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Earlier tonight I purchased a pair of SATA drives, and for now
I plan on using RAID 0. I know if one drive goes I will lose
all of that data, but I'm not too worried right now...
How hard would it be to add some redundancy in the future?
Would it be a matter of adding another pair of drives, and
mirroring the first array? Or would it be more involved?
If you can, I recommend running a RAID5 array. You will have the benefits of RAID0 with parity data spread across all drives in the array, giving you at least a chance to rebuild your data in case one of the drives fail or becomes corrupted.
Distribution: Slackware, CentOS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Posts: 216
Rep:
You will have the benefits (nearly) of RAID 0 on the reads, but the writes to a RAID 5 are slower because it has to compute the parity data. You also need 3 drives minimum for RAID 5. As for adding redundancy in the future, you could add another RAID 0 which you can then mirror (RAID 1) with the first RAID 0. Converting the RAID 0 to RAID 5 will usually require you to back everything up and reinitialize the RAID.
I've never heard of the 3+ drive limitation on RAID 5. Besides, if one of your drives goes south on a RAID 0, you lose all your data. Even if the writes are slower, we're talking many many small files, if that, and since these are SATA drives anyway, using a fast FS like reiserfs or better, will give you good performance. He's probably right about RAID 0 being fastest, but you won't see the benefits unless you're using more than 3 drives at a time.
Distribution: Slackware, CentOS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Posts: 216
Rep:
Quote:
I've never heard of the 3+ drive limitation on RAID 5.
Yup, you a minimum of 3 drives for a RAID 5. The parity information is spread across all the drives and consumes the size of one drive, for a size of N-1.
Thanks for all the replies. I may throw on another raid 0, and mirror in the next few
months. Or I could always back up my data, and go for raid 5 insted.
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