Little top tech tip: Take care choosing your storage drives

RAID is dead. Or maybe it's not. I think it might be off having a conversation with a cat in a box. Regardless of whether or not you use hardware RAID cards or HBAs and some kind of software, the idea of big boxes full of drives that store lots of things isn't going away any time soon. The drives you put in them, however, are …

[oldtaku]

Even if your storage manager claims to support it, Just Don't Do It. Homogeneous disks only. All it takes is one tits up due to your mismatched platters to completely blow all the money you 'saved'.

[Anonymous Coward]

'RAID is dead'

Try explaining that to Lenovo..

[Ammaross Danan]

Re: 'RAID is dead'

Software RAID is still RAID, even if it's abstracted by being called "chunklets," "pages," or the like and hidden behind a WebUI proffering data parity levels.

[P. Lee]

Re: 'RAID is dead'

>Software RAID is still RAID

True, but there are two issues RAID is used to solve:

1. RAID for expanding volume sizes beyond drive size is not dead. That applies to flash and rust.

2. RAID on spinning rust is dead as a performance improver for intensive workloads. We used to run lots of small disks to get the speed up. Flash has killed that dead and it was a large chunk of the enterprise market. Now we rust needs to be just fast enough to run backups. Some speed freaks might need to RAID flash drives, but most do not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain to me why it's not common sense and practice to at least RAID1 two SSD disks? How has SSD solved single point failure and therefore killing RAID?

[TheSolderMonkey]

The disks are faster than the controllers. If you start popping RAID levels on a stripe of disks, the controller quickly kills the performance of the SSDs. Especially with something like RAID 6 which uses a crazy number of read-shift-xor-write operations.

Raid 1 doubles the cost of an already expensive medium.