Do you use hardware RAID

Do you use hardware or software RAID at all? Mirror drives or stripe? I've always thought that if you have enough backups then RAID is not really necessary. If you want really fast drive access though, striping drives together is the way to go.

From my experience, software RAID is always a bad idea. Almost all my servers use hardware RAID-5 because it's the best compromise between performances and security. A fault-tolerant RAID (1,5,10) is not a backup solution, it's only about availability, because without a RAID, if one of your disk fail, you will have to use your backup to restore all the VPS/Websites, and during this time, your website will be down.

energizedit said:

Do you use hardware or software RAID at all? Mirror drives or stripe? I've always thought that if you have enough backups then RAID is not really necessary. If you want really fast drive access though, striping drives together is the way to go.

Click to expand...

Even with backups you still want to use raid, when using backups your usually using a 3rd party software, you never want to solemnly depend on another software raid is always good practice to use.

Also I always use hardware raid for dependability.

I'd have to agree - use both RAID and a remote backup solution. Don't let Murphy's Law latch onto your servers without being prepared.

We use HARDWARE RAID10 for VPS, SOFTWARE RAID5 for backup servers, and SOFTWARE RAID1 for Shared/Reseller. All services run fine.

When I heard for RAID years ago I thought that is best thing to protect your system from losing data or getting a speed and both.
Beside daily backups you need raid.
For valuable data, RAID is only one building block of a larger data loss prevention and recovery scheme, it cannot replace a backup plan.

We use RAID 10 on all shared hosting and VPS servers, AND off site R1Soft backups.

RAID 10 (mirror and stripped) give you redundancy and increased performance.

Whether you choose Software or Hardware RAID 1, 5/6 or 10 also depends on how many customers you want to put on the server. Both setups have their pros and cons

Let's say you have a beefy dedicated server with Hardware RAID 10, well you could host a lot more customers on it as it would have increased performance as @RDO-Servers mentioned above. But if the provider is using large drives compared to a provider who uses Software RAID 1 and has smaller drives you would know the provider would have to host fewer customers per server. So when you look at it like that, in the end, the type of RAID used may or may not make a noticeable difference to the customers.

Both setups have their pros and cons. Beefy servers hosting LOTS of data could have more downtime due to fsck taking longer to do filesystem checks etc whereas a smaller server that are hosting LESS data may have shorter periods of downtime when doing a fsck. There are many more factors that come into play, and I'd be here all night explaining all the different scenarios.

In short, don't always go by specs vs pricing because you don't always know how much the provider oversells/overloads their servers or how big their drives are, etc. Be sure to ask such questions to any providers that you may be interested in. Some providers prefer to host fewer beefy servers and put many customers on them whereas other providers prefer to have more servers that are little less beefy but still have plenty of resources available to host websites as fast as they would be hosted on larger servers.

Just going blindly by what a provider claims to advertise on their website isn't always the full story so to speak, so doing that is pretty much comparing apples to oranges. If in doubt, use any of the providers you're interested in making use of a money back guarantee (if they offer it) so you can test the differences in speed, etc yourself!

We use RAID 1 for our web hosting servers, and RAID 6 and RAID 10 on our VPS hosting Nodes, our old VPS Node is on RAID 6 but all new VPS Nodes are on RAID 10 with SSD Drives, it does increases initial hardware cost, but it pays for it as your VPS Nodes wont' slow down due to Disk I/O and also helps with customer retention as clients won't cancel their hosting easily because VPS even with low RAM like 128 MB runs quite fast

choosing the raid level is depends upon your requirements. Hardware raid is more expensive related to software raid but recommend hardware raid because, software raid is handled by the OS and software RAID takes up a portion of the host processor. But software raid is good if you are looking for small business with less expense.

Hardware raid has Protection against data corruption resulting from a loss of power during the backup process. Battery backup units (BBU) or onboard Flash memory in RAID cards provide the extra fail-safes and Boosts system performance and didnt use server processor to calculate RAID.

We recommend raid 10, 6 or 5 because which provides reliability and I/O speed. But you need to spend more money for hardware raid compared to s/w raid. Hardware raid card now work as SAS controller too so that you can connect many disks to this card.

I always have to laugh at posts like this as many people take on good faith what they read about raid and redundancy, which was never its intended purpose. Raid was created for 2 reasons.

#1. Increase Performance - No matter how much better Hard Drives get they are normally always the bottle neck in our servers. RAID allows us to increase performance of the system to help reduce that bottle neck.

#2. Increase available space - While larger hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, we always need more space available. RAID (except RAID1) allows us to combine multiple hard drives into a larger amount of usable space.

The fact that you can pull a single drive from any RAID system and it still perform is a side effect. I can tell you after 20+ years in the computer industry that most of the time the redundancy does you zero benefit once a RAID system fails. Due to the nature of electronics, they typically do not fail like a light switch, where they just immediately stop working. Unfortunately they go down in flames (metaphorically) like a shot down fighter pilot in World War 2. So what happens as the system starts to fail, corrupted data starts to appear, and then that data is mirrored to all the drives. This doesnt matter if its hard drive, the raid card, the power supply, etc. This is the way it happens the majority of the time.

Now I know someone is going to pop up and say, I had a drive fail and didnt lose any data. First either you were a rare exception to the rule or second did the drive actually fail, or just start to fail and you caught it cause you monitor the drives like you should. More then likely it started to fail and it was replaced before it failed. This is where RAID comes in handy as its easier to rebuild a RAID cluster then mirror a failing hard drive to a new one.

Now Im not saying do not use RAID. It definitely has its place in the world. But if you only reason for wanting raid is redundancy, chances are you a few of you are going to get burnt and get burnt bad.

No matter what hard drive configuration you use (Hardware, Software, No Raid), you should always monitor the drives smart data of the drives and pay attention to all values. In 99% of the time, the hard drive will tell you its going to fail soon in some form or fashion. Hardware RAID does make it harder to monitor this data, but it can be done.

Hot-swap bays are a nice compliment to RAID redundancy.

I'm in Hosting now almost 10 Years.

1 thing I learn is. RAID (software or Hardware) are USELESSS!

Yep. It;s gone fail when you actually need it.

There is plenty offshores Storage options. For KVM hoster or direct servers website hosters. Even for cloud servers hosting - I suggest do offshore storage don't you ever do RAID. It's 100% useless..

Thanks

Most of our servers are installed with SSD only Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 2.0Ghz

We use hardware RAID if the system doesn't officially support software RAID, like Proxmox (you can make a workaround of course by installing Debian) or ESXi. Or Windows where software RAID is trash.

Hardware RAID always!

Can't risk customer's data by going ahead with Software RAID.