On 4/13/2010 1:19 PM, David Miller wrote:
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Ryan's hardware recommendations are good. But I wouldn't run a RAID5 volume that large, software or hardware. It's just too risky as rebuilds will take days and the chances of hitting a non recoverable read error would be near 100% on a volume that size.
Either run multiple smaller RAID5's and use LVM to manage the volumes which the OS will use or choose a better RAID layout. RAID6 or RAID10 are much better choices these days. -- David
With the config mentioned above it would give the flexibility to run RAID10 with a resulting data store of just under 14TB (8x RAID1 stripe using 2TB drives).
Choice of RAID implementation (specifically RAID5) could be an impediment to performance as noted above. Always good to have input from more than one source. At that level of storage looking into spending a bit more for redundancy (drbd/pacemkaker/heartbeat) may be a worthwhile investment as well.