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Raid Drives - Choosing Redundant Server Hardware

The cheapest way to mirror hard drives when building redundant servers is to have them in a RAID 1 configuration. Because even cheap RAID cards can support a RAID 1 configuration. This means that you are using at the minimum 2 hard drives, for example if each one is a 500 Terabyte hard drive you would have not 1 Petabyte of storage but only 500 Terabytes.

Mirroring Hard Drives

A little more expensive option is to use a RAID 5 configuration, which gives you a savings in the cost of hard drives however the RAID controller will be more expensive. This configuration uses at a minimum three drives and gives you 1.5 times the capacity of RAID 1, while still offering you redundant data storage. A benefit of this array is that you have faster read times however your write times are slower because of the additional parity bits that need to be written to the drives.

Again most operating systems today support some type of software RAID solutions, so if need be you can have redundant hard drives on a budget, however these solutions are never as fast as actual RAID hardware, since the hardware has a processer that handles the tasks of managing the drives, while with a software solution this gets dumped onto the CPU to do the job. If your server is under load and your CPU is really busy then having to deal with controlling the hard drives will slow it down even more. I would always recommend a hardware RAID solution if possible so check with your dedicated hosting service to see if they offer it as an option.

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