RAID5 vs RAID6

[Just_Visiting]

Would you go with RAID5 with a hot spare vs RAID6 with a hot spare if you had an available backup 3 hours away? I recently built my fileserver and currently am building an identical box for a friend who lives a couple hours away. All of our "media" files will be sync'd. I'm trying to decide whether save some space and go with RAID5. I did RAID6 on mine. With five 3TB's and no hot spare and netted 8.1TB. In testing, I created his array as RAID5 and netted 10+TB. I had eight 1TB's with a hot spare in my last box and never had any issues. Oh, both computers currently have LSI 9260-4i's in them and using APC Smart-UPS'. All important data gets backed up weekly.

So R5 or R6?

 

[ben805]

I have the Lsi 9265-8i and use Raid5 iwth 6x 1TB instead, this card does not like Raid6 much, and I get less storage space with it.

 

[Trepidati0n]

The point of RAID5 vs RAID6 is "will my system fail or have a URE during rebuild". If working with very large drives, the chance of URE is non-trivial.

 

[mwroobel]

Would you go with RAID5 with a hot spare vs RAID6 with a hot spare if you had an available backup 3 hours away? I recently built my fileserver and currently am building an identical box for a friend who lives a couple hours away. All of our "media" files will be sync'd. I'm trying to decide whether save some space and go with RAID5. I did RAID6 on mine. With five 3TB's and no hot spare and netted 8.1TB. In testing, I created his array as RAID5 and netted 10+TB. I had eight 1TB's with a hot spare in my last box and never had any issues. Oh, both computers currently have LSI 9260-4i's in them and using APC Smart-UPS'. All important data gets backed up weekly.

So R5 or R6?

If you have the choice, and your card fully supports RAID6, I would without question go RAID6. Since you are comparing it against RAID5 with a hot spare, you will have the same available space. If you can afford the slight additional write penalty (since these are just vid/warez/pr0n boxes anyway, I don't think you need to worry). Keep in mind, the larger the drives, the higher the possibility of a second drive failing during rebuild.