Discussion Forums > Technology
RAID Boxes
per:
Hardware raid cards are mostly a total waste if you use ZFS, ZFS does not really use them at all (the only gain is for the write cache. But adding a SLD SSD for the intent log is better, really).
My home-raid can do 650MB/second streaming read, and more than 100MB/second doing 100% random access.
While seeding the 100 or so torrents I'm currently seeding, it's using less than 1% I/O capacity.
Considering the fact that a Gbit network can only handle a little bit more than 100Mb/second, it's sort of good enough. :-)
It contains 15 drives in a 3x5 stripe/raid5 configuration (and a SSD drive for the OS and cache), and is using two rather cheap 8-port PCI-express SATA controllers.
And I really think that ZFS is extremely easy to set up, compared to any of the alternatives, but I have been a unix system administrator since '92.
On a separate note, when you have more than 3 or so drives, you really need to have some kind of redundancy.
If a single drive as a mean time before failure of 5-10 years (which is more or less what I have noticed), you are likely to get a failure per year with 4 drives.
K7IA:
RAID, imo, still sounds like an acronym special to corporate IT environments and benchmark enthusiasts. I always tried to stay away from it in my personal environment, just because I thought it made simple things more difficult.
It's a widely adopted technology in corporate environments and has numerous benefits. if you had small 15krpm scsi hdds, then it was considered a beast several years ago, but rich companies would eventually go ramsan anyway.
Things I don't like in RAID
- when adding new hdds, the matter of consistency of hdd sizes in the array.
- removing a hdd when it's needed elsewhere
- recovery
Hdd sizes getting ridiculously bigger everyday, terabyte disks are everywhere and gigabyte is the new kilobyte.
I recommend, always prefer accessing physical drives directly, don't merge them and refrain from raid logical drives. If you don't like drive letters, you can assign ntfs folders to local drives easily.
By the way, I still don't understand why some clever guy didn't come with an os embedded tool that will allow us to implement secure data storage (thru parity or something else) with a single click to a folder or a file. I don't want everything there to be duplicated or parity checked. Why should I deal with the whole hard disk?
ps. I liked the design of the device though :)
per:
--- Quote from: enginarc on August 04, 2009, 08:43:20 PM ---RAID, imo, still sounds like an acronym special to corporate IT environments and benchmark enthusiasts. I always tried to stay away from it in my personal environment, just because I thought it made simple things more difficult.
--- End quote ---
Well. It's supposedly supposed to be standardized rather soon in macos-x (ZFS).
--- Quote ---Things I don't like in RAID
- when adding new hdds, the matter of consistency of hdd sizes in the array.
--- End quote ---
Not a problem with ZFS, really. Just start a new raid-stripe with the size of the new drives.
--- Quote --- - removing a hdd when it's needed elsewhere
--- End quote ---
If it's _a_ hdd, that's not a problem either, if you have redundancy enabled. You will loose the redundancy, though (actually, with ZFS, you only lose redundancy for the old files, new files will be written with redundancy to the new lower number of drives).
--- Quote ---- recovery
--- End quote ---
Hm? Like restoring from backup? Well, yes, that takes a while when you have 30+Tb of storage. Not that I have a backup.. :-)
--- Quote ---By the way, I still don't understand why some clever guy didn't come with an os embedded tool that will allow us to implement secure data storage (thru parity or something else) with a single click to a folder or a file. I don't want everything there to be duplicated or parity checked. Why should I deal with the whole hard disk?
--- End quote ---
Included in ZFS.. :-) (for folders, not files)
And the pure cool-factor of having an actual server is not to be ignored.
And the convenience of not having all the noisy drives in the room you are sitting in..
K7IA:
^ per, are you from the ZFS promotion group in sun :)
ok ZFS is a very good fs but you need a dedicated device for it running sun solaris or other supported os, if you are using windows.
May be we can use it with those small footprint hw virtual machines in the future, I doubt microsoft will implement it :P
per:
--- Quote from: enginarc on August 04, 2009, 09:08:57 PM ---^ per, are you from the ZFS promotion group in sun :)
ok ZFS is a very good fs but you need a dedicated device for it running sun solaris or other supported os, if you are using windows.
May be we can use it with those small footprint hw virtual machines in the future, I doubt microsoft will implement it :P
--- End quote ---
Yes, but the original subject was about a RAID box. :)
And, no I'm not from SUN, if I were I would not be using cheap generic PC hardware. ;)
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