Which RAID should I choose?

[constantly_confused]

I am setting up a storage server for my family's family business and am conflicted on what RAID setup I should do. We have four 2TB WD Black drives for the server and I don't know if I should run them all in RAID 10 or do dual RAID 1's. I like the extra layer of redundancy with the dual RAID 1's but read and write performance is important because we have anywhere from 3 to 8 workstations hitting it all at once for extended periods of time (sometimes all 8 for nearly 10 hours). So would it be worth it to use the RAID 10 considering all the drives will be backed up nightly to a separate machine with 4 drives in a RAID 5 array? 

[Matt_98]

27 minutes ago, CPU_bot said:

I am setting up a storage server for my family's family business and am conflicted on what RAID setup I should do. We have four 2TB WD Black drives for the server and I don't know if I should run them all in RAID 10 or do dual RAID 1's. I like the extra layer of redundancy with the dual RAID 1's but read and write performance is important because we have anywhere from 3 to 8 workstations hitting it all at once for extended periods of time (sometimes all 8 for nearly 10 hours). So would it be worth it to use the RAID 10 considering all the drives will be backed up nightly to a separate machine with 4 drives in a RAID 5 array? 

yaid 10 would be fine but realisticly just using 2 drives in raid 1 would probably be fine (they you have 2 spares). how much space do they use?

[Jarsky]

You'd be better off doing a 4-disk RAID6 than a RAID10.

 

[scottyseng]

11 hours ago, CPU_bot said:

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I'd also vote for the RAID6 instead of RAID10. You only really need RAID10 if you plan on having a lot of small random IO. You gain in sequential (At least what I saw changing from RAID10 to RAID6 myself). Also, with RAID10, you can lose up to two drives, but they have to be the correct two drives. At least with RAID6, you can lose any two drives.

 

What hardware is running the array? Hardware RAID controller?

[Trippik]

I would maybe look into running a ZFS array instead of RAID, there are some great free Operating Systems like FreeNAS out there, and I tend to find ZFS far cheaper and easier to manage in most situations, as you then don't need expensive RAID cards etc. 

[constantly_confused]

14 hours ago, scottyseng said:

I'd also vote for the RAID6 instead of RAID10. You only really need RAID10 if you plan on having a lot of small random IO. You gain in sequential (At least what I saw changing from RAID10 to RAID6 myself). Also, with RAID10, you can lose up to two drives, but they have to be the correct two drives. At least with RAID6, you can lose any two drives.

 

What hardware is running the array? Hardware RAID controller?

We do need the random I/O for our sale day. I understand that I can lose 2 disks in a RAID 6, but I'm going to be backing up the data on this RAID to a separate RAID 5. 

The hardware is a Xeon E3-1245 with 16GB 2400MHz ECC RAM, on a Supermicro motherboard (I don't know the exact model right now). I am not using a hardware RAID controller because the motherboard I have supports RAID 0/1/5/10, and its connected to a UPS. 

[scottyseng]

23 minutes ago, CPU_bot said:

-snip-

Ah, okay, now I understand a bit more. You couldn't do RAID6 even if you wanted (The motherboard doesn't support it). I'd say RAID10 in this case then since you need the random IO. However, have you considered a SSD (If it can cover your space needs). They simply crush hard drives in random IO. Expensive yeah, but it might be worth it for you if you have a lot of IO to handle.

 

Oh wait, I just read you have WD Black drives. You may want to avoid RAIDing them. In some cases it works (depends on the model), but the newer ones don't have TLER support. You may have drives dropping out of the array for no reason because the RAID controller might think the drive died when it's stuck trying to fix a drive error. I'd say you might want WD Red Pro drives instead. I have seen some people run WD Blacks / the other WD consumer drives in a RAID array, but I personally wouldn't risk it, even with a backup.

 

The RAID ready WD drives are the Red, Red Pro, and the enterprise drives (Re, Gold, etc)