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Forum Discussion
Failures of various RAID modes.
I'm intrigued by the failures. dbott67 wrote: ........ and 2 multiple disk failures where I had to replace the drives and restore from backup. In each case, I was able to recover without dat...
I'll chime in with my advice (take it for what it's worth... not much! ;) ).
The level of RAID that one chooses is a balance between price, performance, capacity and availability/resiliency. If you need higher availability/resiliency (especially on larger arrays) then you should use a level of RAID that can tolerate multiple disk failures. Of course, this decreases capacity or increases price (or both) but it generally increases performance. There are other factors that can cause data loss that RAID does not protect against (i.e. some other sort of hardware failure, accidental or intentional deletion, malware such as cryptolocker, fire/flood and theft). Additionally, there are other factors that would need to be addressed if high-availability were paramount (redundant power supplies, redundant network links, NICs, UPSes, etc.)
My big sermon is always to maintain multiple backups in multiple locations. Keeping only one copy of your data on a single device is not a backup. Having another copy of your data stored elsewhere will always allow you to recover in the event of a disaster.
For the average home user where there's going to be 4 drives or less, RAID 5 is most likely the best trade-off between price, performance and storage capacity. Again, this is for the average Joe.
For those people/organizations that require larger arrays, higher-availability and/or increased performance, then RAID 5 is not the recommended option as the risk of failure increases with # of disks. Of course, the cost per GB increases, but that generally goes with the territory. In my recent upgrade, I chose a balance between redundancy, capacity and price and decided to go with RAID 50 (I was unaware that it was deprecated).
As mentioned previously, I can tolerate *some* downtime to recover from a hardware failure. I *could* increase availability by buying redundant equipment and having some sort of heartbeat flip over to the backup hardware, but it's not within our financial means to do so. We would then also have to address the other areas of failure (network links, etc.) to be truly redundant. It's not something that our board would likely want to sign off on, as the price to purchase and maintain the equipment and links would be too great.
-Dave
The level of RAID that one chooses is a balance between price, performance, capacity and availability/resiliency. If you need higher availability/resiliency (especially on larger arrays) then you should use a level of RAID that can tolerate multiple disk failures. Of course, this decreases capacity or increases price (or both) but it generally increases performance. There are other factors that can cause data loss that RAID does not protect against (i.e. some other sort of hardware failure, accidental or intentional deletion, malware such as cryptolocker, fire/flood and theft). Additionally, there are other factors that would need to be addressed if high-availability were paramount (redundant power supplies, redundant network links, NICs, UPSes, etc.)
My big sermon is always to maintain multiple backups in multiple locations. Keeping only one copy of your data on a single device is not a backup. Having another copy of your data stored elsewhere will always allow you to recover in the event of a disaster.
For the average home user where there's going to be 4 drives or less, RAID 5 is most likely the best trade-off between price, performance and storage capacity. Again, this is for the average Joe.
For those people/organizations that require larger arrays, higher-availability and/or increased performance, then RAID 5 is not the recommended option as the risk of failure increases with # of disks. Of course, the cost per GB increases, but that generally goes with the territory. In my recent upgrade, I chose a balance between redundancy, capacity and price and decided to go with RAID 50 (I was unaware that it was deprecated).
As mentioned previously, I can tolerate *some* downtime to recover from a hardware failure. I *could* increase availability by buying redundant equipment and having some sort of heartbeat flip over to the backup hardware, but it's not within our financial means to do so. We would then also have to address the other areas of failure (network links, etc.) to be truly redundant. It's not something that our board would likely want to sign off on, as the price to purchase and maintain the equipment and links would be too great.
-Dave
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