HBA vs Raid Card in new systems

[Dujith]

Going to update our test surveillance server with a new build. The old one had a HP P800 connected to a MSA.

Now looking at building a microserver 2u that has a SATA backplane, so i would need a controller for that.

 

Now do i only require a HBA? The data is not critical and most likely will be either 1 big volume or RAID 10.

From what i have read is that a "Hardware" Raid card is not needed as much as it just to be.

[leadeater]

If it's Windows then I'd still recommend hardware RAID, Linux HBA and software will be fine.

[Dujith]

On 6/15/2020 at 10:43 AM, leadeater said:

If it's Windows then I'd still recommend hardware RAID, Linux HBA and software will be fine.

Any specific reason for that? Just curious .

[Dutch_Master]

Linux has excellent RAID support in the kernel since, well, mists of time really. Win-OS, not so much   And despite best efforts, Win-OS is essentially still a desktop OS. Yes, I know there's various server versions, but their code base is still the desktop OS. Linux, in all it's variations, has an excellent record of stability as well as scalability and some pretty outer-worldly use-cases to promote it. Like, loaded into space crafts (plural, yes ) of various complexity.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Dujith said:

Any specific reason for that? Just curious .

Storage Spaces is pretty good but there is a few things you have to do to make sure you actually get good performance. The easiest is to only use Two-way Mirror or Three-Way Mirror Virtual Disks, these support any number of disks as data is striped at the chunk level not disk level so once you start increasing the disk count it acts like RAID 10 but with double the read performance.

 

If you need to use Single Parity or Dual Parity then you have to also use Journal SSDs or performance will be terrible, much worse than you think. Because of that the cost goes up quite a bit so hardware RAID is price competitive and far more reliable and consistent when it comes to Parity performance and you don't have to optimize as much to get good performance, only add on a BBU/Flash Cache module to enable Write-Back Cache (Same function as Storage Spaces Journal SSD).

 

Personally I do use Storage Spaces but it's not on the same level as hardware RAID in terms of flexibility and ease of use to get good performance out of it. It really is just that much easier to just drop in a hardware RAID controller and put your disks in an RAID group and go.

 

If you are only ever interested in RAID 10 then Storage Spaces would be a marginally better option than hardware RAID.

 

Storage Spaces was created for large servers with many disks and for configuration by professionals with a lot of experience and understanding of storage sub systems, sure you can use it in Windows Desktop OS but like I mentioned stick to Mirror configurations or I don't recommend it.