I'm sure many will answer the questions, so for a different perspective: Make sure you buy a drives from a number of manufacturers, or get ones from different production batches - I was once on a customer's site where two 'brand-x' drives in a RAID 5 array went bad within minutes of each other due to a spindle bearing defect and this took down the array. -----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Vong Sent: 25 July 2005 10:57 To: centos at centos.org Subject: [CentOS] RAID 5 vs. RAID 10 Hi, I am looking into purchasing a new server. This server will be mission-critical. I have read and somewhat understood the theories behind RAIDs 0, 1, 5, 10 & JBOD. However, I would like to get some feedback from those who have experience in implementing and recovering from a HDD failure using RAID. Hardware specs include:- Dual Xeon 3.2 GHz 2 GB RAM I would like to implement hardware RAID but am unsure as to which would be most suitable for my needs. Any advice is appreciated. Option 1 - RAID 5 (3 hdd's) + 1 hot spare Option 2 - RAID 10 (4 hdd's) + 1 "cold" spare (in the shelf) Questions I have :- 1) When should RAID 5 be implemented? 2) When should RAID 10 be implemented? 3) Is RAID 5 with a hot spare safer than RAID 10 with a "cold" spare? 4) Is it possible to configure RAID 10 to have a hot spare? 5) Should one of the HDDs fail, a hot spare w kick-in immediately and begin rebuilding. As I am planning to put in 300 GB HDDs, how long would this take on a RAID 5 vs. RAID 10? 6) Will there be a degradation in performance for users on the system (RAID 5 vs. RAID 10)? 7) What are the disadvantages of using RAID 5 vs. RAID 10? Thanks in advance for answering my questions. Best Regards, Andrew -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20050725/e0bc7b97/attachment-0004.html>