[ML-General] hardware RAID

david ainut at knology.net
Fri Jun 12 09:21:08 CDT 2015


replies embedded (pun intended):


On 06/12/15 07:53, Kirk D Mccann wrote:
> So I've noticed two things that no one has mentioned yet.  3 drives 
> running in raid 0 and rebuild times of large drives.
>
> Raid 0:
> You realize that if any one of the drives that are running in raid 0 
> fail then you lose all your data right?  The only time you want to use 
> raid 0 is when you dont care about the data and are looking for 
> speed.  I use raid 0 for our build server build drive because we 
> always have source code that can be used to rebuild the builds.
>
The two sets of RAIDs are on different machines right now.  The striped 
0's are used for video capture, then they are compressed and put on 
different media (blu-ray write-once usually), and then that video is 
deleted from the stripe array.






> Large Drives:
> So if you have more two drives mirroring isnt really what you want 
> because true mirroring only works with two sets.  (That could be two 
> drives or two sets of raided disks).
> Since you have more than two drives you are going to want raid 5,6, or 
> 7.  The raid that you choose should be based on the size of your 
> drives and the class of the drives.

The mirrored drives, qty 2, are each 2 Tb, and are identical drives.  
Again, intent is easy failover without losing existing data.  I'm 
horrible about doing the proper backups at home.  (Like the mechanic's 
personal car always needs a lot of work.)
That machine is not a data or compute intensive one.  Email, games, and 
such.


>
> If the drives you have are more than 1TB in size and they are consumer 
> grade drives then you shouldn't be using raid 5.

I was incorrect; they are RAID 1.


> This is a problem because the likelihood of a read failure while 
> rebuilding a disk is higher the larger the drives are. So then you 
> have to be able to handle a read failure which requires a higher 
> raid.  Check out the calculator: 
> http://www.servethehome.com/raid-calculator/raid-reliability-calculator-simple-mttdl-model/
>
> Also if you are using raid dont use Western Digital Green drives 
> unless you plan to reflash the firmware to make them function like red 
> drives.
>

Will look further into ZFS.


> My recommendation:
> All that being said I am a big fan of Freenas, because it uses ZFS.  
> Btrfs is great but its not quite where ZFS is yet(or at least that was 
> the case when I last looked at it). If you go the ZFS route you REALLY 
> REALLY need to read up on how ZFS, uDevs, and vDevs work.  Because 
> what many people dont realize is you cant just add a single disk to 
> the array when you do it makes the entire array fail if that single 
> added disk fails.  When you add drives you have to add drives in sets.
>
> Personally I'm paranoid about my data, I use ZFS raid z3 on two vDevs, 
> each vDev has 5 2+TB drives.
>
> Oh and with ZFS you can use different size drives but you waist a good 
> amount of space when you do that.
> And lastly be sure to schedule scrubs of your drives and do it in a 
> way that the scrub will not occur while a long smart test is running.  
> That can cause problems.
>
> -Kirk
>

Thanks!



> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 5:33 PM, WebDawg <webdawg at gmail.com 
> <mailto:webdawg at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 3:30 PM, WebDawg <webdawg at gmail.com
>     <mailto:webdawg at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 3:11 PM, david <ainut at knology.net
>         <mailto:ainut at knology.net>> wrote:
>
>             I'm thinking about putting all the computers on the
>             network disk array, including the SOC's: beaglebone
>             blacks, arduino mega256, and the RPi2.  I would not mind
>             doing the compiles (and maybe even the booting!) on the
>             hard drives instead of the limited-life SD cards and
>             'flash' that are on the SOC's.  Any of you guys done
>             that?  Everything in the house is 1Gb Ethernet.  If only I
>             could get that to the outside world <heavy sigh.> :-)
>              Already have the BBB's booting of the SD card, which you
>             have to do with the rev B's and their 2 Gb size..
>
>             David
>
>
>         I have thought about it.  At that point you need to consider
>         the transport mechanism between the systems and such. NFS,
>         CIFS, iSCSI?
>
>         You need to back up.  Live. (ZFS Snapshot)
>
>         I do not know what you do with them, so I cannot help there.
>
>         PXE boot?  Other ways to boot?  I do not know a lot about that
>         stuff except the RPi.
>
>         I would consider bonding more then one port together on the
>         network server if you are doing anything major.
>
>         I run some VMS over NFS right now, I do not like it.
>
>         I was using CIFS but after learning that is really bad to do
>         over and over again.  I stopped.  None of this was mission
>         critical.
>
>         I want speed so I am leaning towards some physical disks for
>         the virtual systems.  In the future I would use a fiber target
>         or bonded target that was dedicated if I wanted network stuff.
>
>         Fun Fun.
>
>
>     I forgot to mention.  You are going to need a few UPS units.  I
>     have destroyed virtual systems when a server that hosts its
>     filesystem has went down.  It is not fun bringing it back to life.
>
>     If you are talking about creating and image, and having the
>     devices pull any new images when new ones exist, still using them
>     on the SD cards while they are on, I think you have a different
>     situation all together.
>
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