On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Markus Falb markus.falb@fasel.at wrote:
On 12.4.2011 15:02, Marian Marinov wrote:
On Tuesday 12 April 2011 15:56:54
rainer-RNrd0m5o0MABOiyIzIsiOw@public.gmane.org wrote:
Yes... but with such RAID10 solution you get only half of the disk
space... so
from 10 2TB drives you get only 10TB instead of 16TB with RAID6.
From a somewhat theoretical view, this is true for standard raid10 but Linux md raid10 is much more flexible as I understood it. You could do 2 copys over 2 disks, thats like standard 10. Or you could do 2 copys over 2 or 3 or ... x disks. Or you could do 3 copys over 3 or 4 or ... x disks. Do the math. See the manpage for md(4) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_RAID_levels#Linux_MD_RAID_10
However, I have to admit that I have no experience with that but would like to hear about any disadvantages or if I am mislead. I am just interested.
--
We only use RAID 10 (rather 1+0) and never even bothered with RAID6. And we've had no data loss in the past 3 years with it yet, on hundreds of servers.
But, our RAID10 is setup as a stripe of mirrors, i.e. sda1 & sdb1 -> md0, sdc1 + sdd1 ->md1, then sde1 + sdf1 ->md2, and finally md0 + md1 + md2 are stripped. The advantage of this is that we can add more disks to the whole RAID set with no downtime (all server have hot swap HDD cages) and very little performance degradation since the 2 new drives have to be mirrored on their own first (take very little CPU / RAM resources) and then added to the RAID set. Rebuild is generally quick since it only rebuilds the broken mirror