Questions tagged [raid]

RAID, an acronym originally for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (today usually interpreted as referred to as Redundant Array of Independent Disks), is a technology that provides increased storage performance and reliability through redundancy by spreading data across multiple disks using various algorithms (RAID-levels). RAID can be implemented in hardware storage controllers, or in software, usually as operating system/kernel features.

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Megacli is killing me, any help appreciated

I run a server with 2 drives in raid0 configured through BIOS. I just added 2 more drives using hotplug (the server is dell r610 with RHEL 5.4 64bit) and I would like to configure a separate raid0 partition on these drives. I am getting the…
Stefan
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Guidelines for the maximum number of disks in a RAID set?

In any of the RAID levels that use striping, increasing the number of physical disks usually increases performance, but also increase the chance of any one disk in the set failing. I have this idea that I shouldn't use more than about 6-8 disks in a…
kbyrd
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Hot spare or extra parity drive in RAID array?

In a different question about configuring a RAID array, the author is building a RAID array with 8 drives. One answer suggests using 7 drives in RAID 5 with one left over as a hot spare. Since RAID 6 protects against two failures, even if they are…
Nic
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Most efficient RAID configuration with 6 disks?

I have a hand-me-down server that I'm setting up at home and it's got 6 72Gb hard disks (as well as 2 18Gb drives that I'm using for the OS). What is the best way to configure those 6 drives? Should I RAID 5 or 6, or go with something simpler, like…
Bob King
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RAID strategy - 8 1TB drives

I'm setting up a backup storage device- This machine has Windows Server 2008, on a separate boot drive. It has 8x 1TB drives, and uses a hardware RAID card. My question is, which RAID configuration should I go for? Initially, I was going to go with…
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RAID with three disks (RAID 5 vs RAID 1E)

I am upgrading a server which has four drive bays. I'll be putting a new Adaptec RAID card into the server so it will support large drive sizes. I need to squeeze as much capacity as possible out of this four-drive cage, so 8 TB drives are my most…
TSG
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Can a RAID 4 disk setup crash if only 1 hard disk fails?

I am a web developer. I have not much experience in hardware. For this reason, I use managed servers. This morning, one of the drives in our setup failed. However, the full site went down. I asked my web host what happened and he replied that…
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For a server that can tolerate downtime, is it better to use a hot spare or a cold spare?

In other words, should I leave a spare disk on the shelf or set it up as a hot spare? If the server has a little bit of downtime, it isn't the end of the world. It's not a webserver or anything that needs to serve stuff up 24/7. Are there any…
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Why would one use RAID 1 and LVM for a file server?

Im a part time systems administrator and there is little formal documentation. Our main file server was set up in 2010 by somebody who is not even at the institute any more. The requirement at the time was to have three shared filesystems: /home…
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If a raid controller changes, are the drives still usable without re-formatting?

I've been wanting to do a raid 1 setup in my home with a pair of sata drives. Someone told me that if the controller fails, you can't just get a new controller because you'll have to reformat the drives. Or is that true only in some…
Jeremy
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RAID 0 recovery

I know the theoretical answer is "not possible". But theory and practice do not always match. So I'm wondering if you know any trick to recover something... Is there any chance to recover anything from the remaining disk of a RAID 0 set, even if…
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Do all mirrored pairs in a RAID 10 configuration need to be homogeneous in size?

I was planning to expand an existing raid 10 array composed of four 1TB disks with the addition of two 2TB drives. Then I wondered whether, despite the configuration of RAID10 (striping of mirrored sets), the new pair would see only half of its size…
Fulvio Scapin
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Do I lose RAID array if I switch RAID controller

If I have a RAID array and I switch out the controller to a newer controller, does this destroy the array? E.g. I have 6 drives as 1 RAID0 array. If I upgrade the controller to a different one, but don't configure anything, should I be able to plug…
Lock
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Why are there RAID models where there are more than one parity disk?

I was just wondering how multiple "parity disks" would work, since it seems that doing so might defeat the purpose of having a parity.
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Is SAFE new terminology that is replacing RAID?

I was looking for an external drive enclosure with a RAID controller and found one in Newegg. Looking at Wikipedia, I cannot find information on this "SAFE" terminology. Is this a replacement for RAID or something? If so, why? The feature list for…
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