3ware RAID Or Software RAID

Mar 24, 2009

MY server configure our drives with RAID-1.

How can I check it my server configure with 3ware or software raid ?

Also please advise me how can I monitor raid configuration that my raid is working fine or no ?

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400GB Hard Disk Drives In RAID 0, RAID 5 And RAID 10 Arrays: Performance Analysis

Mar 7, 2007

Quote:

Today we are going to conduct a detailed study of RAIDability of contemporary 400GB hard drives on a new level. We will take two "professional" drives from Seagate and Western Digital and four ordinary "desktop" drives for our investigation. The detailed performance analysis and some useful hints on building RAID arrays are in our new detailed article.

[url]

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3ware Raid Checking

Mar 3, 2007

I have installed 3dm for checking 3ware 8086 card status, but when going to [url] it doesnt show anything. It seems cannot connect to 1080 port, even I have turned off the firewall. Have checked in its config file already to make sure the port is 1080

Is there anyone having experience with 3dm software?

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Changing 3ware Raid Setup

Jul 14, 2008

Not sure if this is too specific for this forum or not, but since I've gotten great advice here in the past I'll give it a shot.

I have a colo'd production server with a 3ware 9500S-12 RAID card and 12 400GB drives attached. The drives form 3 arrays:

1) 2 drive RAID 1 (400GB)

2) 2 drive RAID 1 (400GB)

3) 6 drive RAID 5 (2TB)

plus 2 global hot spares.

For a variety of reasons I need to change this setup so that array 1) and 2) remain as is, and array 3) is removed and those 6 drives replaced with 6 new 750GB drives in JBOD mode. I've copied all the data from the RAID5 array number 3) onto 3 of the new 750 drives (the 2TB array wasn't completely full,) and I have 3 other blank 750GB drives.

What's the best / safest way to do this? Ideally I'd like to remove the 6 old 400GB drives and retain the ability to plug them all back in and get my old array back (if something goes horribly wrong doing the switch.)

Do I need to reboot into 3BM (3ware Bios Manager) to do this, or can I do it from the command line?

Is there any problem with having a drive that already contains data written to it by another system, and bringing it up on the 3ware card in JBOD mode with the data intact? (All filesystems are ext3.) I'm not going to have to reformat the drive, am I?

Is there any problem with the new drives being SATAII (Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB) but the old drives (and I think the 3ware card, and certainly my motherboard) being SATAI? I've read that this should "just work" but of course I am nervous! There are no jumpers I can see on the 750GB drives.

Will it be possible to remove the RAID 5 in such a way that I could plug the drives back in and get the array back?

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Putting 3Ware RAID In A PowerEdge 860

Apr 13, 2007

Probably going to give this a shot in the near future anyway, but just wanted to check whether anyone has tried and had success putting either 3Ware 8006-2LP or 9550SX-4LP cards in Dell PowerEdge 860 systems with a couple of SATA drives instead of using the Dell PERC controllers?

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How To Repace A Failing Hdd In A 3ware RAID 1

Aug 21, 2007

we use 3Ware's 8006-2LP sata raid controller in each of our servers for RAID1. Our servers are all Supermicro boxes with hot-swap driver carriers (ie. the 2 raided drives are in them)

One of the drives appears to be starting to crap itself as smartd is reporting issues (although tw_cli c0 shows the raid to be OK) incl. multi zone errors.

Anyway, I'd like to replace the failing drive before it becomes a real issue so i've bought a replacement (74gb raptor, just like the original) drive.

Now I've never had to replace a failing drive in any of our servers before and I used to think it would be a simple matter of simply popping out the failing drive's carrier, put the new drive in the carrier and stick it back in the server... and the raid controller would do the rest.

Yes a little naive I know but i've never had to do it before so never paid much attention .. Anyway, I've just read and re-read the 3ware docs for my controller and their instructions are VERY VAGUE ... however I do get the feeling that the process is move involved ie. I need to tell the controller (via cli or 3dm) to first 'remove' the failing drive from the raid ..and then add a new drive and then rebuild

However there is one catch .. 3dmd/3dm2 has NEVER worked on our (centos 4) servers - 3dmd crashes regularly and 3dm2 never worked. So yes I am stuck with the 3ware cli ... which I don't mind as long as someone can tell me the sequency of commands I need to issue

As this point I'm thinking what I need to do via cli is

1) tell raid controlloer to remove the failing drive on port 0

2) eject the drive carrier with the drive in question

3) insert new drive in carrier and re-insert into server

4) using tw_cli tell the controller to add the new drive to the array and to rebuild the array

Am I anywhere close to being correct? I'm sure there are some of you out there who've done this countless times before with the 3ware controllers and hotswap drive carriers ..

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HW RAID Controller Battery Test? (3ware)

Jun 28, 2009

I'm seeing the following from dmesg:

Quote:

3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: INFO (0x04:0x0053): Battery capacity test is overdue:.

When I'm in the CLI console (tw_cli) and tries to test the battery, I'm seeing the following:

Quote:

//vpsXX1> /c0/bbu test
Depending on the Storsave setting, performing the battery capacity test may
disable the write cache on the controller /c0 for up to 24 hours.
Do you want to continue ? Y|N [N]:

This is a live production server with client VPSs on it. Anyone here actually did 3ware battery test before on production system? Is it ok to do this? I'm seeking someone actually performed test operation before, not from someone just assumes it will be ok.

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3ware RAID Controller Blinking Red Light

Jun 6, 2009

I have a 3ware 9650SE-24M8 RAID Controller. It was working fine for a few days and today while I was changing the RAID configs and installing different OSs, it just stopped working. Now when I boot my machine up it does not even detect any hard drives or RAID controller. I looked inside the box and the LED light on the RAID controller that is usually solid green is now blinking red. I googled for solutions but all searches lead me to useless information such as blinking red lights on the server case.

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Hardware RAID Test (3ware 8006-2LP)

Apr 6, 2008

After seeing a topic a week or go discussing RAID cards I decided to give a hardware raid card a go to see if the performance will increase in one of our boxes.

Just for the simplicity of the test, I have put them into a RAID0 formation for purely performance tests and no redundancy. I choose a 3ware RAID card and went for the 2 port 8006-2LP option rather than the 9600 (as they had the 8006-2lp and risers in stock and what I've always been told is that SATA1 and SATA2 is really a selling point rather than any performance increase but we will leave that argument there). Because we run mainly Windows systems, I have put on Windows Server 2003 x64 R2. What I am finding after installing it all is it seems pretty "slow".

The rest of the hardware is a Dual, Quad Xeon (E5410x2), 8GB ram on a Tyan motherboard. Hard drives are 160GB Western Digital 7200 RPM so I can't see quite why it feels like its not running at a peak level.

Does anyone have any applications or software to give this RAID array a test as I really don't want to order any more or roll them out on to the network to find that software raid would be a better improvement. I did try a burn in app which tests everything but it according to the 20 seconds I ran it, in average it only transferred at 2mbs.. That cant be right..

I think one possibility is the RAID drivers arn't installed correctly as its still coming "Unknown Devices" in Device Manager and it seems It wont let me manually install the drivers for the 3ware device as it doesn't like the OS even though I have the correct ones and it installed Windows with it fine (a bit longer than normal anyway)

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Adaptec 2405SAS Vs 3Ware 9650SE-4LPML For Raid 10

Oct 19, 2009

i want to use q9550 with 8G RAM,

install on X7SBL-LN2,

and use for 500G SATAII to do raid 10,

about Adaptec 2405SAS and 3Ware 9650SE-4LPML,

which one will get better performance?

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Hardware RAID: Is Motherboard RAID As Good As A Dedicated PCI-E Card

Mar 24, 2008

Is Motherboard RAID as good as a dedicated PCI-E card? I am guessing a dedicated card is the best option, though costs more.

We are looking at buying a barebones server from Supermicro. It features an onboard RAID controller which supports RAID 0, 1, 5 & 10 - but for some strange reason it will only support RAID 5 if you use Windows. Here is a link to the page detailing the RAID features.

[url]

We are going to be running Linux, CentOS 5.1, so we will only have the choice of RAID 0, 1 or 10. This isn't an issue, as having RAID 10 on 4x SAS (15k) drives will be fine for speed and stability. What is an issue is would this RAID controller be as fast or reliable compared to a dedicated PCI-E card? If it can only use RAID 5 in windows, does that suggest this controller is too reliant on software? It would be a nightmare to suffer downtime and data loss because the controller couldn't hack it during a drive failure, or one day it decided to bugger up the array when rebooting.

So that leads me to looking at this card, this looks very good for what we need. Are adaptec a reliable brand? I've seen it advertised for £200, which is a good price.

[url]

This card features RAID 5 and 6, would RAID 6 be better than RAID 10 for redundancy, or is it too slow to bother with? Also it seems to have a battery module available for it, what does this achieve? Cos surely if the power dies the hard drives and motherboard can't run off this little battery, or does it just help the controller stay alive long enough with some hard drive information in its memory if the power goes out during a rebuild?

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Any Experiences With Software-Raid 5 Vs Hardware-Raid 5? (e.g. Hetzner EQ9)

Sep 17, 2009

I could try the Software-RAID 5 of the EQ9 Server of Hetzner.

Does anyone here has experiences, how fast a hardware raid 5 compared against the software-Raid 5 is?

The i7-975 should have enough power to compute the redundnacy on the fly, so there would be a minimal impact on performance. But I have no idea.

I want to run the server under ubuntu 8.04 LTS x64.

On it a vitualisation like VMware the IO-Load could get really high.

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Whats The Best For Server With SATA Raid 1 And SCSI Raid 10

Jan 14, 2008

So I've just got a server with 2xSATA raid 1 (OS, cpanel and everything in here) and 4xSCSI raid 10 (clean).

Which one do you guys think will give the best performance:

1. Move mysql only to 4xSCSI raid 10
2. Move mysql and home folder to 4xSCSI raid 10

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How To Setup Software RAID-10 On Linux With /boot On RAID-1

Jul 8, 2007

I am in a somewhat complicated situation... I wanted to order a custom server with hardware 3Ware RAID controller but after over a month of waiting I was told the HW RAID controller, as well as any other 3Ware controller they tried, does not work with the motherboard used in the server from Fujitsu-Siemens and that they simply got a reply from FS that the controller is not certified to work with their motherboard.

So although I'd prefer a HW raid, I am forced to either choose a different webhost or setup a software RAID. The problem is, I haven't done that before and am somewhat moderately...scared

I have read a lot of the info about SW RAID on Linux that I could find through Google but there are some questions unanswered still. So I thought that perhaps some of the more knowledgeable WHT members could help me with this problem...

The server specs will be:

Core2Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz), 2GB RAM, 6-8x* 250GB SATA II HDDs, CentOS 4.4 or SuSe, DirectAdmin

* I prefer 8 HDDs (or actually 9) over 6 but I am not sure if their server chassis can hold that many HDDs, I am awaiting answer from them. They don't have any other drives beside the 250GB ones so I am limited to those.

The preferred SW RAID setup is to have everything in RAID 10, except for the /boot partition which has to be on RAID-1 or no RAID I believe, plus one drive as hot spare (that would be the 9th drive). I am quite sure they will not do the setup for me but will give me access to KVM over IP and a Linux image preinstalled on the first HDD so that I'll have a functional system that needs to be upgraded to RAID-10.

How do I do that? The big problem I see is that LILO or GRUB can't boot from a software RAID-5/10 so I will have to mount the /boot partition elsewhere. It's probably terribly simple...if you have done it before which I have not. I have read some articles on how to setup a RAID-5/10 with mdadm (e.g. [url] ) but they usually do not talk about how to setup the boot partition. Should it be setup as a small sized (100-200MB) RAID-1 partition spread over all of the drives in the otherwise RAID-10 array?

What about swap? Should I create a 4-8GB (I plan to upgrade the server RAM to 4GB in near future) RAID-1 swap partition on each of the disks or swap to a file on the main RAID-10 partitions. The second sounds simpler but what about performance? Is swapping to a file on RAID-10 array a bad idea, performance wise?

Is it possible to grow a RAID-10 array in a way similar to growing a RAID-5 array with mdadm (using two extra drives instead of one of course)? mdadm doesn't actually even mention RAID-10 despite it does support it without having to create RAID-0 on top of RAID-1 pairs if the support is in kernel, from what I know.

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Worth Having RAID 1 If Raid Arrays Break

Feb 25, 2009

How often do RAID arrays break? Is it worth having RAID if a servers hard drive goes down? I was thinking it may just be a better option to just have a backup drive mounted to my system and in the even of a system failure just pop in a new hard drive, reload the OS, and then reload all my backups?

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Software Raid 1 - Rather Slow During Raid 1 Recovery

May 20, 2009

I have a new server and it is rather slow during raid 1 recovery after system installed

CPU: Intel Core2Duo E5200 Dual Core, 2.5Ghz, 2MB Cache, 800Mhz FSB
Memory: 4GB DDR RAM
Hard Disk 1: 500GB SATA-2 16MB Cache
Hard Disk 2: 500GB SATA-2 16MB Cache

root@server [~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
256896 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md1 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
2096384 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md2 : active raid1 sdb4[2] sda4[0]
480608448 blocks [2/1] [U_]
[=======>.............] recovery = 36.7% (176477376/480608448) finish=1437.6min speed=3445K/sec

the sync speed is just 3.4Mb/second and the total hours needs to be more than 40 hours

Also the server load is very high (nobody uses it)

root@server [~]# top
top - 07:00:14 up 16:55, 1 user, load average: 1.88, 1.41, 1.34
Tasks: 120 total, 1 running, 119 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 4148632k total, 747768k used, 3400864k free, 17508k buffers
Swap: 5421928k total, 0k used, 5421928k free, 569252k cached

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RAID 5 Vs RAID 10 In Shared Hosting Server

Oct 22, 2009

I am in the process of restructuring the infrastructure on our servers. I am thinking of using either RAID 5 (1 hot spare) vs RAID 10 as my 1U server has 4 HDD tray.

RAID 5 would have better capacity but RAID 10 has better overall performance. Which one do you guys go for a shared hosting server?

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Turn Non Raid Into Raid On Live Server

Dec 23, 2008

Is it possible to turn a non raided setup into Linux software raid, while it is live, and if it's the OS drive? Can you even software raid the OS drive remotely? I've been thinking about doing it for the redundancy (and possible slight performance boost for reads, but doing it more for redundancy). I'm using CentOS.

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Read Raid-disk On Non-raid System

May 22, 2008

I want to take some data from a raid-disk (taken from a raid-1 sstem). Put it into a new system already, but this system doesn't have any raid.

When viewing "fdisk -l", it said /dev/sdb doesn't contain valid partition. Is there anyway I can mount it now? I am on CentOS 4 box

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RAID Or Not To RAID: Trying To Decide On A New Server

Jul 11, 2008

I've been talking to the Planet about trading in my four and a half year old "SuperCeleron" (from the old ServerMatrix days) Celeron 2.4 GHz system for something new. As part of their current promotions, I've configured a system that looks decent:

Xeon 3040, 1 gig of RAM, 2x250GB hard disks, RHEL 5, cPanel+Fantastico, and 10 ips for $162.

Not too bad. I could bump up the ram to 2 gb for, I think, $12 more, which I'm thinking about and wouldn't mind some thoughts on. But, the thing that has me really confused is RAID. I like the idea of doing a RAID 1 setup with those two hard disks. But, the Planet wants $40/month for a RAID controller to do it. I really don't want to go over $200 a month!

Any thoughts on alternative redundancy strategies that might avoid that cost? Software RAID does not seem to be offered by the Planet, unless I can figure out how to do it after installation (is that possible?) Better ideas in general on the server?

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Raid 1 SCSI Or Raid 10 SATA 10k

May 23, 2007

Just curious what your thoughts are on performance:

2 SCSI Drives 10k w/RAID 1

or

4 SATA 10k w/RAID 10

Prices are not too different with 4 drives just being a tad more.

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Software Raid Vs. Hardware Raid

Jun 5, 2007

how well software raid can perform and how it compares to hardware raid. How does software raid actually work and is it worth it?

How should I look at be setting up software raid if I was going to? Would you recommend just to use hardware raid instead?

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RAID 10 Or RAID 5 With Online Backup

Dec 10, 2007

Which do you guys recommend of the following?

4x 73GB 15,000rpm SAS drives in a RAID 10

or

4x 73GB 15,000rpm SAS drives in a RAID 5 w/ online backup

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4 15K SAS RAID 10 Vs. 8 7.2K SATAII RAID 10

Nov 3, 2009

Are there any significant difference between 4 15K SAS HD in RAID 10 versus 8 7.2K SATAII HD in RAID 10? I have the same question for 2 15K SAS HD in RAID 1 versus 4 7.2K SATAII HD in RAID 10.

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2 X SSD Raid 1 Or 4 X SAS Raid 10 For Mysql

Apr 19, 2009

I'm currently using 4 x 15K SAS raid 10 for a mysql server for a pretty busy forum, it has no I/O problem.

Now i'm going to migrate to a new server that i'm building soon, I have choice of:

2 x Intel X25-E SSD RAID 1

or

4 x 15K Fujitsu SAS RAID 10

will be using Adaptec 2405 RAID card.

The OS will be installed on a seperate hard drive.

If I go with the SAS setup, will be about $200 cheaper.

Which one do you think is better for Mysql performance?

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Raid 5 Vs Raid 10 (4 Drives)

May 10, 2009

I have room for 4 more hard drives on my home server. My original goal was to go raid 10 but I've been thinking, raid 5 can support 4 drives and give more capacity. Which one would have better performance as software (md) raid? I'm thinking raid 10 might actually have bad performance as software raid, vs hardware, compared to raid 5. Would raid 5 with 4 drives be better for my case?

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Would You Choose RAID 5 Or RAID 10

Mar 16, 2008

We are looking to build our first server, and collocate it. It will be a higher investment than just renting the server, but will be worth it in the long term, and we have already decided we are going to support the hosting business for a minimum of 3 years - so we might as well invest in a server from the outset to benefit from lower data center charges and higher redundancy and performance.

We are currently looking at Supermicro for servers as they offer 1U barebones systems with dual hotswappable psus and upto 4 hotswappable drives. This would be ideal for redundancy, and also for taking advantage of the speed and redundancy that a RAID 10 array would give you. These two factors combined are very appealing as it would reduce the possibilities of downtime and data loss. Obviously we will be backing up daily, but its good for piece of mind to know that you could potentially blow a PSU and 2 hard drives, and your server will still be up long enough for a data centre technician to replace the parts.

Now then, my business partner and I are currently deciding what the best all round hard drive configuration would be. He has decided that we should opt for SAS instead of SATA to have lower latency seek times, which would give us better performance. I agree, though this does increase costs considerably.

He is then arguing that we use RAID 5 on cost grounds. He says we should only use 3 of the slots to begin with, save money on one drive by not having a spare, and hope we don't have a drive failure - which sods law will happen. I'm not happy us cutting corners to save money, because if we gamble and lose, that's a hell of a mess we have ourselves in, and will cost us a load more time, reputation and data center charges to get ourselves out of it.

I say we might as well go for RAID 10 for that extra performance, and redundancy, you can potentially lose 2 drives so long as they aren't from the same mirrored pair. With RAID 5 you can only lose a drive, it takes longer to rebuild onto a spare, and during rebuild the performance takes a hit. Also RAID 10 is much faster than RAID 5, and at the expense of the cost of a drive.

Now the question we should be asking is... would a SATA2 RAID 10 array provide better performance than a SAS RAID 5 array?

So I think the choice we have to make is either go for RAID 5 and run with a hot spare, and stock a cold spare, or go with RAID 10 and stock 2 cold spares.

We are considering going with Seagate drives because they are high performance and have 5 year warranties. I have had to RMA two Western Digital drives already in the past 12 months, a raptor and a mybook, both deaths invoked data loss.

The server is going to be a linux web, email, dns and mysql box. It will likely feature a single dual/quad core processor, and 4-8GB of unbuffered ddr2 ram.

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Build RAID 0 Or Raid 5

Aug 23, 2007

I'm trying to build a physical raid 0/5 that can plug in to any computer which has SCSI behind it.

What are components you recommend (case, cpu, motherboard, SATA ...)

This is first time raid builder so i don't really need an expensive components.

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RAID-1 Pair Plus One Vs. RAID-5 Set

Oct 22, 2007

Question though on RAID choices... I'm considering getting 3 x 250GB SATA drives. Would it be better to make two of them a RAID-1 mirrored pair for my OS, home directories, and use the 3rd drive seperately for backups, swap, and perhaps some logs.... OR should I put all three drives into a RAID-5 set and treat it as a single logical drive?

my math says usable space would actually be identical... with 465GB usable in either setup. RAID-1 would be faster for I/O with no parity overhead... but one drive would not be redundant. On the other hand, RAID-5 would be fully redundant but have parity overhead for writes.

I think I just sold myself on RAID-5, didn't I.

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4 500 Gb Disks In Raid 10 Or 2 150 Gb Raptor Disks In Raid 1

Apr 27, 2008

I would like to hear which configuration you think will be better for a hosting server.

I have allready a raid controller in the server.

I am more concerned with security.

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Is It RAID 5

Jan 5, 2009

I am trying to determine if i really got RAID 5 from a server of ServerLoft.

But i am not really sure how, fdisk only show 1 HDD.

This is the screenshot of IRMC hopefully it help, what do you guys think?

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