Lenovo ThinkServer RD330 MegaRAID SAS Software User Guide - Page 43

MegaRAID SAS Software User Guide Chapter 2: Introduction to RAID | RAID Configuration Strategies Table 16: RAID Levels and Performance (Continued) RAID Level Performance 10 RAID 10 works best for data storage that need the enhanced I/O performance of RAID 0 (striped drive groups), which provides high data transfer rates. Spanning increases the capacity of the virtual drive and improves performance by doubling the number of spindles. The system performance improves as the number of spans increases. (The maximum number of spans is eight.) As the storage space in the spans is filled, the system stripes data over fewer and fewer spans and RAID performance degrades to that of a RAID 1 or RAID 5 drive group. 50 RAID 50 works best when used with data that requires high reliability, high request rates, and high data transfer. It provides high data throughput, data redundancy, and very good performance. Spanning increases the capacity of the virtual drive and improves performance by doubling the number of spindles. The system performance improves as the number of spans increases. (The maximum number of spans is eight.) As the storage space in the spans is filled, the system stripes data over fewer and fewer spans and RAID performance degrades to that of a RAID 1 or RAID 5 drive group. 60 RAID 60 works best when used with data that requires high reliability, high request rates, and high data transfer. It provides high data throughput, data redundancy, and very good performance. Spanning increases the capacity of the virtual drive and improves performance by doubling the number of spindles. The system performance improves as the number of spans increases. (The maximum number of spans is eight.) As the storage space in the spans is filled, the system stripes data over fewer and fewer spans and RAID performance degrades to that of a RAID 1 or RAID 6 drive group. RAID 60 is not well suited to tasks requiring a lot of writes. A RAID 60 virtual drive has to generate two sets of parity data for each write operation, which results in a significant decrease in performance during writes. Drive performance is reduced during a drive rebuild. Environments with few processes do not perform as well because the RAID overhead is not offset by the performance gains in handling simultaneous processes. 2.6.3 Maximizing Storage Capacity Storage capacity is an important factor when selecting a RAID level. There are several variables to consider. Striping alone (RAID 0) requires less storage space than mirrored data (RAID 1) or distributed parity (RAID 5 or RAID 6). RAID 5, which provides redundancy for one drive failure without duplicating the contents of entire drives, requires less space then RAID 1. Table 17 explains the effects of the RAID levels on storage capacity. Table 17: RAID Levels and Capacity RAID Level Capacity 0 RAID 0 (striping) involves partitioning each drive storage space into stripes that can vary in size. The combined storage space is composed of stripes from each drive. RAID 0 provides maximum storage capacity for a given set of drives. 1 With RAID 1 (mirroring), data written to one drive is simultaneously written to another drive, which doubles the required data storage capacity. This is expensive because each drive in the system must be duplicated. 5 RAID 5 provides redundancy for one drive failure without duplicating the contents of entire drives. RAID 5 breaks up data into smaller blocks, calculates parity by performing an exclusive-or on the blocks, then writes the blocks of data and parity to each drive in the drive group. The size of each block is determined by the stripe size parameter, which is set during the creation of the RAID set. 6 RAID 6 provides redundancy for two drive failures without duplicating the contents of entire drives. However, it requires extra capacity because it uses two parity blocks per stripe. This makes RAID 60 more expensive to implement. 00 RAID 00 (striping in a spanned drive group) involves partitioning each drive storage space into stripes that can vary in size. The combined storage space is composed of stripes from each drive. RAID 00 provides maximum storage capacity for a given set of drives. Page 43