----- "Clayton Milos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> If you goal is speed and obviously as little possibility of a fail 
> (RAID6+spare) then RAID6 is the wrong way to go...
> RAID6's read speeds are great but the write speeds are not.
> If you want awesome performance and reliability the real way to go is
> RAID10 
> (or more correctly RAID 0+1).

  RAID6 has better reliability than RAID10, because in RAID6, you can survive 
the failure of _any_ two disks.  In RAID10, double disks failures are only 
survivable if specific disks fail (alternates).  In RAID10 sets this is a 
problem.  So:

* Reliability and space:  RAID6
* Performance:  RAID10

And the performance issues on RAID5/6 on writing is directly proportional to 
the quality of your controller.  Good controllers can do partial stripe 
updates, and other optimizations to avoid having to read data back before 
writing anything.  A simple minded RAID controller which has to read the entire 
strip back, writes are 1/3 slower than reads.  Any good controller should be 
about 75% of read the speed.  And RAID5+0 and RAID6+1 are also good options.

  And make sure your controller can do RAID scrubbing.  The chances of a fatal 
failure on an array can be greatly minimized with RAID scrubing.  None of the 
cheap controllers can do this.  ZFS can do it though.  ZFS software RAID is 
almost always better than a cheaper hardware RAID, though maybe not fully 
mature in FreeBSD 7.  RAID6 also minimizes the risk of double disk failures.

  Big huge disks are almost always the wrong choice for databases though.  You 
will never be able to fill the disk up before you hit the IOPS limit per each 
spindle.  A 15K SAS disk has at least twice the IOPS of a 7K SATA disk.  And 
while adding another bank to your RAID0 array doubles your IOPS in theory, it 
isn't exactly a linear increase.  You need the IOPS, it is better to start with 
faster disks.  

Tom


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