Which is better: RAID5 + 1 Hotspare / RAID6? [closed]

Solution 1:

You have disadvantages and advantages with each approach; it depends on why you're using RAID. Most people use it for availability. They don't want a drive to die and end up having to take their system or server down. In that, you don't use RAID 5. I learned it the hard way and hammer this point home with every RAID-related question I get into on SF.

Why? Because as drives are getting larger, there's more tolerance for URE, unrecoverable read errors. We had it happen and it isn't what you want to discover in the middle of a rebuild. Scenario: RAID system with 3 drives. We got an alarm on our Dell with a hardware PERC card that drive C died. Order new drive, swap it out, no problem. In the middle of the rebuild, it died.

According to the diagnostics, there was a "bad spot" on drive B. The system had a silently failed on that drive repeatedly, and now that it was rebuilding the data, it couldn't read that spot, and no matter how many times we ran the repair even off the controller directly and it each time said everything was fixed, it wouldn't rebuild. So we have one dead drive and one drive that couldn't read from a spot...we end up replacing 2 drives and restoring from backup.

Lesson: RAID isn't a backup, and RAID 5 is no longer an availability option for larger drives.

If you're looking to increase speed or increase storage sizes, then you can balance that into your decision. You need to define your needs in terms of your needs and goals, not in terms of "I need RAID, which do I use?"

Solution 2:

Use RAID6. Read "Why RAID 6 stops working in 2019" by Robin Harris on ZDNet.

Solution 3:

RAID 5 should never exist with a hot spare (warm spare.) RAID 6 is always a better use of the same drive count.

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/07/hot-spare-or-a-hot-mess/

There is no space/capacity advantage or cost advantage to the RAID 5 solution (but some small performance advantage) but it does a ton for mitigating things like URE risk.

Solution 4:

This one's easy - do you want more available disk space or the ability to survive disks failing - it's that simple.

So I'll make some wild assumptions - that you don't care about performance as they're 7.2's and that you do care about available space as they're 1TB disks - you don't mention what type of data you want to store but I'm going to assume it's either just video files or a combination of video and audio. If I'm right then presumably you would struggle to replace the data? in that case I'd choose neither 5 or 6 but go with R10, yes you lose 1TB over R6 and 2TB over R5 but it'll be faster and can survive three disks going pop. If I'm wrong and you can quickly recover your data then you may as well go R5 so you get the most available space.

Solution 5:

While performance is a concern, it is not as much of a concern as you think. Newer RAID hardware is going to be as fast writing 2 parity stripes as they are at 1 stripe.

Also, SAS drives usually have a lower Bit Error Rate, which translates to a lower Unrecoverable Read Error (URE). Usually an order of magnitude (10x), however, if the SAS drive is the same model as a SATA drive, you may not see an improvement.

Finally, as to the question of RAID-5 and UREs and how that can just ruin your day, I wrote an article on it some time ago at: http://subnetmask255x4.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/sata-unrecoverable-errors-and-how-that-impacts-raid/ in which I cover some of these questions. Basically, RAID-6 on good hardware (not software RAID) should show equivalent performance to RAID-5. If you have poor hardware, or are using software RAID, then you will see a performance hit.

As always, backups are your saving grace. Do not forget to implement a backup policy, AND verify that it can be recovered from.