• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Quick Question: Raid 1 vs. Raid 5 ?

B

BassKozz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 10, 2005
Messages
311
Is a Raid 1 array any safer then a Raid 5 array (as far as redundancy goes)?

I know the differences between the two arrays, but I am trying to figure out if it would be SAFER for me to run 2 Raid 1 arrays vs. 1 Raid 5 array with 4 HD's... Assuming Loss of HD space isn't an issue.

Thanks,
-BassKozz
 
BassKozz said:
Is a Raid 1 array any safer then a Raid 5 array (as far as redundancy goes)?

I know the differences between the two arrays, but I am trying to figure out if it would be SAFER for me to run 2 Raid 1 arrays vs. 1 Raid 5 array with 4 HD's... Assuming Loss of HD space isn't an issue.
Click to expand...

Base safety of Raid-1 with two drives is better per array than a raid-5 with three drives, because the first and second drive failures occur with higher probability due to higher number of drives. However, base safety of raid-1 is less than raid-5 if you count by gigabytes, not by array.

Then there are secondary considerations such as that a computer with more drives will typically have higher temperature and draw more out of the PSU and hence raise the chance of individual drive failure and of the PSU going amok and killing everything.

Then, after the first drive failure and inserting or starting using a spare you have recovery time for the array. If a second drive of the original array dies during recovery you are dead meat. Recovery of raid-1 is much faster than that of raid-5, in particular if the array is in use and/or if you use a controller with a slow CPU.

Software complexity of raid-5 is also higher, the chance of the array being destroyed by an error in the raid software is much higher.

Then, you can with no effort at all have a three-drive raid-1which is orders of magnitude safer than raid-5, with no performance degration. You would have to go raid-6 which is slower and has very complex performance characteristics.

Last but not least, in a raid-1 with any number of drives you can easily put one drive on a separate PSU which instantly gives you safety against the main PSU going bonkers and killing everything connected (which is a major thread to any RAID array). Of course doing this raises the base chance of PSU failure because now you have almost twice the chance of a PSU going bad due to higher number of PSUs.

Confused yet? :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top