RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?
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@nashbrydges said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
Picked up a Dell R720xd for the lab today. Popped-in 16 SSD drives and will be completing setup tomorrow. RAID5 still the go-to for drive setup these days for SSDs? I'd prefer RAID10 but I need the additional drive space from RAID5.
You should be find with RAID5 and SSD, yes.
We only bring out the pitchforks for RAID5 on HDD!
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RAID 5 is still a solid choice. At sixtreen drives, though, I might start wanting to consider RAID 6. That's a lot of drives.
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@scottalanmiller said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
RAID 5 is still a solid choice. At sixtreen drives, though, I might start wanting to consider RAID 6. That's a lot of drives.
See that's exactly why I asked, I was thinking that might be on the edge of too many. How much of a penalty for RAID6 should I expect on performance with SSDs? I'm thinking negligible since the workload isn't going to be very IO intensive.
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@nashbrydges said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
RAID 5 is still a solid choice. At sixtreen drives, though, I might start wanting to consider RAID 6. That's a lot of drives.
See that's exactly why I asked, I was thinking that might be on the edge of too many. How much of a penalty for RAID6 should I expect on performance with SSDs? I'm thinking negligible since the workload isn't going to be very IO intensive.
Does # of drives matter? We used to be more concerned over total array size when we had UREs to worry about. Great, now I'm going to want to start compiling statistics on SSD RAID failure causes.
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@nashbrydges said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
RAID 5 is still a solid choice. At sixtreen drives, though, I might start wanting to consider RAID 6. That's a lot of drives.
See that's exactly why I asked, I was thinking that might be on the edge of too many. How much of a penalty for RAID6 should I expect on performance with SSDs? I'm thinking negligible since the workload isn't going to be very IO intensive.
The RAID 6 penalty will mostly be determined by your RAID controller. If it has enough overhead, the penalty will be trivially small. If it is overwhelmed, it could be pretty big. But only on writes is it a problem at all.
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@nashbrydges said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
I'm thinking negligible since the workload isn't going to be very IO intensive.
What kind of writes do you do, and what percentage of the time?
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@scottalanmiller said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@nashbrydges said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
I'm thinking negligible since the workload isn't going to be very IO intensive.
What kind of writes do you do, and what percentage of the time?
About a third of the files will be WORM like video content. A few websites (15). There will be 5 instances of Nextcloud for clients to test out. Unifi instance. Piwik, Mattermost, Veam B&R, Snipe-IT, Guacamole, Alfresco x 2, Fastvue, Kimai, without having actual data and only ballparking it, I'm likely 80% read. The videos are the most write intensive and even though they are large files, only get uploaded at a rate of 3 - 10 per week.
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@nashbrydges said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@nashbrydges said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
I'm thinking negligible since the workload isn't going to be very IO intensive.
What kind of writes do you do, and what percentage of the time?
About a third of the files will be WORM like video content. A few websites (15). There will be 5 instances of Nextcloud for clients to test out. Unifi instance. Piwik, Mattermost, Veam B&R, Snipe-IT, Guacamole, Alfresco x 2, Fastvue, Kimai, without having actual data and only ballparking it, I'm likely 80% read. The videos are the most write intensive and even though they are large files, only get uploaded at a rate of 3 - 10 per week.
Sounds like RAID 6 wouldn't have any noticeable impact.
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@scottalanmiller said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
RAID 5 is still a solid choice. At sixtreen drives, though, I might start wanting to consider RAID 6. That's a lot of drives.
Certainly seems odd to not KNOW the answer to this question before you make a purchase.
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@dashrender said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
RAID 5 is still a solid choice. At sixtreen drives, though, I might start wanting to consider RAID 6. That's a lot of drives.
Certainly seems odd to not KNOW the answer to this question before you make a purchase.
When I hear "picked up" and "lab" I'm not thinking purchase. Or at least not an important one.
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@brrabill said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@dashrender said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
RAID 5 is still a solid choice. At sixtreen drives, though, I might start wanting to consider RAID 6. That's a lot of drives.
Certainly seems odd to not KNOW the answer to this question before you make a purchase.
When I hear "picked up" and "lab" I'm not thinking purchase. Or at least not an important one.
This. Maybe he just had a few older drives from another project? We are slowly walking into the area where we could see desktops and servers with SSDs getting replaced by newer machines. Just for example. Or he just bought a few of them, hell, why not? You easily get some solid SATA consumer drives with 256GB for < 70$ today -
probably good enough for a lab. -
Wow, that is a nice LAB and you will have many systems running. That’s a lot of hard drives too. What SSDs will you be using?
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@dashrender said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@scottalanmiller said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
RAID 5 is still a solid choice. At sixtreen drives, though, I might start wanting to consider RAID 6. That's a lot of drives.
Certainly seems odd to not KNOW the answer to this question before you make a purchase.
Not odd really. I knew I wouldn't be running RAID10 so the only remaining question was whether it would be RAID5 or RAID6. The 512GB difference in storage between the two wasn't going to change the fact that I would be setting up 16 drives out of the 24 available slots.
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@dbeato said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
Wow, that is a nice LAB and you will have many systems running. That’s a lot of hard drives too. What SSDs will you be using?
They're drives from a previous project I was working on. The drives are Kingston KC400s.
I'm consolidating from a few older 11th gen servers to slightly newer (without breaking the bank).
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@nashbrydges said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@dbeato said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
Wow, that is a nice LAB and you will have many systems running. That’s a lot of hard drives too. What SSDs will you be using?
They're drives from a previous project I was working on. The drives are Kingston KC400s.
I'm consolidating from a few older 11th gen servers to slightly newer (without breaking the bank).
How does the server "react" to the Kingston drives since they do not have Dell's HD firmware?
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@pmoncho said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@nashbrydges said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
@dbeato said in RAID5 Still The Go-To Setup For SSD?:
Wow, that is a nice LAB and you will have many systems running. That’s a lot of hard drives too. What SSDs will you be using?
They're drives from a previous project I was working on. The drives are Kingston KC400s.
I'm consolidating from a few older 11th gen servers to slightly newer (without breaking the bank).
How does the server "react" to the Kingston drives since they do not have Dell's HD firmware?
I have a Dell R620 that didn't have any problems with off-the-shelf consumer Kingston drives. The indicator lights are all green even though, as expected, the SSDs appear as non-critical status because they don't have the Dell firmware (see screenshot from H710P Mini controller). The controller reads the SSD S.M.A.R.T. data and reports "failure predicted" even on those consumer drives.
These 512GB SSDs however were purchased directly from Dell so I'll know more once the server is setup. The previous project never panned out so they are still new.
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The R720xd in its new home. The drive indicator lights are all green on the server. OMSA complains about the firmware even though these were purchased from Dell directly.
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hardware rarely arrives up to date with firmware in my experience.
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@dashrender Interestingly enough, this is the current firmware for this drive.
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RAID 5 for SSD is a yes. Space-efficient, yet performs decently, if you need the extra redundancy and make the system future-proof just get a second server with SSD in RAID 5 and balance the storage efficiency with replicating part of the data with a VSAN type solution. StarWind can make it easier from a cost perspective due to us having a free version, but ultimately any VSAN will do the trick.
