Hardware raid Configuration

  • We are currently running a database that hosts the MOM application and its a heavy transcation database.  On the hardware side we seem to occasionally run into to some problem with the controller getting extreme IO traffic.  We have RAID 10 configuration with 4 disks stripped and 4 mirrored.  My question is would we get better performance or less IO overload if we recut our raid set into an 8 disk RAID 5.  Please explain pros and cons if possible.

    Thanks 

  • Raid5 is suitable for low cost and mainly read only applications as every write operation needs to calcul the parity to be written to the parity disk.

    Read operation can be fast because several spindles (physical disks) coud honour the read request.

    Raid10 is one of the most expensive RAID solution but ont of the best too because no parity calculation is needed.

    The write operation is made by paralel chunks on several spindles which is then mirrored. The read operation is also paralelized due to the spilled data on several physical disks.

    For MOM, as read and write operations are frequents I wouldn't recommend to switch from RAID10 to RAID5.

    I would separate some database parts into separate RAIDs like the log files on RAID1 because the read and write operations are there sequentiel so the data split of RAID10 would not bring any performance gain just in contrary.

    TempDB on very fast disk, probably on RAID10

    Data on RAID10.

    Also I would use as small and as many physical disks as possible to be able to let turn as many spindle as possible paralel



    Bye
    Gabor

  • One other to consider is separating the trans logs to raid 1 AND use a split backplane....that way the backplane can speak to both at the same time.  

     

    charlie

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