Looking for fast, big and reliable storage solution for video use

[abailey]

You need to think very carefully about your RAID. I would recommend Raid 10. Raid 10 gives you the performance of RAID 0 with the backup of RAID 1. In fact it can give even better performance than RAID 0 on some read request. RAID 0 only if you really don't care about a failure. I would recommend RAID6 only if you are really trying to save money and don't mind a huge write performance penalty and a read speed less than a RAID10. With today's size drives I would never under any circumstances recommend Raid5. In fact you might as well do RAID0 if you are going to do RAID5. Raid 5 really hit the end of its usefulness almost 10 years ago when drives became cheaper and larger. I won't go through the reasons why here but I'll leave you with just a couple of links to articles that explain basically why RAID5 is horrible. Anyway whatever you decide make sure you educate yourself first.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/has-raid5-stopped-working/
https://www.askdbmgt.com/why-raid5-should-be-avoided-at-all-costs.html
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/

EDIT: Ok I made this statement "I would never under any circumstances recommend Raid5". That is not completely true. If all the drives in your RAID5 are 200GB or less each then I might recommend RAID5.

 

[Captations]

Hello Everyone
I received 6 Hdds yesterday for building my Raid array.
It is consisting of 6 Ironwolf Pro 6TB with a 9217-8i SAS card from LSI. It is only capable of raid 0, 1 and 10.
Raid 0 test is a breeze : 1080MB/s writing, and a little above that reading. 32TB useable.
But RAID 10 is a failure : writing is 120MB/s and reading 150MB/s. 16TB useable.
What am I doing wrong ?
I thought I would be about 500MB/s.
Thank you for your help.

 

[abailey]

That sounds like Raid1. Are you sure you have got the Raid10 configured correctly? You can also try changing the controller to write-back, at least for testing. I don't think that controller has a battery backed cache so if write-back fixes the problem you will have to decide if you want to take a chance with it.

 

[Captations]

Hi
Thank you for your response.
In the card bios, I chose Raid 1/ 10, but selected all 6 drives. There does not seem to be any way to congregate arrays and such... Is the card defective ?
I do not know if I can change to write back or write through, but all is set in write through.
I also have the MegaRAID Storage manager onstalled on the PC, but it does not seem to do anything more than the Bios...
I enclose a picture of the config in windows.

 

[sfx2000]

Hmm... make sure the megaraid card BIOS is up to date - normally these are pretty good cards (I've used similar in carrier grade servers) - under RedHat and Suse, they perform quite well - never tried them with Windows...

As per earlier mention - RAID10 is the way to go...

 

[Captations]

Hello
Yes I'm going for RAID 10.
It seems I'm running the latest bios on the raid card. What is most puzzling to me is that the perf in raid 0 is excellent.
Some megaraid cards seem to run another type of bios like this one :

Sadly, I have this one : https://www.vladan.fr/wp-content/uploads/images/lsi3008.jpg

 

[Captations]

Support replied me this :
"RAID 10 was built by RAID1 + RAID0 (please refer to below picture), based on RAID1 the hard drive performance is only based on one drive speed.
Using 6 hard drives is not a good combination for RAID10 (recommended is 4 or 8 drives)"

 

[Audio-catalyst]

Hello Everyone
I received 6 Hdds yesterday for building my Raid array.
It is consisting of 6 Ironwolf Pro 6TB with a 9217-8i SAS card from LSI. It is only capable of raid 0, 1 and 10.
Raid 0 test is a breeze : 1080MB/s writing, and a little above that reading. 32TB useable.
But RAID 10 is a failure : writing is 120MB/s and reading 150MB/s. 16TB useable.
What am I doing wrong ?
I thought I would be about 500MB/s.
Thank you for your help.

sounds to me the ideal setup to run zfs.
due to mem and /or ssd caching it will seriously improve your performance.
it will prevent bitrot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot


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[sfx2000]

Support replied me this :
"RAID 10 was built by RAID1 + RAID0 (please refer to below picture), based on RAID1 the hard drive performance is only based on one drive speed.
Using 6 hard drives is not a good combination for RAID10 (recommended is 4 or 8 drives)"

Makes sense actually - maybe consider the following...

drive0 and drive1 - RAID1 for OS and apps
drives 2-5 - RAID10 for storage volume

For our servers that had local storage, we usually split things up like that

 

[sfx2000]

sounds to me the ideal setup to run zfs.
due to mem and /or ssd caching it will seriously improve your performance.

I was wondering when someone would bring that up - really depends on the OS and use cases

zfs has pros and cons - and one needs robust support from the OS - I've used ZFS with Solaris, and there it's good - I'd hesitate to run it under Linux considering the state of development compared to other options (and then there's that pesky GPL that keeps getting in the way) - btrfs is another option.

if OP is running windows, the options there are limited...

 

[abailey]

Support replied me this :
"RAID 10 was built by RAID1 + RAID0 (please refer to below picture), based on RAID1 the hard drive performance is only based on one drive speed.
Using 6 hard drives is not a good combination for RAID10 (recommended is 4 or 8 drives)"

I have been using and setting up RAID arrays for more than 15 years and have never heard of a problem with a 6 drive RAID10. I just did a quick Google search and still can't find anything to support what you were told by the support techs. It is possible that they are correct as I surely don't know everything but I have never heard of this problem. At my house I run a 6 drive RAID10 (actually Mirrored Vdevs) array using FreeNAS (ZFS). I have never had performance problems. A 6 drive RAID 10 should have the Write performance of a 3 drive Raid 0 and the Read performance of a 6 drive Raid 0 (possible even a bit higher depending).
Personally I think something is up with your Raid card.

 

[Captations]

Thans for all your feedback.
@sfx & audio : I just need the raid array for putting medias for NLE video. My OS is on SSD, as is my cache folder etc...
@abailey : I do believe you are right.
I guess it has something to do with the firmware, becaue the Raid 0 configuration is excellent (1080MBs). There seem to be 2 kind of bioses for megaraid. I don't know if I can install the later on my card (or where to find it)...

 

[sfx2000]

At my house I run a 6 drive RAID10 (actually Mirrored Vdevs) array using FreeNAS (ZFS). I have never had performance problems. A 6 drive RAID 10 should have the Write performance of a 3 drive Raid 0 and the Read performance of a 6 drive Raid 0 (possible even a bit higher depending).
Personally I think something is up with your Raid card.

It should be ok with what ever is done - when working with the megaraid, make sure the groups are balance - where it can get weird is with multiple disks, you could end up with an odd configuration - most RAID10 on Megaraid is usually a RAID0 consisting three pairs of RAID1's

Once created - you need to let the array settle a bit, completing the stripes - this can take up to 48 hours - one can read/write to it right away, but you need to let the array settle before doing benchmarks.

In the FWIW category - depending on the CPU in use - MDADM can be faster, depending on the horsepower of the CPU being used.

 

[Audio-catalyst]

I was wondering when someone would bring that up - really depends on the OS and use cases

zfs has pros and cons - and one needs robust support from the OS - I've used ZFS with Solaris, and there it's good - I'd hesitate to run it under Linux considering the state of development compared to other options (and then there's that pesky GPL that keeps getting in the way) - btrfs is another option.

if OP is running windows, the options there are limited...

true, but freebsd has perfect zfs support, and one can try omniosce...

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