SMB IT Journal Blog Archive Choosing a RAID Level ...

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/11/choosing-a-raid-lev...

SMB IT Journal
The Information Technology Resource for Small Business
Home About Find
Go

Scott Alan Miller Nov 6th, 2012

Choosing a RAID Level by Drive Count

In addition to all other factors, the number of drives available to you plays a 1 signicant role in choosing what RAID level is appropriate for you. Ideally RAID is chosen ahead of time in conjunction with chassis and drives in a holistic Tweet approach so that the entire system is engineered for the desired purpose, but even in these cases, knowing how drive counts can aect useful RAID choices can be very helpful. To simplify the list, RAID 0 will be left o of it. RAID 0 is a viable choice for certain niche business scenarios in any count of drives. So there is no need to display it on the list. Also, the list assumes that a hot spare, if it exists, is not included in the count as that is outside of the RAID array and so would not be a part of the array drive count. 2 Drives: RAID 1 3 Drives: RAID 1 * 4 Drives: RAID 10 5 Drives: RAID 6 6 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 10 7 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 8 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 10 ** 9 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 10 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 10 or RAID 60/61 11 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 12 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 10 or RAID 60/61 13 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7

1 of 4

02/18/2013 11:53 PM

SMB IT Journal Blog Archive Choosing a RAID Level ...

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/11/choosing-a-raid-lev...

14 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 10 or RAID 60/61or RAID 70/71 15 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 60 16 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 10 or RAID 60/61 or RAID 70/71 17 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 18 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 10 or RAID 60/61 or RAID 70/71 19 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 20 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 10 or RAID 60/61 or RAID 70/71 21 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 60 or RAID 70 22 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 10 or RAID 60/61 or RAID 70/71 23 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 24 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 10 or RAID 60/61 or RAID 70/71 25 Drives: RAID 6 or RAID 7 or RAID 60 * RAID 1 is technically viable at any drive count of two or more. I have included it only up to three drives because using it beyond that point is generally considered absurd and is completely unheard of in the real world. But technically it would continue to provide equal write performance while continuing to increase in read performance and reliability as more drives are added to the mirror. But for reasons of practicality I have included it only twice on the list where it would actually be useful. ** At six drives and higher both RAID 6 and RAID 10 are viable options for arrays of even drive counts and RAID 6 alone is a viable option for odd numbered drive array counts. For this list I have only considered the standard RAID levels of 0, 1, 4, 5, 6 and 10. I left 0 o of the list because it is always viable for certain use cases. RAID 5 never appears because there is no time on spindle hard drives today that it should be used, as RAID 5 is an enhancement of RAID 4, it too does not appear on the list. Non-standard double parity RAID solutions such as Netapps RAID-DP and Oracles RAIDZ2 can be treated as derivations of RAID 6 and apply accordingly. Oracles triple parity RAIDZ3 (sometimes called RAID 7) would apply at seven drives and higher but is a non-standard level and extremely rare so I included it in italics. More commonly, RAID 6 makes sense at six drives or more and RAID 7 at eight drives or more. Like RAID 4 and 5, RAID levels based on them (RAID 40, 50, 41, 51, 55, etc.) are not appropriate any longer due to the failure and fragility modes of spindle-based hard drives. Complex RAID levels based on RAID 6 and 7 (60, 61, 70, 71, etc.) have a place but are exceedingly rare as they generally have very little cost savings compared to RAID 10 but suer from performance issues and increased risk. RAID 61 and 71 are almost exclusively eective when the highest order RAID, the mirror component, is over a network rather than local on the system.
2 of 4 02/18/2013 11:53 PM

SMB IT Journal Blog Archive Choosing a RAID Level ...

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/11/choosing-a-raid-lev...

No Comments yet Uncategorized Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply
Name (required) Mail (hidden) (required) Website

Submit Comment

Recent Posts
Comparing SAN and NAS The Ripple Eect of Windows 8 Keeping IT in Context Solution Elegance The History of Array Splitting

Archives
February 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 December 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011

3 of 4

02/18/2013 11:53 PM

SMB IT Journal Blog Archive Choosing a RAID Level ...

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/11/choosing-a-raid-lev...

April 2011 February 2011 November 2010 August 2010 May 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009

Tags
"open storage" analytics blade blog Business of IT cloud communication consolidation consultant desktop documentation dokuwiki google ha

hard disk

high availability IT Management laptop

linux

mediawiki microblog

nas netbook

Never Get os virtualization pmwiki printer purchasing

raid relationship reseller risk san smb virtualization web wiki windows

storage
workstation

system virtualization twiki twitter vendor virtual

Categories
Business of IT IT Management Storage Uncategorized Virtualization Windows

Meta
Log in Entries RSS Comments RSS WordPress.org 2013 SMB IT Journal. All rights reserved. TerraFirma | WordPress Theme

4 of 4

02/18/2013 11:53 PM