Is RAID a must have for server? Do you notice any signifcant perforamce increase with a RAID installed on your server?
Server Question
Is RAID a must have for server? Do you notice any signifcant perforamce increase with a RAID installed on your server?
I'd consider RAID more important for uptime. My newest server has RAID1 (mirroring) and hotswap drives which means that a failed drive can be replaced without needing to shut down and derack the server.
If your sites are extremely high bandwidth/high content then RAID10 or RAID5 might help, but at that level you'd be using faster drives and you'd probably be on a RAID controller by then anyway.
Rowan would you consider a 7000GB of bandwidth use a month "extreme high bandwidth"?
Also would it be wise to get instead of say a HD of capacity with 500 GB but instead get 2x250 GB? I don't even use that much disk space so really space not an issue. I was considering using the 2nd drive for backup maybe.
The Raid 5 and 10 setups require at least three HDDs but they can improve seek times in certain applications.
Raid is by no means a requirement but if you have two HDDs and your server has a Raid controller in it, then I would certainly recommend taking advantage of it.
As to 7000 GB of BW, that is a pretty sizable amount. If you are having any thoughts of searching out new hosting, I would certainly like the chance to earn your business for Caro.Net
I'll put it this way. we will not sell a box and manage it without raid.
Not worth it, not worth the headache, no way no how. We want reliability.
RAID will allow a server to continue functioning when a drive fails, then be down for a short period while the failed HD is changed (or zero downtime if it's hotswap capable). This can be scheduled to suit you (eg outside peak) and is not a 911 level priority.
Compare this to the time needed to reinstall the OS then restore from backup, which is of extreme priority since your server is down from the moment the drive fails. Depending on the host's response time and the size of your data you could be counting your downtime in hours.
Just remember... RAID is not infallible and is therefore NOT a backup solution... you need to maintain separate, full backups still.
While its better to have it than not if its an issue of cost you have to consider how much content you will end up having to replace if you have a drive failure. If your running a low content site then its not such a big deal but when your talking about dozens or hundreds of gigs its a must have.
Also if you your just looking for faster seek times you would win out with just having an insane amount of ram and caching data there
RAID and backing up are separate issues, and costs.You need to back up if you don't have RAID, you need to back up if you do have RAID.
True but performance wise i cant really see RAID having more of a direct impact than huge amounts of RAM and a proper caching scheme
Depends how much content you have and how diverse the requests are. If 90% of your requests are for 5% of your content then it's going to be a definite performance gain, but if most of your requests are "long tail" then a large cache won't help... each new unique/infrequently requested object will be read from disk...Originally Posted by flip.green
Anyway, I don't have any huge sites with high performance needs so my knowledge stops short there... I'm more interested in reliability.
Yea it all depends but you can get pretty wacky with some of the server boards they have out these days. But if your talking about over 20 gigs of content then its a bit of a wet blanket for caching. At that point i can see where RAID would be a big up.
But as i alluded to earlier if its not about the coin might as well do both.
This has got me thinking though has anyone tried SSD in a RAID i wonder if that would be the best of both worlds
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