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I am looking to build a system and was wondering the best way to configure the hard-drives.

I have three lines of thought. The machine will be used for supporting VM's.

  1. 3 500 gb drives raid 0.

    This setup will give me quick read / write but if a drive goes back, I lose everything.

  2. 1 drive for os, 2 drives raid 0.

    This one has all OS stuff on one drive and the 2 drives would be for data, the VMs'

  3. All drives independent?

Anyone have any opinions on this?

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Have at least one of the drives be a SSD, then do RAID on the others if you want extra speed or redundancy. – Tom Brossman Dec 31 '11 at 20:09

closed as off topic by Stefano Palazzo♦ Feb 1 '12 at 11:38

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2 Answers

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It's possible to setup RAID5 with mdadm. That will give you both mirroring and stripe, at the cost of one disk. In other words, using 3x500GB disks, you would only get 1TB of storage, but if one disk fails, you'll not loose anything.

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I need fast disk IO for the VM, this is going to be a development box.. Any opinions on option 2 or 3? Thanks. – nitefrog Dec 30 '11 at 6:13
development box means different things to different people. It sounds like your real problem is a lack of solid goals. It's an easy choice when you make the decision to take security over performance e.g. RAID1. If you want just performance, and can withstand an even greater risk of losing your data, then RAID 0 is the choice. Development server's usually imply some sort of safety for code that is actively worked on. Build servers on the other hand are disposable. The most conservative arrangement would be a RAID 1 + hotspare. – ppetraki Jan 18 '12 at 15:32
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There is no reason not to put all three drives in a raid configuration. A raid0 will give you the best sequential transfer speeds, but has no fault tolerance. A raid5 will give good sequential performance performance, at the cost of one disks's storage capacity. A raid10 can give better random performance ( possibly even better random read than raid0 ) and can be optimized for reads ( far configuration, sequential read on par with raid0 ) or writes ( offset configuration, sequential write performance between raid0 and raid1 ) or balanced ( near configuration ), but costs 50% of the total space.

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