Broadcast Radio Forums

Raid Array Question


http://forums.broadcastradio.com/Topic5359.aspx

By Matt Wade - Wednesday, June 8, 2011 9:10:50 AM

Hi All,

We are installing a new server at HR Chelmsford and my technical guys has asked the following question:-

We have 2 ways of arranging the 3 drives. My initial idea was to have 1 drive as a mirror of the other (RAID 1, what we have now for the Audio/data folders) with the third as a 'Hot' spare - if one of the 2 drives failed then the spare would kick-in and replace it. Meaning we would regain a fault tolerant RAID automatically within minutes. It is not something we have had before, whether it is worth it is up for debate.

Another option is to arrange the 3 discs as RAID 5. This may give better performance and would give more capacity. It would also mean that if a disc failed we would lose fault tolerance until we replaced the failed drive (rather like we have now) However because there are 3 discs rather than 2 there is a 50% greater likelihood of a disc failure at some point.

Does anyone have an opinion on this or not. Should we do Raid 1 or Raid 5? Or something completely different?

ta
By Matt Wade - Thursday, July 21, 2011 10:59:44 AM

Thankyou all for your comments. My technical guy went for RAID5 in the end and we have 2 backup drives. One working via Firewire 800 and one on USB. The Firewire drive is taken off site once backed up and the USB drive is connected all the time and is backed up every night and we use this USB drive with the copy of myriad (Audiowall only) that we have on our OB laptop - this ensure it is always up to date when we are out and about.

cheers again all

M