I have 12 750GB drive appliance from HP. I was wondering what is the best disk configuration? I suppose a >large RAID5 would be bad since rebuilding would take too long. What do you recommend?

TIA

Well, what do you plan to do with it? Is it being used as DAS for one server etc...

And yea, rebuild times will be long :)

jlc

On Mon, 2008-05-26 at 14:40 -0400, Mag Gam wrote:

I have 12 750GB drive appliance from HP. I was wondering what is the best disk configuration? I suppose a large RAID5 would be bad since rebuilding would take too long. What do you recommend?

I prefer RAID10. You can create 1 RAID-10 device with 12 * 750 Gb / 2 = 4.5 Tb size.

Also you can create 3 RAID-10 devices with 4 HDD per device. Each MD device's size will be 3 * 750 / 2 = 1.125 Tb.

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/RAID#RAID_10:_Striping_across_Mirror_set... : "RAID 10 provides better performance than simple RAID 1 along with the redundancy that simple RAID 0 lacks. It requires at least four drives to implement and provides usable space equal to S*N/2 where 'S' is the size of the smallest of the hard drives being used and 'N' is the number of disks in the array. So, if I form a RAID 10 of four 10 GB disks, the usable size of the array is 20 GB.

RAID 0+1 and RAID 10 are very similar but, by most measures of both performance and redundancy, RAID 10 is considered to be preferable.

A RAID 10 can withstand the failure of a single drive (or multiple drives, so long as they are NOT in the same mirror set)."