I will point out that 2TB drives are absolutely dirt cheap, so if the info stored on them is going to be of high value, it probably won't hurt you to pick up a fourth drive and just RAID-6 it to be extra safe. If you were looking to do RAID-5 on a large group of really fat disks, you might start edging into territory where a parity error could crop up, but at the drive sizes you're talking about, I'm not going to pooh-pooh 5. Unlike the others here, I don't have any particular beef against RAID 5. Vantec also gets good reviews, but I don't have any hands-on time with them. LSI 9217 or 9211 should do you fine here. I tend to prefer LSI for RAID controllers, but RAID has been around so long we're talking about commodity-level hardware now, so it's likely whatever brand you get it's going to do the job just fine. Takes a lot more effort to bork up a hardware component than it does to trip up software. If something corrupts your software, it gets your entire drive array with it. I can't imagine a time when software RAID would be better than hardware RAID (not to say there isn't some peculiar circumstance), it is almost universally better to go with a hardware solution. The outside consultants weren't very smart, hypervisor on 7200rpm disks is fine in my home lab, I'd never deploy it to a production environment unless I knew storage performance wasn't remotely important to the task at hand.Īlso, are they consumer SSDs? Look them up, I suspect so, if they are then install them in someone's PC and buy enterprise SSDs, google (or search here as I've explained it before) Flash Transform Layer, that explains why consumer SSDs are dangerous in server environments. Performance wise, these days, unless your server is heavily loaded I doubt you'd notice much real world performance difference, the battery backed cache on a HW controller will speed up writes (until the cache is full anyway) better than software can, but with SSDs you can mostly write quickly enough for it to become less of a performance boost anyway. Never RAID5, rebuild failures with mechanical disks are far too common, and with SSDs you're asking the controller to do a lot of parity calc work so unless you can guarantee the controller is fast enough to do that and not slow the SSDs down, then maybe, but personally, I still never would. If you don't have a warranty like that on it, then software RAID, because you can rebuild it on a different machine if you suffer a controller failure. Hardware RAID if you have a manufacturer warranty with an SLA on the card, because it can be replaced and bring your server back up quickly.
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