Question regarding new Areca Setup

[FeedmeBrains]

Hello everyone!

I currently own an Areca-ARC1230 Card with a 1GB ECC Ram upgrade, I have had it for years and its been absolutely great.
Currently I have
10 X 1TB drives (Samsung F1's) in a RAID 6 Volume
2 X 2TB drives (Samsung F4's) in a RAID 1 Volume

However both raidsets are about 90% full so I have ordered 12 X 2TB Samsung F4's to replace the whole lot with.

I would like to know what everyone recommends for my new setup

I could either have 1 huge volume or carve it up. However I have experienced problems during heavy IO to both volumes at once so I am leaning
more towards 1 large volume.

I am thinking of dropping to RAID 5 since all of my important data is backed up anyway and I would like the performance increase of
going from RAID 6 to 5

Any thoughts / suggestions?

P.S how long should this take to initialize? I seem to remember the 10 Disk array taking something like 12-24 hours last time!

 

[Blue Fox]

The older Areca cards didn't fare too well with multiple volumes, so best to leave it as one. You can pretty much expect initialization time to double going from 1TB to 2TB drives. As for RAID 5 vs RAID 6, well, the performance difference on reads is negligible and writes are a bit slower on RAID 6, but not by a whole lot. You just have to weigh the speed/space options against uptime. 12 drives is really the max I would run in RAID 5 personally.

 

[FeedmeBrains]

Thanks for the reply, I think I will go with a 12 disk Single RAID 5 volume then I would rather have 19TB instead of 18TB

cheers