Calling all raid experts

[Joshua Oreman]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 10:26:19AM -0500 or thereabouts, Darryl Hoar wrote:
> Greetings,
> I need to build a file server for our marketing departments documents
> and images.  I want to use Freebsd.  Since the data is large, and
> backups would be difficult I was wondering if RAID would be a solution.
> 
> I thought that RAID 5 would be the ticket, but after reading up on it,
> maybe not.
> 
> Isn't RAID 5 the one where if a disk fails, you plug a new one it and it
> regenerates the lost data ?

You have two main choices: RAID-1 and RAID-5.

If N is the number of disks and M is the size of the smallest disk, then...

RAID-1 will give you M amount of space. As long as one disk still works, you
can have multiple disks fail at the same time; just replace them and your
data's back. Reads execute at N times the speed of single-drive reads. Writes
are normal speed.

RAID-5 will give you M*(N-1) amount of space. If one disk fails, you can replace
it with no loss of data. But if two disks fail at the same time, your data's toast.
Reads execute at about N times the speed of single-drive reads. Writes
are slower than normal speed.

-- Josh

> 
> thanks,
> Darryl
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