Share your RAID setup?

[Chrisroman]

1. How much much space
2. What RAID configuration and why
3. What controller
4. What do you use it for.
5. What would you do different if were to do it over again.

I'll go first.

1. 12GB advertised... soon to be 16GB. (8x 2TB Samsung F4). How the heck did I fill up 8TB already???
2. RAID 6. Good tradeoff of space, protection and performance. And my controller card handles RAID 6 well.
3. Areca ARC-1230 1GB cache Picked it up used with BBU for $250 so cant complain.
4. Use it mostly for archiving music, movies, home videos, photos. But also use it for scratch disc when encoding, using CS5, etc...
5. I tried RAID 5 off motherboard controller. That was a disaster so I guess this current setup is my do-over Works ok for my needs right now. But I wouldn't mind a faster RAID card down the road.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I currently have 5 WD 1TB blacks in a raid 5 array using Linux mdadm. Comes up to 3.6TB. I just add more drives as I need space and regrow . Next time I will probably add two and convert to raid 6.

Using cheapy 2-port PCI-e controllers and the motherboard ports. Was having issues which I suspected was that, but after replacing all the drives, backplane, and cables, all seems fine. If I was to do it over again I'd get a single higher end card but 3-4 years ago when I built the server there was not as much availability of such cards as now.

I use it for samba, as well as VMs. It's pretty much a "everything" server, so it gets quite a lot of I/O.

Next setup I think I may get one of those 24 bay cases and build a SAN, then use ISCSI or NFS. That way my data will be completely separate from the server(s). The server(s) would have a small SSD as boot drive, and that's it. Only have one server now but I'd like to have more to spread the load, eventually. Money is the main show stopper.