Which RAID mode is best for my SuperMicro Server?

Picking the correct RAID mode is important, especially as data carries a large value to most organizations. With many organizations relying on SuperMicro servers, we wanted to help you a little through the RAID mode understanding process.

Whether you need speed or redundancy, or both, you must pick the right RAID mode for your environment. There are other factors at play, such as read and write speeds, which we will discuss in the advantages and disadvantages below.

RAID 0:

ADVANTAGES:

• High performance
• Easy to implement
• Highly efficient (no parity overhead)

DISADVANTAGES:

• No redundancy
• Limited business use cases due to no fault tolerance

RAID 1: 

ADVANTAGES:

• Fault-tolerant
• Easy to recover data in case of drive failure
• Easy to implement

DISADVANTAGES:

• Highly inefficient (100% parity overhead)
• Not scalable (becomes very costly as the number of disks increases)

RAID 5:

ADVANTAGES:

• Fault-tolerant
• High efficiency

DISADVANTAGES:

• Disk failure has a medium impact on throughput
• Complex controller design

RAID 6:

ADVANTAGES:

• Fault-tolerant with increased redundancy.
• High efficiency
• Remains a great option in multi-user environments that are not write performance sensitive

DISADVANTAGES:

• Write performance penalty vs 5
• More expensive than 5
• Disk failure has a medium impact on throughput
• Complex controller design

RAID 1+0:

ADVANTAGES:

• Fault tolerance
• High Performance

DISADVANTAGES:

• Expensive
• High Overhead
• Very limited scalability

RAID 5+0:

ADVANTAGES:

• Higher fault tolerance, better performance, and higher efficiency than RAID 5

DISADVANTAGES:

• Very Expensive
• Limited Scalability 

RAID 6+0:

ADVANTAGES:

• Higher fault tolerance than RAID 6
• Higher performance than RAID 6
• Higher efficiency than RAID 6

DISADVANTAGES:

• Very Expensive
• Very complex/difficult to implement

To find out more about the pros & cons of your RAID setup, talk to us by using the form below, and one of our expert team will be in touch.