Best RAID for 4x HDD server?

S

Sayth

Gawd
Joined
Oct 7, 2001
Messages
618
Hey All,

I have a new Dell R310 Server with 4x 1TB HDD to work with. Data storage is more important than up-time.

Dell sent the server with 3x Raid 5 with the OS on a partition and then 2x Raid 1.

To get the most storage, I was thinking Raid 5 across all 4 HDDs with OS and Data on both. What do you think? Bad idea? Okay idea? Good idea?

Normally I would go Raid 1 for OS and Raid 5 for data, but in this case I need more space...

opinions?
 
For 4 drives I would normally recommend raid 10 since you do not need purchase an expensive ($400+ US) raid controller for raid 10. Instead with raid 10 the motherboard raid should be just fine. However if you paid dell for the server and they put raid 5 on it most likely they put a hw raid controller on it.
 
At really depends on your needs.

Will this be a NAS/Fileserver? If so, then ~125MB/s over gigabit will be your bottleneck. You might as well go RAID5 or RAIDZ.

RAID 10 or 0+1 will be faster but still the gigabit will be your bottleneck so its kinda pointless unless you REALLY need the ability to have 1 discs fail at once.
 
Hey guys, thanks for the replies.

Yes this machine's main duty will be for file storage so I'm not concerned about r/w speeds so much as redundancy. I was just wondering if someone would pipe up and say "OS on the same lun or volume as your data??? You're an idiot!"

I will likely go RAID5 across all and have a small partition for OS.

Thanks again!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top