Which RAID i need to select?

[Ayan Mukhopadhyay]

Hi, Im new in LTT's forum but a regular viewer. Recently i got an server (Dell Poweredge 2950) and im confused about RAID. everyone is talking about RAID. i know very little about it. Im using this server for our website which has mahy data and using web mails which also has many data. what i want to know is

can i double or triple up my storage by just installing the 3.5 hard drive into the server bay? i have 6 bay with 3.5 inch of HDD space. 

 

Now i have installed 1 TB WD Blue in one bay and if I need another 1TB or 2TB of storage can i just plug the HDD into the bay? I dont know how to elaborate but if any one understand my goal please suggest.

 

Thanks!

Ayan

[Hewie]

Ok there are a few different types of raid but I will go through some of the main ones.

For all raid setups, you will need the same model of drive

If you don't care about redundancy, JaBOD (Just a bunch of disks) will combine all your drives into one drive.

Raid 0 is designed for speed, you keep all the storage but if one drive fails you lose all the data.

Raid 1 is for redundancy. you lost half the capacity but if one drive fails, you still have all your data.

Raid 10 is a combination of both 0 and 1 but you need 3 drives.

Raid 5 needs at least 3 drives. It increases speeds and protect from failure and only loses 1 drive worth of capacity.

 

I personally recommend ensuring you use the same drives in your server

Since you can have up to 6 drives I recommend a raid 5 array if you can get the drives. Upgrading is possible but you will need to redo the array which can take a lot of time.

[Olaf6541]

23 minutes ago, Ayan Mukhopadhyay said:

what i want to know is

can i double or triple up my storage by just installing the 3.5 hard drive into the server bay?

Does that mean there are already hard drives in this machine and you want to add an extra drive?

[Ayan Mukhopadhyay]

2 minutes ago, Olaf6541 said:

Does that mean there are already hard drives in this machine and you want to add an extra drive?

Yes. i have 1 TB WD blue installed on the server and i want to expand the storage but as a single giant space. like if i install 3 more 1tb HDD so can i use all of them as a single 4TB storage?

[Ayan Mukhopadhyay]

7 minutes ago, Hewie said:

Ok there are a few different types of raid but I will go through some of the main ones.

For all raid setups, you will need the same model of drive

If you don't care about redundancy, JaBOD (Just a bunch of disks) will combine all your drives into one drive.

Raid 0 is designed for speed, you keep all the storage but if one drive fails you lose all the data.

Raid 1 is for redundancy. you lost half the capacity but if one drive fails, you still have all your data.

Raid 10 is a combination of both 0 and 1 but you need 3 drives.

Raid 5 needs at least 3 drives. It increases speeds and protect from failure and only loses 1 drive worth of capacity.

 

I personally recommend ensuring you use the same drives in your server

Since you can have up to 6 drives I recommend a raid 5 array if you can get the drives. Upgrading is possible but you will need to redo the array which can take a lot of time.

Thanks for this videos. i have already seen that and understand the basic things.

[Hewie]

1 minute ago, Ayan Mukhopadhyay said:

Yes. i have 1 TB WD blue installed on the server and i want to expand the storage but as a single giant space. like if i install 3 more 1tb HDD so can i use all of them as a single 4TB storage?

If you use JBOD, it will combine them into one "virtual drive" so there will be 4 drives in total but your system will only see 1.

This effectively merges the drives together.

[beersykins]

I'd advise against jbod or similar since there's no redundancy scheme.

 

Raid 6 or 10 are ideal but you lose that much disk space to store redundant data blocks.  It all depends on your storage goals, raid 5 is okay for smaller sets but it's possible to lose your array when rebuilding the array onto a replacement drive if another disk fails during rebuild.

 

You would need at least three drives (4 for raid 10) to get it going into an expandable array, keep in mind when you add your drive to a new raid volume it will wipe the disk.

[Ayan Mukhopadhyay]

thank you guys for your help. Finally i figured out the issue. I have simply disable the RAID and marge all 3 hard drive as a single drive. now i have full 3 tb of storage in my server.