Calling all raid experts

[Mike Tancsa]

While RAID5 gives efficient use of disk space for situations where you have 
5 drives, its NOT a substitute for backups nor is it necessarily the best 
thing to use depending on the application.  Writes for example are VERY 
slow and  depending on the card, direct reads can not be that great 
either.  Having a mirror of your file system containing

/home/data/very-important-big-file

will not stop

rm /home/data/very-important-big-file

It just obliterates it off all your drives.

If you do a lot of reading and writing of the disk, RAID5 is not 
necessarily the best. With IDE drives dirt cheap, consider something like 
RAID1+0 (aka RAID10). It offers the best of speed and safety, at the 
expense of space.  In some cases, RAID1 might do you well.  With the 3ware 
cards, reads are optimized and writes are hardly penalized.  If you need a 
lot of space, consider the 3ware cards. Solid FreeBSD support, are 
relatively inexpensive, and have done me VERY well over the years.


         ---Mike



At 10:26 AM 29/07/2003 -0500, 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 ?
>
>thanks,
>Darryl
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