Just recently I got my hands on a beautiful HP ProLiant 360p Gen8 1U server that I wanted to Install and Configure VMware ESXi 5.5 with. This wasn’t going to be hosting any critical data but I wanted to mirror a live production setup so I had to be cautious of how I wanted to setup my storage. Typically in any environment, using RAID 0 is not best of ideas, simply because there is no fault tolerance. If one drive in that array goes belly up, POOF!! there goes all your data. RAID 1 was somewhat of a viable option since it did allow for mirroring, but I wanted something a little more robust in terms of fault tolerance. RAID 5 was next on my list, and while it did have parity to allow for disk failure, the chances of a second disk going out while I was looking for hard drives on amazon would have been very probably. Plus the fact that I wanted to give it the look and feel of something at the enterprise level. My choice led me to Setup RAID 10 on my HP ProLiant 360p Gen8 server.
RAID 10 Pros and Cons:
Pros:
- RAID 10 is fast! Since it uses both Striping and Mirroring, you get the best of both worlds and can get to your data quickly.
- It’s robust and fault tolerant. RAID 10 allows for 2 disk failures and the recovery time is fast.
Cons:
- RAID 10 uses half the space of the raw storage. So for example, if you had 1TB of raw storage, a little less than 500GB would available as usable storage.
- RAID 10 requires a minimum of 4 hard drives. For some people, this can get a little pricey.
Why should I use RAID 10 over RAID 6:
- RAID 10 is faster and performs much better for situations where speed is factor. (Isn’t it always)
- It should be used for database servers with high IO.
Here is the video demo of how I setup RAID 10 on my server.
