Raid or not to raid

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

vanillagorilla3

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?

rsutton

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.

nascar_paul

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.

OctalDump

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.

UnixGuy

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.

netsysllc

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.

Deathmage

is this a 10, 25 or 40 man RAID?

aschenbecher

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.