Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
You know, the whole "disk is cheap, so why use RAID5?" argument just doesn't wash with me. Sure, disk *is* cheap. But some of us need every GB we can get for our money (well, given I'm spending grant money, it's actually *your* money too (if you live in the US)).
To demonstrate, let's look at a 24 drive system (3ware has a 24 port 9650 board). Newegg has 500GB WD RE2 drives for $160. So for $3840 in drives I can get:
a) 6TB RAID10 => $0.64/GB
or
b) 10.5TB RAID6 w/ hot spare => $0.37/GB
Umm, I'll take 75% more space for the same money, TYVM.
c) 12TB RAID0 w/no redundancy => $0.32/GB
When my scratch data increases in importance, I'll have to investigate that new fangled RAID 6 thang. :) Does RAID6 suffer from this performance degradation bogey man when used with ext3? Isn't RAID6 just RAID5 with a redundant parity stripe across the drives?
Cheers,