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Brian SelltizFlag for United States of America

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What is faster with 24 disks, raid 6 or raid 60?

Using 24 x 4TB WD RE Drives
Raid 6 will have all 24 drives in the volume with 22 usable.
Raid 60 will have 2 x 12 drive volumes each with 10 usable disks.
Which is faster for read and which faster for writing?
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Paul MacDonald
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I'd never heard of RAID 60, so I had to look it up.  It's essentially stripping across a series of RAID 6 arrays.  

That said, RAID 60 will be faster for reads and writes, as long as an array isn't degraded.  The more arrays you have (you're talking about having two), the faster it will be (but the fewer disks you'll actually have for storage).
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Kimputer

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Kimputer, thank you for the detailed answer. May I ask another question?

Would RAID 50 be faster than 60? And would there be any downside other than reduced redundancy over the 60 array?
(ok - 2 questions)

Thanks,
RAID 50 would be slightly faster for writes, because you're only creating one parity bit instead of two.  The speed difference would be nominal, but your fault tolerance is reduced by using RAID 50 over RAID 60.
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Kimputer

RAID 50 is indeed only slightly faster, while losing the extra redundancy (1 disk failure instead of 2 disk failure).
Use RAID50 if you are SURE you can get the hard disk with extremely short lead time (for instance, HP Carepack warranty). If not, and you rely on "normal" hardware, better keep it RAID60.