The Case for Raid

As a datacenter operators of 1,000’s of servers at NETdepot and previously the owner of a mid-sized shared hosting provider, I know directly the benefits of using Raid as opposed to be going cheap and not using Raid. I am all for being cheap, however the benefits of using Raid vs using a single drive far outweigh the pure cost perspective.

Increased IO
Not only do you get the redundancy issue, but when using Raid10, you also get increased performance.

Redundancy, Redundancy and Redundancy!
Hard drives fail. Did you read that, hard drives will fail eventually. Fortunately with Raid10, when a hard drive does fail, we can replace that (without any downtime) and the array will rebuild without any data issues.

Comparing this to replacing a single failed drive, can be the difference of no downtime or a simple reboot to a full restore without raid that could many hours or even days in some cases.

All of our internal infrastructure here at NETdepot.com runs on Raid10 and I sleep well at night knowing that, I would suggest the same to anyone else.

Sincerely,

Rodney Giles, President
NETdepot.com
rgiles@netdepot.com