RAID Levels?

SenseiSteve

HD Moderator
Staff member
Just curious what RAID level most providers are seeing requests for today? And why you think that is?
 
There are several different RAID levels that can be used, each with its own characteristics and benefits. Some common RAID levels that hosting providers may offer include:
  1. RAID 0: Provides striping (data is divided into blocks and distributed across multiple disks) but no redundancy. This can improve performance, but if one disk fails, all data is lost.
  2. RAID 1: Provides mirroring (data is copied to multiple disks). This provides good fault tolerance but does not increase performance or capacity.
  3. RAID 5: Provides striping with distributed parity (data is striped across multiple disks, and parity information is also striped across the disks). This can improve both performance and fault tolerance, but requires a minimum of 3 disks.
  4. RAID 6: Similar to RAID 5, but uses double distributed parity. This provides even better fault tolerance but can impact performance.
  5. RAID 10 (also known as RAID 1+0): Combines striping (RAID 0) with mirroring (RAID 1). This provides good performance and fault tolerance but requires a minimum of 4 disks.
I often get requests from customers for RAID 10 setup. It provides good performance and fault tolerance, making it a popular choice for most hosting companies.

One of the main benefits of RAID 10 is that it offers a balance of performance and fault tolerance. The striping of RAID 0 helps to improve performance by distributing data across multiple disks, while the mirroring of RAID 1 provides redundancy so that if one disk fails, the data can still be accessed from the other disk. This makes RAID 10 a good choice for applications that require both high performance and high reliability.

Another advantage of RAID 10 is that it can be implemented with a minimum of 4 disks, which is fewer than some other RAID levels such as RAID 5 and RAID 6. This can be an important consideration for hosting companies that need to maximize their storage capacity while still maintaining good performance and fault tolerance.

Overall, I think RAID 10 is a popular choice because it provides a good balance of performance, fault tolerance, and capacity, making it well-suited for a variety of hosting applications.
 
Another advantage of RAID 10 is that it can be implemented with a minimum of 4 disks, which is fewer than some other RAID levels such as RAID 5 and RAID 6.

But...

RAID 5 can be implemented with 3 disks, and RAID 6 with 4, so I'm a bit confused by your point here.
 
Our data SANs have all of their LUNs configured RAID 10, over 8 disks. Our backup SANS have all of their LUNs in RAID 6 over 8 disks.
Although technically we don't allow advertise the configurations and don't take requests, so sorry for not fully answering the OPs question.
 
Most providers using RAID often choose RAID10 for speed and redundancy or at least RAID1 for redundancy.

There are some low budget providers that use RAID0 for speed and to increase their disk space, but it is highly not recommended to do so.
 
Our most of client ask for RAID10 for speed and security and few RAID 0 and 1 with backup space.
We always ask client to manage 2nd backup no matter what raid they use.
 
We always push raid10, Raid1 is useless most of the time as it writes bad data to the other disk.
 
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