Question Best Raid for my SAS drives?

[drydenspyduh]

I recently acquired a Gen 7 HP DL360 and have a few different drive sizes. I currently have 2x 300gb sas and 2x 146gb sas drives installed. I also have 6x 146gb sas drives sitting on my desk that I could potentially use. I am trying to get the most storage and speed possible. With current hd config with Raid 5 selected it says I have a data size of 410.1GB. Curious if 4x 146gb would net me more or what peoples suggestions are.

Thanks!

 

[mdd1963]

Few recommend RAID 5 with spinning drives anymore as their is a disturbing tendency for another drive to fail in a rebuild process resulting in all data loss, but, as long as you are putting using data you can afford to lose (RAID 5 can only lose 1 drive).

The mixed capacity drives suggest the two smaller drives were likely mirrored OS drives, and the two larger likely data drives, and, can be combined in RAID 5,6, etc, depending on your RAID controller....

RAID 6 has two drives redundancy...(with 6 drives combined, about 550 GB capacity with two drives redundancy, if controller supports RAID 6) As 146 and 300 GB drives are likely several years old, some redundancy would be a good idea)

Will the system work with SATA drives, including SSDs? A single 500 GB SSD would be as fast as a 4 drive RAID 5 with about as much capacity anyway...

 

[faalin]

With the way you have it set up now the 2 300GB drives are downsizing to 146GB and then raiding with the other 2 146GB drives, giving you 4x 146GB in raid 5.

Since the Gen 7 HP DL360 is only a 1 U server i would run the 2 300GB in raid 1 for the OS and then 6x 146GB in raid 5 or 6, depending on how valuable your information is your storing on the server.

Just remember that raid is not a backup solution, 1 or 2 drives can fail at a time or even the card so you still need to make backups of your information.

On a side note does your DL360 have dual back planes or is it only a 4 drive server with a DVD drive? We have 2 DL360 gen7's at work, one has dual back planes for 8 drives where the other only has 4 drives and a DVD drive.