From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Mar 3 15:50:57 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0E4C916A4CE for ; Wed, 3 Mar 2004 15:50:56 -0800 (PST) Received: from gateway.home.ricin.net (cp464173-a.dbsch1.nb.home.nl [212.204.145.167]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6B89543D2F for ; Wed, 3 Mar 2004 15:50:55 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from danny@ricin.com) Received: from workstation.home.ricin.net (workstation.home.ricin.net [172.16.32.66]) by gateway.home.ricin.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 232A524D09 for ; Thu, 4 Mar 2004 00:50:54 +0100 (CET) From: Danny Pansters To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 00:50:53 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.6 References: <20040303222612.W39053@guldivar.globalwire.se> <20040303213641.GA37555@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20040303213641.GA37555@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200403040050.53556.danny@ricin.com> Subject: Re: 1 processor vs. 2 X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: danny@ricin.com List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 23:50:57 -0000 (enough CCing, back to list only) On Wednesday 03 March 2004 22:36, Matthew Seaman wrote: > On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 10:26:43PM +0100, Stefan Cars wrote: > > Okey, but if you would compare RAID-1 on two disks compared to RAID-5 on > > three disks then ? What would be the faster ? > > RAID1 is going to be faster, both reading and writing, but it will > take a lot more raw disk space to provide the required usable space. No, it would require 2 identical disks, whereas RAID5 with 3 disks would require 3 of those disks ;-) Physical disks are your unit of failure or of resilliance if you like. That's why you need 5+ drives for RAID5 to be any real fun. You want your data to be present at least twice on different physical drives. You want the same for your parity info. The mere fact that you stripe everything out with RAID5 doesn't change your physical unit which is one disk. Resilliance means: what happens if a random drive fails. RAID5 on 3 disks defeats the purpose of RAID5 IMHO. Theoretically the more drives, the better RAID5 gets, so that might say something about Veritas if they warned against using more than 7 drives. Perhaps grog can be the final referee here, not my turf ;-) Having said that I don't have a RAID5, but I would recommend OP to use RAID1 and use the 3rd drive as a (semi) hot spare for extra sleep security and less spending. It's much more interesting if you can (un)plug a spare on the fly BTW. I just kinda fell back into the developed thread, hope you don't mind me adding a general remark: One doesn't do RAID to increase performance. Period. If budget is no problem, buy spare boxen and use them "secondary", always nominated to become "primary" at any time. That's better insurance against (any) hardware failure than mere RAID can ever be IMHO. Greets, Dan