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Can you put multiple different levels of raid on drives

ahadley1124

I was wondering if it would be possible to put multiple different sets of raid on drives. For instance, having 20 drives and making 4 sets of raid 5 then putting them into a raid 5. If needed I can draw a diagram.

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1 minute ago, ahadley1124 said:

I was wondering if it would be possible to put multiple different sets of raid on drives. For instance, having 20 drives and making 4 sets of raid 5 then putting them into a raid 5. If needed I can draw a diagram.

I suppose it's possible (given enough of the proper hardware and programming knowledge), but why would you want to?

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4 minutes ago, ahadley1124 said:

I was wondering if it would be possible to put multiple different sets of raid on drives. For instance, having 20 drives and making 4 sets of raid 5 then putting them into a raid 5. If needed I can draw a diagram.

It would be possible, yes, but it'd be a terrible idea.

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Raid "10", "50", and so on exist, which is exactly the idea you're describing.  Your example would be called "RAID 55" I guess.  I've never seen someone do it but I don't see why it shouldn't be possible.  However, it's likely not the best way to go about what you need.  The issue with tiered solutions like that is, unlike what you get with RAID 5 or 6, the number of drives (or arrays) you can lose depends on which drives those are, so it's not an "efficient" solution.  What are you doing?

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It is possible. One example would be using hardware RAID controllers then using software RAID to RAID the hardware arrays together.

 

This type of double resiliency is really not necessary though and could cause havoc on the performance of the pool. You really only need one level of RAID.

 

It's important to understand that RAID is not a backup. If you want more than 1 parity disk use RAID6. Some software RAID solutions even support 3-bit parity (overkill IMO). Alternatively if you can sacrifice 50% of your storage RAID10 is also an option. Some use cases can benefit from RAID10 greatly compared to RAID5/6.

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