Need help 3ware Raid Card with 4 hard drives setting for CentOS and Cpanel

[cwuser]

Hi,

I am going to install CentOS and Cpanel on the server that has 4 x 250GB hard drives along with 3ware raid card. It is currently configured as raid 5 but and I think this previous setting will be disappeared once the OS installation formats the drives.

What would be the best raid option I should use with these four hard drives? Or shall I don’t use the raid at all? I want to be able to use lots of space.

Thanks

 

[alphawolf50]

Re: Need help 3ware Raid Card with 4 hard drives setting for CentOS and Cpa

Since you have a RAID card, the OS is largely unaware of how the underlying drives are configured and formatting the drives/reinstalling will not change the RAID level. That being said, RAID 10 generally offers better performance and redundancy over RAID 5. You will only have 500GB of storage with RAID 10, however, compared to 750GB with RAID 5. Which RAID level you pick depends mostly on which is more important -- storage space (RAID 5) or performance and robustness (RAID 10). It should be noted that RAID 5 can kill performance for write-heavy databases.

Unless you don't care about your data, I would highly discourage *not* using RAID. Actually, if you don't care about your data at all, you're still better off using RAID 0, which would consolidate your storage space into one contiguous 1 TB with high performance. The downside is, if one single drive dies you will lose ALL of your data (on all 4 drives). In other words... don't use RAID 0 unless you absolutely don't care about your data. Here's a chart:

RAID 5: 750GB, medium performance, can survive 1 drive failure.
RAID 10: 500GB, high performance, can survive 2 drive failures.
RAID 0: 1000GB, high performance, survives NO drive failures.

 

[cwuser]

Re: Need help 3ware Raid Card with 4 hard drives setting for CentOS and Cpa

Thank you very much for the info and advise. I can definitely forget about the expense on 3ware that I though something worthy as one hard drive failed before.

What if I don't use raid at all? Could you advise me how would you use these four drives wisely? If one drive fail, I can still cover that single drive to bring the server up while without raid?