RAID Stripe size

[Steevo]

Data density has as much if not more to do with performance from mechanical HDD's than anything. But if pure performance is what you want get 2 4TB drives, short stroke them and put them in they array at half capacity.

 

[Bill_Bright]

That is definitely not true. While it is ideal to use identical drives, it is certainly not required on any modern RAID controller.

I agree if you get a separate dedicated controller (or at least a upper end motherboard with decent controller). And for sure, modern controllers are much more accommodating. But I have still seen recent problems of compatibility.

That said, by "recent", I mean the problems I encountered surfaced recently. The server, drives and controllers are all from 5 years ago. So with 2015 controllers and drive failures in 2020, compatibility hopefully will not be an issue.

 

[xvi]

No cloud storage for anything I don't want shared, stolen or compromised.

Sounds like you need a "personal cloud".
(I hate that term.)

RAID-5 is seriously underestimated. Consider this performance while still maintaining redundancy. If you like 200MB/s, you'll love 300MB/s and redundancy.

I think people's distaste for RAID5 was back when controllers couldn't keep up calculating parity data (or at least I think that was a thing. I was young then, never got to play with it). On top of that, I don't think older controllers liked reading from the parity drive to give full read performance. These days though, n-1 write performance, n read performance, nice fault tolerance, very widely supported.. I've always thought RAID5 is the way to go for home use.

Data density has as much if not more to do with performance from mechanical HDD's than anything. But if pure performance is what you want get 2 4TB drives, short stroke them and put them in they array at half capacity.

The idea was better seek times and to keep files off the slower end of the drive, right? Never heard how much that improved things.

 

[Steevo]

Sounds like you need a "personal cloud".
(I hate that term.)

I think people's distaste for RAID5 was back when controllers couldn't keep up calculating parity data (or at least I think that was a thing. I was young then, never got to play with it). On top of that, I don't think older controllers liked reading from the parity drive to give full read performance. These days though, n-1 write performance, n read performance, nice fault tolerance, very widely supported.. I've always thought RAID5 is the way to go for home use.

The idea was better seek times and to keep files off the slower end of the drive, right? Never heard how much that improved things.

Yeah it used to be a huge thing for RAID 5 when CPU's handled the overhead through drivers, and it cost 25% of a systems performance (1Ghz CPU single core) to run a decent array, but with modern controllers the CPU use and or onboard hardware has eliminated this problem.


Instead of 50% degradation of performance you may only have 15%, and cut seek times by a third.