build out of a server advice

[Lloyd Brown]

At least with large, rackmount, enterprise arrays, the general consensus
with large drives is to use 2-drive parity, eg. RAID6.  Depending on the
load you put on the controller, there is a non-trivial chance that
you'll have a second drive failure in the RAID-group during the time
that you're rebuilding.  Frequently a rebuild on either RAID5 or RAID6
with that big of a drive, might take 24-48 hours or more, sometimes
longer.  Two failed drives in a RAID6 doesn't lose any data, but in a
RAID5 it would.

If you'll have a fairly light I/O load on the server, you might be able
to get away with RAID5, since the reduced load will let the RAID
controller (or kernel, for software-raid) spend more of its resources
rebuilding when a drive does fail.



Lloyd Brown
Systems Administrator
Fulton Supercomputing Lab
Brigham Young University
http://marylou.byu.edu

On 06/22/2012 03:09 PM, Merrill Oveson wrote:
> plug:
> 
> Building a server:
> 
> one 1 TB - for the OS and programs.
> 
> four 3 TB raid 5 - which should give me 9 TB usable.  Correct?
> 
> How reliable are the 3 TB drives these days?  Am I taking a big risk here?
> 
> thoughts?
> 
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Merrill
> 
> /*
> PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net
> Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug
> Don't fear the penguin.
> */