RAID Levels for Dell MD3000i

[Agamar]

I have the opportunity to install a new Dell MD3000i. It is coming configured with 4 iSCSI ports and 10 450G 15K rpm SAS drives. I was debating on how to configure the Raid array for best performance/reliability.

On one hand, I could have 4 450G mirrored sets (Raid-1) that should have good read speed and OK write speed. The other option being a Raid-10? array. Since I only have real world experience with Raid-0,1, and 5, I thought I might ask those of you that have actually ran Raid-10.

One other possibility would be one large Raid-5 array, but that might not be so good on the write times!

 

[Agamar]

I decided to configure the array as a RAID-10. I will try some benchmarking later to see how it stacks up to local drives...

 

[Boobs McGee]

Old post and you already decided, but it really depends on what you will be using it for. Another factor is how important the data residing on your array is.

Some personal experience: I had a few servers overseas that housed data that was nearly impossible to quickly or easily replace. I configured in RAID 5 and kept three of the 15 drives as global hot spares. This was on MD-1000 units. My reasons for this were quick recovery and always having a hot spare available since it was difficult to get a SAS drive in a time efficient manner. RAID 10 is highly regarded for database performance assuming the OS is separate. RAID 0 is fast, but IMO extremely risky if in use on a production machine.