on the Raid-50. They say High Read and Medium Write. All I can really recall is that we had no issues with any server in those configurations.

We later moved to a RAID-1 for files & single SSD for Databases.

Of course, we also provided HOURLY backups - so there was limited data loss should we have an SSD failure. Thankfully, we never had one!

Artashes can speak to the reliability and the backup service when we had an issue on the HostingDiscussion server. I don't recall the length of time on the outage, but it was fairly minimal because we had those hourly backups.
 
bigredseo said:
Of course, we also provided HOURLY backups - so there was limited data loss should we have an SSD failure. Thankfully, we never had one!

Artashes can speak to the reliability and the backup service when we had an issue on the HostingDiscussion server. I don't recall the length of time on the outage, but it was fairly minimal because we had those hourly backups.
Click to expand...

The way you ran your company I don't recall any issues at all, because most of the issues that might have happened were fixed before I could even notice.

It is this kind of proactive support that I was always in awe about and frankly I wish every hosting company was putting in that kind of effort into their tech infrastructure and service. It was pure spoilage to experience that level of hands on service as it is hard to accept anything less than that today.
 
We currently use Hardware Raid 10 with 12 SSD's on our most recent shared web servers. Our backup servers also use hardware Raid 10 but with large spinning drives with an SSD for read/write cache. Raid 5 didn't offer enough write speed or redundancy, we did Raid 6 for a while but switched to Raid 10 because we wanted more write speed.

We're now waiting to see if/when hardware Raid manufacturers make NVME raid cards.
 
I prefer to use Software RAID 10 because of good performance, low risk of data loss.

I do not use hardware raid because of If your Raid Array degraded/crashed and RAID rebuild in background then you can't find about it unless your reboot it and check status on on boot.
 
HostaPolis said:
Out of curiosity, what level of RAID do you use?

RAID 0 for speed, RAID 1 for fault tolerance, RAID 5 or 10 for both, or something else?

Also do you use hardware or software RAID?
Click to expand...

We use only raid 10 or raid 6 in dedicated where need high security and data safety

Also very good utility is aufs ( advanced multi-layered unification filesystem), they enable drive's .

But also use raid + lvm if we nee fast speed + safety.

:)
 
It really depends on what the service is, normally however we tend to see software raid 1-10 mostly used.
We really like software raid for the most part as it's been solid for us throughout the years.
Hardware raid 10 is the other options we tend to see often with BBU.
 
bigredseo said:
If I remember right, the Software Raids didn't allow a hot-swap of drives should something fail. I don't know if that has changed, but I remember that was a reason we went for Hardware RAID many many years ago.
Click to expand...

Software raid does allow for hot-swap. I have personally tested it.

I use software raid 10. Its simple to set up and reliable. No chance of a raid card failing.
 
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