• coldsteel2112 (4/6/2011)


    peter-757102 (1/10/2011)


    At my company we had two times now a disk in a RAID 5 broke and the array could not restore itself and had to use backups to continue working on another server. An identical issue with RAID 10, never cause any issues or significant downtime.

    I noticed this post and had to respond. In a properly configured RAID 5, a single disk failure would not cause a failure of the array. And even if there was a failure of the writing of the data to the replaced disk, no one would have known it because the array would have kept chugging along like nothing happened.

    So, I'm wondering if your aversion to RAID 5 is simply based on misunderstanding? What you've described cannot happen in the real world.

    Theory and practice are two entierliy different things.

    The RAID controller choked early during the repairs and never recovered, we had to send the disks to a specialised company to retrieve the data!

    And te time during repairs of a raid 5, is VERY risky for the validity of your data. At that point there is NO redundance and the disks themself cannot be read on their own either, so ANYTHING that can go wrong will cause data loss or corruption.

    And with todays big disks, the chance of something like that that happening is simply to large.

    To even considder using raid 5 today on large spinning disks is IMHO just on that basis alone a bad idea!

    Now, for SSD's there might by an exception as they are so fast and more reliable, rebuilding can be fast too.

    But even then, I strongly prefer the much simpler and transparent method of mirroring!