Raid or not to raid

umarbhattiumarbhatti Member Posts: 67 ■■□□□□□□□□
in Off-Topic
Hi All

I have been lucky enough to score a Dell T5500 from work with two 1TB HD. I am mainly going to be using it for labbing and to learn (VMWare/Server2012R2 stuff mainly). Now my question is is there any benefit to set it up as Raid 1 or not?

Thanks
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Comments

  • vanillagorilla3vanillagorilla3 Member Posts: 79 ■■■□□□□□□□
    I would say no unless you need redundancy. If it's just going to be used for labbing, I don't see a reason to waste a whole drive for mirroring.

    What were your reasons for setting it up as RAID 1?
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  • rsuttonrsutton Member Posts: 1,029 ■■■■■□□□□□
    Would you care if one of the drives failed and you lost the data on there? If so, RAID, or backups, would be a good option.
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  • nascar_paulnascar_paul Member Posts: 288 ■■■□□□□□□□
    Nah, if you're going to be labbing on that machine, you'll want RAID-0 at least. Redundancy probably won't be a factor, as you'll be tearing apart a label and rebuilding it on a regular basis, but VMs can run AGONIZINGLY slow on spinning disks, so you'll give yourself a performance boost with that configuration.
    You'll also want to consider adding an SSD to run the VMs off of while you use your RAID-0 disks as host/datastore.
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  • OctalDumpOctalDump Member Posts: 1,722
    If it's a lab machine, then try every combination. It's extra skills and knowledge.

    However, if you get to the point where you do have concerns about recovery times after failure, then RAID-1. RAID1 is all about resilience to failure through redundancy. If those are old drives that have had a long and heavy production life, failure is a real possibility.

    If performance is paramount, then consider RAID-0, but do realise that you are much more vulnerable. A good option might be an external USB drive for backup.
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  • UnixGuyUnixGuy Mod Posts: 4,570 Mod
    It's a lab, do you have 1TB of storage for a lab? I doubt it, so raid why not, ...doesn't matter a lot really.
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  • netsysllcnetsysllc Member Posts: 479 ■■■■□□□□□□
    A SSD drive for the VM's will be the way you will want to go. Running multiple VMs on a singe sata drive or small raid drive likely will yield poor performance. If you care about the VM's you can backup to another SATA drive.
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  • DeathmageDeathmage Banned Posts: 2,496
    is this a 10, 25 or 40 man RAID? icon_razz.gif
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  • aschenbecheraschenbecher Member Posts: 27 ■■□□□□□□□□
    DO raid-0 if you want speed but dont care if you lose your data.
    Doing a raid-0 of 2x 1tb hdd will giive you 2 tb plus performance boost.

    I have a Raid-0 of 4x1TBhdd it gives me better than ssd performance for seq read and write. But SSd is still better at random Read and write.
    I use raid-0 mostly for my games and non essential data.

    All my essential stuff get copied onto my NAS which has raid-5.
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