How Do You Approach Multi-Disk Arrays? | Hacker News Reader

How Do You Approach Multi-Disk Arrays?

2 pointsmarkmcb4 comments

Every 4-5 years I upgrade my home server. This year I've shifted to some nice rack-mounted hardware. At the core of my setup, I have two servers with 8 HDD bays each. One is the active box, and the other is local redundant storage (i.e., backup). Assuming 1 HDD is the system disk, how would you configure the other 7 HDDs to give you 1 massive storage volume in your favorite OS? Would you use the same approach on both the active and backup server?

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It depends on what you value more. Do you want as much storage as possible and not care about redundancy? Then RAID 0 or JBOD would give you a lot of space. I wouldn't recommend it myself but it's an option.

If you care about redundancy but want a good amount of space, you can go with a RAID 5. You'll lose some write performance especially if one of the drives crashes but you won't lose anything.

I would recommend using 2 drives in a RAID 1 for OS and using the other 6 as a RAID 10 for storage. You'll get good performance and redundancy for both storage and the OS.

For a more specific recommendation, more data is needed about your needs.

Thanks. Yeah, I left it a little vague as to not sway any opinions. I definitely want at least minimal redundancy on both arrays just to ease the hassle of recovering from a disk failure. I guess I'm really trying to decide if hardware RAID is the way to go, or if letting a fast disk controller hand off the work to software (e.g., zfs) is a better option.

Anyway, I'm just curious to hear what others are doing especially given all the "RAID is dying" talk that's popped up in the last few years.

I'd use zfs (consider freenas as your os, i like it) with raid-z3 (triple-parity, thus 3 drives may fail w/o data loss) on the remaining 7 drives. You then may use zfs snapshots + replication to the other machine or just use a cron job to wol the backup machine and simply run rsync at a certain interval.

The zfs question is one I'm debating. I actually already use FreeNAS on the backup server and it seems to be doing well. For the primary server I want an OS I can do more with on, so I'd probably throw something like CentOS on it and then run VMs for specific tasks or to use more bleeding edge distributions. I suppose I could try zfs in Linux.

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