Best Raid Configuration for a 8-1tb hhd server

Hi All,
I have been trying to figure out what would be the best raid configuration for my Windows 2012 essentials server. So I was wondering if I could get some advise on this. Here is what I would like to get out of this configuration.
I would like to split the 8-1tb drives into 2 VHD one with about 300gb for the OS to be installed on, and the rest to be use for storage. I want like to have good redundancy, fairly good read & write capabilities.
I will be using this server for a Small Web Page and Game Hosting, Email Exchange, Critical Application hosting.
I would like the ability to enlarge the overall raid storage by swapping out my 1Tb drives with 2Tb or larger as the need for more storage arises.
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks

You may be better of using Storage spaces and not using raid at all.
Robert Pearman SBS MVP
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Similar Messages

What is the best RAID configuration for a MacPro as a Logic User?

There ought to be a universal answer to this question: what is the best RAID configuration for Logic Mac Pro users? I will be more specific.
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Well, both Mirrored and Striped have their pros and cons. If you use mirrored, it will offer no better performance than the spec'ed drive along with it's sata bus speed. The plus point is, if one drive goes down, you have the second as a backup as the complete contents of one drive are mirrored on the other.
With striped you will get a performance boost because all files (for example a single project) will get written across both drives and hence split the load on the drives and the SATA busses. The drawback is that you'll have to make sure you have a good, regular backup schedule in place because when one of the drives goes to drive heaven, you're going to be stuffed without a full backup of both drives.
Exactly what performance boost you'd get will depend on your project, number of files, size of files, fragmentation of files, track count etc. You may find it would be easier to use the 3 drives straight, with no raid and have:
HD 1: OS and Apps. No samples at all.
HD2: Audio Files for Logic projects
HD3: Reason, Ableton, Logic etc instrument sample library
HD4: Video and bouncing.
Which is what I ended up doing although I use HD4 as an interchangeable backup for HD1 and 2.
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Start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
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Kappy wrote:
In these early models, Ronda, the benefit is very marginal.
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In doing a Google search for that article I saw, I found this:
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-notebooks/99215-4gb-ram-my-macbook.html
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RAID Configurations for Cisco servers

Hi All,
What is the RAID configuration for Cisco Appliance(Version 8.5) like CUCM, CUPS, CUIC, Unity etc?RAID Configuration will be done while installtion itself or we need to do it explicitly?
Regards,
Adithya

Hi Geoff,
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Regards,
Adithya

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Please rate helpful posts!

Best Xserve configuration for MySQL?

Basically, I'm trying to figure out the optimal configuration for our next Xserve. Obviously, more RAM, more CPUs, more and faster disks in RAID, etc will improve things. But considering that money doesn't grow on trees, what have some of you found to be particularly cost-efficient in building an Xserve to run mainly MySQL where there are many small INSERTs on indexed (!? tables of 10 million or more rows (DB size of ~1GB, presently). I realize it's kind of a "depends if" type of question, but I'm just curious what people have found. (I've also read that AnandTech article that wasn't too kind to Mach.)
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Should I even bother to look at a Sun or Dell running Linux?
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Traffic ø per hour
Received 1,168 MiB 21 MiB
Sent 1,631 MiB 29 MiB
Total 2,799 MiB 49 MiB
Connections ø per hour %
max. concurrent connections 92 --- ---
Failed attempts 0 0.00 0.00%
Aborted 81 1.43 0.08%
Total 98 k 1,731.89 100.00%
Total ø per hour ø per minute ø per second
6,409 k 113.27 k 1.89 k 31.46
Query type ø per hour %
admin commands 41 0.00 k 0.00%
alter db 0 0.00 0.00%
alter table 7 0.00 k 0.00%
analyze 3 0.00 k 0.00%
backup table 0 0.00 0.00%
begin 0 0.00 0.00%
call procedure 0 0.00 0.00%
change db 98 k 1,734.77 1.56%
change master 0 0.00 0.00%
check 0 0.00 0.00%
checksum 0 0.00 0.00%
commit 0 0.00 0.00%
create db 0 0.00 0.00%
create function 0 0.00 0.00%
create index 0 0.00 0.00%
create table 1 0.00 k 0.00%
create user 0 0.00 0.00%
delete 210 3.71 0.00%
delete multi 0 0.00 0.00%
do 0 0.00 0.00%
drop db 0 0.00 0.00%
drop function 0 0.00 0.00%
drop index 0 0.00 0.00%
drop table 1 0.00 k 0.00%
drop user 0 0.00 0.00%
flush 0 0.00 0.00%
grant 0 0.00 0.00%
ha close 0 0.00 0.00%
ha open 0 0.00 0.00%
ha read 0 0.00 0.00%
help 0 0.00 0.00%
insert 214 k 3,776.04 3.39%
insert select 5,725 101.18 0.09%
kill 6 0.00 k 0.00%
load 0 0.00 0.00%
load master data 0 0.00 0.00%
load master table 0 0.00 0.00%
lock tables 16 0.00 k 0.00%
optimize 0 0.00 0.00%
preload keys 0 0.00 0.00%
purge 0 0.00 0.00%
purge before date 0 0.00 0.00%
rename table 0 0.00 0.00%
repair 0 0.00 0.00%
replace 0 0.00 0.00%
replace select 0 0.00 0.00%
reset 0 0.00 0.00%
restore table 0 0.00 0.00%
revoke 0 0.00 0.00%
revoke all 0 0.00 0.00%
Query type ø per hour %
rollback 0 0.00 0.00%
savepoint 0 0.00 0.00%
select 941 k 16.64 k 14.92%
set option 855 15.11 0.01%
show binlog events 1 0.00 k 0.00%
show binlogs 43 0.00 k 0.00%
show charsets 121 2.14 0.00%
show collations 121 2.14 0.00%
show column types 0 0.00 0.00%
show create db 15 0.00 k 0.00%
show create table 376 6.64 0.01%
show databases 129 2.28 0.00%
show errors 0 0.00 0.00%
show fields 675 11.93 0.01%
show grants 46 0.00 k 0.00%
show innodb status 393 6.95 0.01%
show keys 37 0.00 k 0.00%
show logs 0 0.00 0.00%
show master status 0 0.00 0.00%
show ndb status 0 0.00 0.00%
show new master 0 0.00 0.00%
show open tables 1 0.00 k 0.00%
show privileges 0 0.00 0.00%
show processlist 18 0.00 k 0.00%
show slave hosts 0 0.00 0.00%
show slave status 0 0.00 0.00%
show status 415 7.33 0.01%
show storage engines 8 0.00 k 0.00%
show tables 186 3.29 0.00%
show triggers 0 0.00 0.00%
show variables 283 5.00 0.00%
show warnings 0 0.00 0.00%
slave start 0 0.00 0.00%
slave stop 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt close 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt execute 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt fetch 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt prepare 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt reset 0 0.00 0.00%
stmt send long data 0 0.00 0.00%
truncate 0 0.00 0.00%
unlock tables 16 0.00 k 0.00%
update 260 k 4,600.62 4.12%
update multi 0 0.00 0.00%
xa commit 0 0.00 0.00%
xa end 0 0.00 0.00%
xa prepare 0 0.00 0.00%
xa recover 0 0.00 0.00%
xa rollback 0 0.00 0.00%
xa start 0 0.00 0.00%
Begin
Variable Value Description
Flush_commands 1 The number of executed FLUSH statements.
Lastquerycost 0 The total cost of the last compiled query as computed by the query optimizer. Useful for comparing the cost of different query plans for the same query. The default value of 0 means that no query has been compiled yet.
Slow_queries 338 The number of queries that have taken more than longquerytime seconds.

RAID 5 is the worst possible storage option for databases.
That's not to say it won't work, but it has an overhead that will impact disk I/O, especially writes and it sounds like your data set is write-heavy.
This is because a write requires a Read-Modify-Write process for every write - whenever you write data to the array it has to read all the existing data in the corresponding blocks, recalculate the new parity data, then write it all back.
This may or may not be a problem for you, depending on actual quantity and scale of the writes, but if you're looking for the best configuration, RAID 5 is not it.
For optimal performance use RAID 0. Of course, RAID 0 has no protection, so you need to deal with that.
The ideal combination is RAID 0+1, but that requires a minimum of four drives, while the XServe can only handle three internal drives.
As for the rest of it, you really need to analyze your data more before you can get an answer.
The number of rows is largely irrelevant if you're just inserting data. It has some bearing on indexes, so you need to look at how your data is indexed.
As for memory, the ideal configuration is at least enough memory for MySQL to load all the indexes into RAM - most lookups should be indexed and if those indexes fit entirely within the memory space you're off to a good start.
Note that the standard MySQL is 32-bit, so you're limited to 2GB for InnoDB or MyISAM (whichever you're using). You'll need the 64-bit version to use more memory than that.
Most performance bottlenecks (and gains) can be traced to either indexes (too many indexes can be just as bad as not enough), and application (there's significant overhead in opening a new MySQL connection (which is a large factor in the AnandTech article), so try to ensure that your application uses connection pools (where a number of connections are opened when the app starts, and reused through application processes rather that a new connection opened for every query). Without knowing the application it's impossible to narrow that one down much more.
As for Sun or Dell - sure, they're options. Just be aware that you'll need Solaris or Linux admin skills in order to get the most out of them. They may (but not necessarily will) perform faster at the end of the day, but it may also take you much time and heartache to get there.
The other thing that you don't mention is why you're looking to upgrade. Is the G5 currently stressed? If so, where? what's the typical CPU load? disk activity level? network load, etc.
It doesn't make any sense upgrading the machine if the network is your bottleneck - all you're going to do is move that same bottleneck to a different machine.

Which RAID Configuration for my WD "My Book Mirror Edition"?

About to reformat my WD "My Book Mirror Edition" to use on my iMac. I hope to also install on my iMac "Virtual Box", "VM Fusion", or "Parallels" and then run a few windows products. Which RAID configuration should I choose in the WD "drive configurations" box?

If I were you I'd run any Virtual Machine directly on your iMac, not on a "WD My Book Mirror Edition", in particular not when connected through USB 2.0.
To store data, the WD is fine.
For the RAID options:
RAID 0 ("striping") : if you want something fast (insofar this is possible with a USB connection). Note that when one of your disks fails you can say goodbye to all your data.
RAID 1 ("mirroring"): more safe. If one disk fails, the data are recoverable as they are on the other disk as well. Disadvantage is you get only half the storage capacity compared to RAID 0.
Oh. my personal recommendation: RAID 1 is not an alternative to making a backup. So whatever option you choose: if you store valuable data on the disk that are nowehere else: back them up!
On formats:
HFS+ : definitely recommended if you only use the RAID array on the Mac.
FAT 32: if you also use it on a Windows machine. Note that files cannot be larger than 4 GB in this case.
Hope this helps.
Eric

The best RAID level for video editing that has some form of redundancy?

I've been asked to help find the best solution for importing and editing large amounts of HDV (25 Mbit/s) video. However, those whom I am helping also want a level of redundancy that will allow a single drive to fail and their data to be preserved. So what I'm trying to figure out is the best RAID level (or levels) for their need. I'm fairly certain that either 0+1 or 10 is what I'm looking for, however the I/O performance differences between 0+1 and 10 aren't quite clear to me. If someone could explain that to me I would appreciate it. Additionally, if someone knows a better level than either 0+1 or 10 for the needs I described, please don't hesitate to let me know.

The difference between RAID 10 and RAID 0+1 is how the array is created.
RAID 0+1 creates a RAID from multiple RAID 0 arrays that are mirrored.
You can tolerate any number of drive failures in any one side of the mirror (that side of the mirror goes offline as soon as any one disk fails, so it doesn't matter how many other disks fail in the same array), but one drive failure on both parts of the mirror will trash your data.
RAID 10 creates a stripe of multiple RAID 1 mirrors.
In this setup you create RAID 1 mirror sets and stripe them together.
In this setup you can tolerate one disk failure in each element of the stripe.
For example if you have 6 drives you might create three mirrors of two drives each, and each mirror is then striped.
You can lose one drive in each mirror, but if you lose two drives in any mirror set, you're out of luck.
In both cases, though, you're not going to get the best usage out of the array since mirroring has a 50% overhead - meaning you're only going to get 50% of your total disk capacity as usable space.
With the XServe RAID, the RAID 5 performance is very good - good enough for your 25MB/sec throughput so I'd go with RAID 5 arrays, not RAID 0 or 1 on the XServe RAID itself.
Then, depending on your space requirements, you can either stripe or mirror them together for a RAID 50 or 51 array. In this way you gain the data redundancy of RAID 5 with better disk utilization than 10 or 0+1.
RAID 50 will give you the best performance (and the most usable space), RAID 51 will give you the best redundancy.
At the end of the day it's up to you to decide which format to use based on performance and usable space requirements.

Creating the best RAID setup for my MacPro using FCP

I have a MacPro, 2 x 3GHz Dual Core, 16GB ram, 4 x 500GB drives and I work in FCP 5.1.4 and with my Hardware setup I feel it should be faster and I've been wanting to set up a RAID but not sure how to do it, or the best way way to do it.
Out of the 4 drives I have, Drive one is my main drive (boot drive, apps etc.) Drives (2 & 3) which is a TB combined, I'd like to turn those into a RAID) to speed up rendering, editing etc. In FCP and Motion. Drive 4 is where I keep all my working files.
My files are backed up regularly onto external harddrives and kept offsite.
Can I leave everything I have on my entire system the way it is and just turn Drives 2 & 3 into a RAID that's best for this application? People who work in VIDEO I know do this all the time to speed things up but I can't find the steps for the best way to do this. Bits and pieces all over the place but I can't put this puzzle together.
Can you point me in the direction in how to do this?
As I'm doing this is there anything I should be careful about?
Please help me understand this process.
Just in case you need to know what kind of drives I have here's the info:
Capacity: 465.76 GB
Model: ST3500641AS P
Revision: 3.BTA
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk1
Bay Name: "Bay 1"
OS9 Drivers: No
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Startup Drive:
Capacity: 465.44 GB
Available: 367.86 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s2
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My advice would be 'yes' to what you are saying... with the exception of the Softraid stuff - not that I think its wrong, but I've never used it, so I can't comment if you need it or whether the Mac OSX raid is sufficient - but others here say they prefer it so fair enough. You can see some comparisons here http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/softraid/351/
amug always have indepth benchmarks of stuff.
I wouldnt call myself an FCP guru, but I think that your suggestion of putting the FCP scratch disk and client, video files on the raid are the best idea. The scratch folder is essentially where the temp-rendered clips go, so its audio and video - you want that folder to be on a really fast volume. You also want your source video files to be on a really fast volume, so they can be streamed fast enough to play in realtime too when playing unrendered areas, or building a preview.
Some might say in FCP you get bast performance when your scratch disks and video files are on seperate disks. Thats totally true, so it can read from one disk and write to the other at the same time. But in your case you have a 3disk stripe, which is roughly 3x faster than either of your disks! So it would still be faster to have them all on the same stripe.
You can leave your FCP app on the sys drive, keeps things cleaner (drive1 for sys and appsm raid for data). You can keep your project files where ever you want, they're not very big and are kept in memory so dont affect performance at all. Though to stay clean I would keep it on the raid, so again the raid is for data, and you can back it up accordingly. The system drive is only for apps and system so you can back that up accordingly too (less frequently probably).
P.S. Technically your 'point 8' is inaccurate. After creating the raid you will not see drives 2,3 or 4. You will see only one 'volume' for all 3 drives. Overall your mac will have 2 'volumes': the system drive, and the stripe of 2,3,4. Physical drives and 'volumes' that mount in your OS are completely seperate. You can create multiple partitions in a single drive, or you can combine multiple drives into a single volume (e.g. using raid). But basically yes, you copy your client files back to the raid.
And remember, if any ONE of the disks in the stripe dies, you lose ALL of the data on the entire 1.5TB volume. So it is pretty important to backup regularly!!!!
(I dont wanna confuse you any more, but raid5 is a good option if you want more security and don't mind paying extra :P, you'll need more hardware for that, and more drives to make it worthwhile - but I would say skip that for now, as you can build your raid0 for free or almost free and use that until you think you need more)

Best Hardware Configuration for oracle RAC

Hi,
iam planning to implement oracle 10g and 11g rac.Can anyone of you provide me the best hardware configuration which suits the need.
I can spend a reasonale amount.
This is for homesetup,implementation and practice all major activities that's all.
So please provide me a nice coniguration.
Iam planning to install vmware server and create multiple instances in the same server
Please provide me a nice configuration which suits for implementing installing vmware server
Thanks,
Aram
Edited by: aram on Sep 23, 2011 8:08 AM

aram wrote:
Hi,
iam planning to implement oracle 10g and 11g rac.Can anyone of you provide me the best hardware configuration which suits the need.
I can spend a reasonale amount.
This is for homesetup,implementation and practice all major activities that's all.
So please provide me a nice coniguration.
Iam planning to install vmware server and create multiple instances in the same server
Please provide me a nice configuration which suits for implementing installing vmware server
Thanks,
Aram
HI,
For your home testing you might need a latest technology to get a smooth and fast installation. i7 processor might be the ideal with memory at least 8GB. if you're planning to have more than 3 VMs running at the same time than you need 12-16GB memory at least.
From my experience installing on vm and allocated memory 2.5GB each VM the installation could take 15-30minutes
Cheers

What is the best system configuration for a video editing telecast quality using Adobe PRemier pro

We need an editing suite for telecast quality for our church.
What is the best system configuration please?
What are all the requirements to set it up ?

Buy a Desktop Video Editing PC http://www.adkvideoediting.com/
Build a Desktop Video Editing PC
-http://ppbm7.com/index.php/tweakers-page
-3 price level ideas in http://www.pacifier.com/~jtsmith/ADOBE.HTM
-what PC to build http://forums.adobe.com/thread/947698
-2 how to build videos http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1104182
-another video http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1145366
-another video http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1132363
-planning & Building http://ppbm7.com/index.php/intro-part-1
-memory for LGA2011 http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1098759
-an Adobe FAQ http://forums.adobe.com/thread/878520
-http://www.shawnlam.ca/2012/premiere-pro-cs6-video-editing-computer-build/
-http://www.videoguys.com/Guide/E/Videoguys+DIY9+Its+Time+for+Sandy+Bridge
+E/0xe9b142f408a2b03ab88144a434e88de7.aspx
-several more links http://forums.adobe.com/thread/815798
-build tuning http://ppbm7.com/index.php/final-results

Best Raid 0 for PS CS3 and Mac Pro

I am getting closer to ordering a new Mac Pro to run PS CS3 - and to drive 3 big Epson printers. I am leaning toward the dual-core 3.0 GHz as the results and speed for the 8 core with PS CS3 are still not known. It will have 6 to 8 GB of RAM (depends on my budget).
I want to make a machine that will do only PS CS3 - at the fastest possible rate. I have lots of other Macs for running other applications. I plan to order the Mac Pro with 1x 500MB hard drive - and add 2 smaller, but faster drives for the OS and for PS - and for the PS scratch/cache- and to put that on a Raid 0.
I am looking at getting 2 Raptor 150MB 10,000 RPM drives for the Raid 0. They can be small -maybe even just the 70MB versions -as I would only use them for booting OS and for running PS CS3. Images would be saved to a different disk. I have 10 external LaCie FW800 drives for image storage and backups. I will also use the 500MB drive that comes with the new Mac Pro for image storage - and maybe add a 4th similar 500 or 750MB drive for additional storage on the mac Pro itself.
My thought is that if I only have the OS and the PS on the Raid 0 a total failure would do little harm. I would not lose anything except maybe the image being worked on at the time of failure. The applications and OS could be rebuilt from the install CDs.
Is this a good plan? Is there another way to get maximum PS CS3 speed on the new Mac Pro?
Dual 2.7 G5, 2 intel iMacs, 1 MacBook, 1 Powerbook, 18 G4 Macs, 3 iPods Mac OS X (10.4.9) I teach Digital Photography clases - on Macs

Some considerations:
Ideally you want to use separate drives (or RAID volumes) for:
1. Mac OS X and Photoshop
2. Scratch space
3. Storage of images that you're processing
If you use a striped volume for the boot disk, then you'll have to keep another bootable disk to perform some firmware updates (firewire drives work well) - you'll want to do this anyway with a RAID 0...
Buy your RAM so that you can get the quad-channel performance...
If you are comfortable working inside the computer, you can also add a 5th/6th drive in the optical bay. To add one extra drive, you just need 5.25 drive mounting bracket. For two extra drives (or even 4) you can use this product:
http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_i d=158
I found that an 18" SATA cable with elbow connectors is the best... you'll also want a 6" SATA power adapter (4pin-15pin)
My suggestion would be to add a 5th hard drive to the Mac Pro. That way, you could use (1) 150 GB raptor as the boot/PS disk, and then created TWO striped RAIDs with the 4 remaining disks. Perhaps (2) raptors for a scratch stripe, and (2) disks for users/storage. If your storage needs are less than 300 GB, then get 5 raptors...
If your LF Epson printers are firewire, then you'll want each to be on it's own firewire bus - get additional PCIe firewire cards as needed.
All of the drive recommendations above assume that you're doing daily (or more often) backups of any RAID 0 stripes that you create...
EDIT:
On second thought, you might want to stripe the boot drive for better printing performance (waiting for OS to write to the spool)... so perhaps add a 6th internal SATA disk and have 3 unique 300 GB (striped) volumes.

RAID configurations for RHEL partition

We have RHEL 5.x in our production environment using VMware which is configured on RAID using RAID 1, RAID 5 & RAID 10. I had couple of queries with RAID configuration:
1) Is it possible for a RHEL partition to have 2 RAID configurations, like some part of partition on RAID 1 and the remaining on RAID 5?
2) How to identify the RAID configurations used by a RHEL partition.
I hope, I have been able to explain the problem.
Requesting a reply to my query.
Regards

1) Is it possible for a RHEL partition to have 2 RAID configurations, like some part of partition on RAID 1 and the remaining on RAID 5?
No. RAID configurations work on the block level and do not use logical partitions. You can however partition a RAID volume.
2) How to identify the RAID configurations used by a RHEL partition.
Depends what you are using. If you have a hardware RAID, it is transparent to the OS and cannot be seen without using any hardware specific host adapter utilities. If it is software, it depends on mdadm, LVM or BTRFS. What are you using?
P.S. you will most likely do not want to use RAID 5 unless you have special hardware controller to deal with RAID 5 checksums, etc. It's definitely not a solution for large storage, since it will take days to rebuild in case of a failure.

Best Raid Configuration for a 8-1tb hhd server

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