How to determine the best RAID for a file sharing server

[martinjp]

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I have to determine a RAID type for my new server.
This server is gonna be for file sharing only.
Can somebody can tell me wich is the best and why...
Or simply gave me a link of where are the information.

Thanks a lot,

JP

[rik]

Welcome to Techzonez. This link http://www.raidweb.com/whatis.html has a really good explanation of what RAID is and the differences in each. Hope this helps...

[Dehcbad25]

If you want a plain answer IMHO I would use RAID 1+0 always. If not mirror only (1)
The question is too vague. Like what kind of hardware is going to host the RAID? How many users are going to connect, what is the estimated use?
What is the budget? It is for a company? It is for home? Project?
I would recomend for a budget use good ATA drives with high capacity in Raid 1+0 (or 10) ATA will fail in a year or 2, but it is cheap enought to go and buy 4 drives again.
SCSI is more expensive, and you might run into trouble later replacing a drive. We had to pay 1500$ for a 9GB SCSI drive, becuase it was difficult to find, plus it took a week (if another drive went bad, LOSE EVERYTHING [it was RAID 5])
Most important is the RAID card. We had 4 failing from 15 servers.

[martinjp]

The kind of my hardware is: ServeRAID -4 Ultraq SCSI Controller (IBM)

IS gonna be for 15 - 20 users for file sharing in a company and the budget is not important.

Thanks a lot...

JP

[cash_site]

Martin, dedicated hardware RAID is the way to go, as I think you have gone with the ServeRAID (IBM) device. If budget isnt really a concern, then you would want to go for a RAID 5 (O + 1) configuration where you get mirroring and striping together... that way you get file duplication and also the performance aspect... however for 4/5 SCSI drives it will be expensive... but seriously it is worth the effort! and you shouldnt have to upgrade for quite a while... I think you can get 72Gb SCSI drives, which is a lot of space ;)

[Dehcbad25]

for a RAID 5 (O + 1) configuration
RAID 5 is not the same as 0+1 (or 1+0 order has no meaning)
For RAID 5 you only need 3 drives, but you will see the total of 2. IF you have 4 drives, you will see the total of 3. Basically one drive is always use for parity check. IF you read RAID 5 quick it seems to have the best of both worlds, but it is not fail proof. I would still go with RAID 1+0, not RAID 5. Worst case scenario go with RAID 1 (mirroing) s9ince the users probably will do a lot of writing as well, and the advantage of RAID 0 is in the read field (databases take advantage of this) So, if you can get 4 drives do 1+0 if you cannot just do RAID 1. The user's files are like gold for the user. Chose reliability over speed. Plus they might never even know the difference. Better to say, we are redundant than we can open that Excel worksheet 2 nanoseconds faster

[cash_site]

Good Point Dehc, I agree.