Topic: Raid 10 and 0

[jameswilson]

I have been using SME more and more as a VM host with virtual box.
I know it was never designed that way but i love the totally stability and ease of monitoring / maintenance of SME.

But running guests on large raid 6 arrays can cause write issues on the guests if its heavy IO.

I was wondering if raid 10 could be considered as an install option (with spares etc). I also have a friend that is wanting to use sme purly as a media store at home and wanted raid 0. I can see there would be little demand for raid 0 in a server but what about raid 10?

I know sme does not need it if just using it for its main objectives but as a virtual host its spot on and (from the little i know) raid 10 would not have the io wait that 6 or 5 does?

James

[Stefano]

if you need unsupported (i.e. not supported by setup) raid configuration, you should install SME on 2 (small) hd and then manually create the new array..

read here: http://wiki.contribs.org/AddExtraHardDisk
to create a raid10 array, search with google (use 'Centos5' search key too)

raid0 is e v i l

finally, I suggest you to use a virtual machine with small disks to make some tests

HTH

[jameswilson]

i dont want raid 0 and certainly not for any server. Id agree its evil on something that should be reliable. But my mate wants the simplicity of sme without its hardness.
Its a seperate discussion as i wouldnt want raid 0 on sme but my point was to the new raid=0 as a boot prompt sounds like raid level 0.

But i would like raid 10 as an option but i will as always respect charlie's view. The thing works as it is damn well. I wouldnt want to risk any of that.

James

[CharlieBrady]

I know sme does not need it if just using it for its main objectives but as a virtual host its spot on and (from the little i know) raid 10 would not have the io wait that 6 or 5 does?

I don't think you can assume that in a virtual host. That will depend on how the virtual disks are provisioned by the virtualisation platform, and the performance characteristics of the virtualisation platform.

[jameswilson]

oh OK
But isnt write performance worse with raid 5/6 vs 10?