Is setting up RAID 1 important?

NeoCHI

Active member
So I just purchased a new dedi-2 dedicated server at knownhost: https://www.knownhost.com/managed-dedicated-servers.html

and asked them to implement RAID 1 on my hdd in which they replied:

Hello,

There are only two harddrives in the system. In which one is setup as backup drive and the other one is partitioned in to boot, tmp and main.

--
root@host [~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 886G 6.4G 835G 1% /
tmpfs 7.8G 0 7.8G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1 917G 453M 870G 1% /backup
/dev/sda1 504M 72M 408M 15% /boot
/dev/sda3 16G 173M 15G 2% /tmp
--

Everything is already setup and I am not sure, if it can be changed in to raid. I can escalate this if you want.

Should I have them escalate? is having RAID 1 setup important?
 
Personally I would leave it as it is; especially since having a RAID would mean the loss of an internal backup drive.

You might not think that's so important with a RAID (because the array will give you some protection against disk failure), but having a RAID doesn't protect you from overwrites or accidental deletion of data - whereas a backup drive with several days/weeks/months of backups allows you to possibly go back and recover the overwritten/deleted data.

If you're definite about having a RAID on your server (don't forget, the RAID controller introduces an additional hardware failure point!!!) - then you need to ask your host about pricing for network / USB backup.
 
You might not think that's so important with a RAID (because the array will give you some protection against disk failure), but having a RAID doesn't protect you from overwrites or accidental deletion of data - whereas a backup drive with several days/weeks/months of backups allows you to possibly go back and recover the overwritten/deleted data.
That's the reason you want off-site (server) backups.
If you're definite about having a RAID on your server (don't forget, the RAID controller introduces an additional hardware failure point!!!) - then you need to ask your host about pricing for network / USB backup.
Only if you use hardware RAID. Usually RAID 1 is done via the BIOS RAID (which is essentially the equivalent of a software RAID). If I was going to do RAID 1, I'd use Linux's software RAID instead. To often if you use the onboard BIOS RAID and then have a MB failure, you have to replace with a like board.

Even with hardware RAID 10, you should be doing off-site backups.
 
Personally I would leave it as it is; especially since having a RAID would mean the loss of an internal backup drive.

You might not think that's so important with a RAID (because the array will give you some protection against disk failure), but having a RAID doesn't protect you from overwrites or accidental deletion of data - whereas a backup drive with several days/weeks/months of backups allows you to possibly go back and recover the overwritten/deleted data.

If you're definite about having a RAID on your server (don't forget, the RAID controller introduces an additional hardware failure point!!!) - then you need to ask your host about pricing for network / USB backup.

I'm planning on using WHM's built in backup system and sFTPing it to backupsys, so I don't need the extra drive as internal backup drive.
 
Another point of failure.

If its software raid and not hardware, it can also drag your server performance down a lot.
 
hmmm, what percent of people with a serious forum do you think use RAID 1?

If I have daily offsite backups I shouldn't really need RAID.
 
hmmm, what percent of people with a serious forum do you think use RAID 1?

If I have daily offsite backups I shouldn't really need RAID.

I think most people with serious (aka earn a living) forums run hardware based raid 10 with sas or ssd drives :) Those who have mega money move to raid 5 or 6.
 
If I'm in your position, I would get off site backup (like backupsy), then I would do HW RAID1. I normally prefer RAID10.
 
offsite backup = protection
RAID = speed + minimizing downtime

Your thinking RAID 0 right? cause from I know RAID 1 slows things down like slavik said

If I'm in your position, I would get off site backup (like backupsy), then I would do HW RAID1. I normally prefer RAID10.

What's required to do a hardware RAID 1 instead of software RAID 1. From my understanding HW seems to be more suitable for running forums.
 
Not with linux software RAID 1 - it can hit near RAID 0 performance on reads (except 100% sequential reads).

Maybe im out of touch but the last time I used mdadm and a re-sync was needed it crumbled the server it was on and took like 3 days to resync 100Gb. I was less than impressed, though will admit I did not look too much into what could have been done to fix it.
 
Maybe im out of touch but the last time I used mdadm and a re-sync was needed it crumbled the server it was on and took like 3 days to resync 100Gb. I was less than impressed, though will admit I did not look too much into what could have been done to fix it.

You're definitely out of touch. Software RAID is darn quick, and has almost no CPU hit with any modern processor.

Yes...have them escalate. You don't need a backup drive. That's silly, especially when you're using off-site backups. You'll get the extra performance from the RAID, as well as an added layer of protection should one of the drives fail.
 
You're definitely out of touch. Software RAID is darn quick, and has almost no CPU hit with any modern processor.

Yes...have them escalate. You don't need a backup drive. That's silly, especially when you're using off-site backups. You'll get the extra performance from the RAID, as well as an added layer of protection should one of the drives fail.

I'll second this. In our testing it's only a 10% performance drop or so from the theoretical maximum of the drives which isn't to shabby. The biggest place hardware controllers shine is on random writes that can take advantage of the controller's cache.
 
Your thinking RAID 0 right? cause from I know RAID 1 slows things down like slavik said

Write speeds may slow slightly (basically unnoticeable), but read speeds will potentially increase if you are able to use simultaneous reads.
 
Top Bottom