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Intel 520s raid 10. hw or sw raid?
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Intel 520s raid 10. hw or sw raid?

JacobHJacobH Member
edited May 2013 in General

Hi,

I'm soon setting up a shared webhosting server and am in need of some advice.

I'm planning to use 4x intel 520 SSDs in raid 10 with an E3 v2 CPU. However I am a bit unsure whether to use hardware raid or software raid with this setup. I originally thought I would go with hardware but I've noticed a few people recommend using software raid instead?

The server would be a HP ProLiant DL320e Gen8, and the hardware raid card would be HP Smart Array P222/512MB FBWC controller. One thing I notice looking at this server is this "NOTE: Only SATA 3 Gbit/s data transmission guaranteed without HP Smart Array Card" however I'm not sure how much of a problem this would be, in general the bandwidth of the data transfer probably wouldn't be that high, the SSDs are mainly there to give good IOPS. The raid controller is 6 Gb/s. The additional cost of the raid card isn't of concern, mainly interested in the performance, stability and whether it has any effect on the life time of the disks.

So, what are your recommendation, software raid or hardware raid?

Comments

  • Raid 10 is quite recommended

  • JacobHJacobH Member

    Indeed raid 10 is definitely the way to go, my question is more whether I should use software or hardware raid?

  • Hardware raid is nice but is a single point of failure. Software raid is almost as nice and fast and does not fail like raid controller cards.

  • You may find that you saturate your 3gbps ports with software raid.

    Although I am a 'big' fan of software raid, in this instance I'd suggest the hardware card

  • bcrlsnbcrlsn Member

    I've had issues with saturating my raid card with software raid as well.

    Hardware raids are much more reliable IMHO, they tend to not have as many issues rebuilding either from my experience.

  • nutjobnutjob Member

    RAID reduces IOPS. If you want the lowest possible latency, use the drives individually.

  • yomeroyomero Member
    edited May 2013

    @nutjob said: RAID reduces IOPS. If you want the lowest possible latency, use the drives individually.

    dafuq did I just read...

    Long answer:
    It depends, what RAID level? Also, you don't care about the redundancy of your data? ffs

  • JacobHJacobH Member
    edited May 2013

    @yomero said: It depends, what RAID level? Also, you don't care about the redundancy of your data? ffs

    As mentioned, I will be using raid 10 which will do both striping and mirroring so 1-2 disks can fail depending on which ones. I do care about the redundancy of the data of course, otherwise I would've used raid 0, or no raid at all eh.

    Thanks for all the feedback. I'm still not quite sure whether I would saturate the port speed as it's quite simple shared hosting, however I will probably end up going with the hardware raid just in case.

  • yomeroyomero Member

    @JacobH said: As mentioned,

    Yes, I was talking to the guy before me... :S

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