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macpiano
Contributor
Contributor

RAID flavor for SANs?

I'm getting a 2 new SANS this summer and will have 16 1 TB drives. They will be in seperate buildings and will replicate to each other. I understand RAID 50 is best but with 2 Hot spares that means losing 4 dirves. Pros and cons of just using without the 2 hotspares-RAID 50 or Raid 5 with no hotspares or Raid 5 with 1 Hot spare. I'd like to know best practice and also real world results. I will also have Backup Exec dedupe backups on this as well as vm storage etc.

thanks

gary

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3 Replies
idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

if it's 1TB (SATA) i would advise going for raid 50 or even raid 10 so that you will have better performance as much as possible if space is not a concern.

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ewilts
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Large RAID 5 sets with 1 hot spare are almost guaranteed to give you data loss.  As a former storage and backup/recovery admin, let me assure you that double-disk failures in RAID 5 sets are a LOT more common than you would think.  After 1 drive fails, the rest of the drives get beat up royally while you're reconstructing your raid set and if a drive fails during that rebuild, your data is gone.

I have personally witnessed several RAID 5 sets die and won't ever use them on larger raidsets.  As the old saying goes, "been there, done that, didn't like it much".  With 1TB SATA drives, you're just asking for trouble.  The math is out there in cyberspace if you want to see the limits of errors on drives.

When you go through your design, think carefully about what will happen if one of the raidsets fail - you may be replicating between the buildings, but if it takes days instead of hours to complete the replication when one side dies, you may be setting yourself for a world of hurt.  Also factor in how fast you can physically replace a failed drive.  If you lose a drive on a Friday night and don't order a replacement until Monday and it doesn't show up until Tuesday or Wednesday, you will have NO spares if you take drive failure during your business day on Monday.  I've seen this happen too.

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macpiano
Contributor
Contributor

I did read your info before on the RAID 5 thing. I was actually going to keep a physical spare handy. For the price of what I'm paying for a san it really bothers me to lose 4 drives out of 16 but I'm still debating on that. If one SANS died I would physically take it to the other building to rebuild. I will also be backing up all my data and dedupe stuff to tape as a 2nd tier so restore would probably come from that as well.  Do these SANs have monitoring processes in place when they do have problems. My Dell guy says their recommendation is RAID 50 with 2 hot spares so I'm still considering that into my thinking.

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