Question

Best RAID setup for following Drives and storage need

Asked by: Evil_RSA

Hey everyone, I got a seemingly simple question...but the more I search on it....the more I'm losing my way in the fog....

I have a system in need of a large storage drive...

We have the OS's broken off on different drives, and then have 4 500GB drives that we want to make into a big share.....

Seems that we just use Striping (RAID 0) and span data over all the drives...but what if one dies.....don't want to lose all that data either.....so maybe we make two spans...one with drives 1 and 2....and the other with drives 3 and 4 and then mirror 1&2 onto 3&4 to protect the data on the span....which would be (before formatting) 1TB of storage which is just about perfect.

So if I'm going to be running a dual RAID like that I'm going to want to run RAID 10 or RAID 0+1...and my system supports the following RAID's just so that everyone knows:

Controller 1
RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, and JBOD

Controller 2
RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5, and JBOD

......but here’s the part were I'm getting lost.

I'm reading that there are Pro's and Con's with 0+1 and 10 and from what I can tell one is where you span the first parts of the drives and then Mirror the spans.....where as the other is two mirrors that are then spanned

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks#Nested_RAID_Levels

Now here’s the meat and potatoes of this whole question....if I want these 4 drives to be fault tolerant and also be one big drive....what’s the best option.......also I might want to break this raid apart, and try to keep the data on the disks and increases the RAID at a later time....but who knows what RAID systems will be out by the time I need to step up from a TB or storage.

Thanks you very much,
Derek......thoroughly confused and lost in the fog....

I've gave this 300 points just because of the amount of customization of the question.

PS:  I included the RAIDs that are supported because perhaps 0+1 or 10 aren’t necessarily the best way to put together this storage container.  If out of the available RAID types there is a better option, let me know.

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Asked On
2006-02-25 at 11:52:17ID21751566
Tags

raid

,

best

,

setup

Topics

Hard Drives & Storage

,

Tivoli Storage Manager

Participating Experts
4
Points
500
Comments
7

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