RAID5 or RAID6

celliott

celliott

celliott

Soldato
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I'm aiming to use 5 or 6 3TB drives as a storage box for all of my Blurays, PC backups and backups of some work stuff.

I've done a fair bit of googling and getting conflicting results, some say RAID5 should be fine for this many drives, other say its not very safe as large drives have a high BER / Bit error rate?

What would you guys suggest? Im thinking RAID6 but 6TB is a lot of usable space to lose!

Cheers
 
Greetings fellow Newbury dweller :)

RAID 6 for my money. The bit error rate is a concern on drives that big but slightly less so if you can get NAS or enterprise drives with higher TLER.

Alternatively you could use maybe 8x2Tb in a pair of 4 disk RAID 5 arrays.
 
As Chris said, the bigger disks get the longer rebuild time takes. Even at 80MB/s a 3TB rebuild will take 24-36hrs, along time for that data to be unprotected. Also depends if these are consumer drives too. The really paranoid buy in seperate batches too :p
 
I would separate the types of data out.

Work out how much you need for your movies / music / tv shows. These are likely to be write once, read many so set-up a raid 5 for them.

Have separate drives / arrays for backups and for other more important data. Two smaller raid 1 arrays maybe but depends on amount of data in this 'class'.

If you want it all presented as one big lump then you can mount the drives on folders (like you do in Linux / UNIX) in Windows very easily.

Alternatively you could look at various Raid-on-FS solutions out there like FlexRaid which present a single storage pool and provide redundancy after the drives are formatted in the OS.

RB
 
Like other have said RAID 6 has better data protection than 5, however the is a notable performance penalty. If you can afford to lose more disks to the array I personally would go RAID 1+0 (not 0+1) over 5 or 6.
 
I have a similar question. I have 4x2TB disks to store PC backups and blu-ray movies. I also have an offsite backup of the server OS. I'm thinking of going along the RAID6 route.
 
celliott said:
What would you guys suggest? Im thinking RAID6 but 6TB is a lot of usable space to lose!
Click to expand...

Well you make the choice and pay the relevant price.

Look at it another way. How much is your data worth to you?
Is it worth more than the cost of 2 extra disks to protect the array from failure and the subsequent cost to get it recovered? Also figure in a way to backup the stuff on the array you can afford to lose. RAID6 is all well and good until a fire destroys your machine or a tree falled through the side of the house and smashed into smaller pieces
 
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