Hosting business which raid would be good?

[hardwarefish]

If you want to do CO LOCATION and want to build server for your hosting business, which RAID would be the best?

Raid 1 or 5 or 10? Assuming that you also want to cut some budget, will raid 1 sufficient enough? or raid 10 will be the best which many said that

thanks

 

[hang-the-9]

Look here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_RAID_levels

At least you want 5. If you use 1 you will be wasting half your disks and half your speed.

 

[gtvr]

what is the workload for the server (database/email/web/file/something else)?

What kind of i/o requirements do you have? No way to answer without knowing more.

 

[mavroxur]

This thread is related to your previous thread i'm guessing....


http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/284809-30-raid-mobo-seperate-raid-performance-wise#bas




But i posted the following on that thread, i dont know if you saw it or not.



It all depends on the level of redundancy and capacity you need. If you don't need much storage space
, and want average redundancy, then a pair of drives in a RAID 1 would be sufficent. If you need lots of space (more than a pair of mirrored drives could provide) then you need to move to a RAID 5, or if the array will be really large (5 or more disks) and the data is critical, a RAID 6 would be even better. a RAID 5 array requires a minimum of 3 disks, and your capacity is the total minus 1 drive. A RAID 5 array can lose 1 disk and continue to function. a RAID 6 array requires a minimum of 4 disks. Your capacity would be the total minus 2 disks. A RAID 6 can tolerate losing any (2) disks in the array at any given time. A RAID 6 would be a good idea for, say, an array of 6 or more drives, several hundred GB or a few TB each or more, where good fault tolerance is required in a medium throughput application.


As far as your question regarding the card you mentioned. The card you linked, in a RAID 1 scenario, won't provide much speed benefit over the onboard ICH9R. Maybe a very minimal gain if anything. However, the main reason people go with a RAID card as opposed to an onboard RAID is that a lot of onboard RAID controllers don't support things like hot swap, hot spares, and online array rebuilding, which makes them useless in a business scenario that requires high availability of data. What's the point of having a hosted service, if you have to take down the server to rebuild an array after a failed drive, which might take hours for a large array?
In a RAID 5 scenario, the ICH9R would be blown away by a caching RAID card (not the one you linked though, since it doesn't even do RAID 5). The reason being that RAID 5/6 require a lot of processing power for the parity calculations involved, and hardware RAID cards have a RISC or ASIC calculation engine to handle this. I hope I was able to shed a little bit of light on this.