What's your go-to RAID level for SSDs these days?

[KuJoe]

Now that SSD reliability/endurance is pretty good and you can overcome the lack of TRIM with OP, what's you go-to RAID level when using SSDs in a server? I've been switching between RAID10, RAID5, and RAID50 on my production servers depending on the use case but I'm curious what everybody else is using and why.

 

Oh, and I'm finally swapping out my spinning SAS drives on my personal server so I'm trying to figure out which RAID level to use so hopefully I'll get some good perspectives from this thread.

 

Thanks!

[Electronics Wizardy]

How many drives?

 

What drives?

 

What are you managing raid with? Hardware raid? Software?

 

Id probably go raid 10 or 0 depending on number of drives and how much you care about uptime. Parity raid doesn't make much sense to me with ssds as you don't get a huge iops improvement, but really depends on use and ssds

[KuJoe]

21 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How many drives?

 

What drives?

 

What are you managing raid with? Hardware raid? Software?

 

Id probably go raid 10 or 0 depending on number of drives and how much you care about uptime. Parity raid doesn't make much sense to me with ssds as you don't get a huge iops improvement, but really depends on use and ssds

Six 480-512GB drives, I don't know the exact drives but the brand doesn't really matter to me (I'm basically waiting for a good deal on Slickdeals right now before I buy anything). I'm using a hardware RAID controller, it's the same one I use in my production servers (Dell H700).

 

I can't go RAID0 because I need some hardware redundancy because any downtime on this server is bad for me. I'm leaning towards RAID50 for better redundancy than RAID5 and RAID10 just to be safe. I'm just curious what other people are using and why because I enjoy getting different perspectives. :)

[Electronics Wizardy]

11 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Six 480-512GB drives, I don't know the exact drives but the brand doesn't really matter to me (I'm basically waiting for a good deal on Slickdeals right now before I buy anything). I'm using a hardware RAID controller, it's the same one I use in my production servers (Dell H700).

 

I can't go RAID0 because I need some hardware redundancy because any downtime on this server is bad for me. I'm leaning towards RAID50 for better redundancy than RAID5 and RAID10 just to be safe. I'm just curious what other people are using and why because I enjoy getting different perspectives.

What are you storing on here?

 

If you want more space id go go raid 50 or 5, if you need the performance(you probably wont since its a massive jump from hdds) go 10.

 

Id personally go 5 here, 50 won't be a big jump in speed. Just keep a eye on endurance if these are consumer drives. I wouldn't bother with overprovising here, the drives normally already have enough.

[KuJoe]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

What are you storing on here?

 

If you want more space id go go raid 50 or 5, if you need the performance(you probably wont since its a massive jump from hdds) go 10.

 

Id personally go 5 here, 50 won't be a big jump in speed. Just keep a eye on endurance if these are consumer drives. I wouldn't bother with overprovising here, the drives normally already have enough.

It's an ESXi server with about 30 VMs.

 

And thanks for the info, but I'm trying to get an idea of what other people are using and why to give me some different perspectives before making my decision.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

It's an ESXi server with about 30 VMs.

 

And thanks for the info, but I'm trying to get an idea of what other people are using and why to give me some different perspectives before making my decision.

Since you getting new drives why not just give the different raid levels a try and run some benchmarks and see what the speed differences are for your self?

[KuJoe]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Since you getting new drives why not just give the different raid levels a try and run some benchmarks and see what the speed differences are for your self?

I already know the differences, that's not what I'm looking for.

[leadeater]

For me I go RAID 5 for 1-8 disks (starting with less than 8) and RAID 6 for 8+. I'll do RAID 10 if I really need ultra low latency for some reason but I perfer not to waste the amount of capacity/money.

 

I've got 4 NVMe WI SSDs in RAID 10 for Commvault DDBs as an example, because those really care about query insert latency in the ms to sub ms range.

[KuJoe]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

For me I go RAID 5 for 1-8 disks (starting with less than 8 ) and RAID 6 for 8+. I'll do RAID 10 if I really need ultra low latency for some reason but I perfer not to waste the amount of capacity/money.

 

I've got 4 NVMe WI SSDs in RAID 10 for Commvault DDBs as an example, because those really care about query insert latency in the ms to sub ms range.

Agreed, I do RAID10 for anything with a lot of IO like SQL or if I'm selling the space as a shared node for clients where you can't control what users are doing so you can't afford to skimp on performance or else a few users can bring the whole node to its knees. Any reason for not considering RAID50 or RAID60?

[leadeater]

46 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Any reason for not considering RAID50 or RAID60?

Deployments of DAS is usually too small to bother. For our Netapps yea it's effectively RAID 60, you put disks in to RAID groups and then add them to an Aggregate just like ZFS and vdevs/pools.