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first of all i want to appolagize if i doublepost. Plese merge this with similar post. Thank you. Now about the situation and the system we are trying to build and want an advice from experienced server engineer to make all things right and prepare the system to a production. We already ordered and the server is already shipped so we just need advice in configuration. We are planning to setup RAID-5 or even RAID-6 (again, we need an advice), we are planning to install Proxmox KVM and use the the virtualization advantages. The only questions is is there any good practice with partitioning, how is more reliable and secure to deploy and service the server without any data loss? There where two advices already, to split system and data partitions to a sepparate RAID arrays and the other was to make one huge RAID array and just write everything in there. So if there is experienced datacenter engineer out there it wud be very helpfull if you wud share your experience at this point. We also thinking about huge storage server (etc. NAS) but the only downside that there is allways speed and troughtput limits so i wonder how to make this thing working and kicking. Again, RAID arrays wud be also on the NAS server. I already have seen how people makes 100+tb storage servers and they run at almost native SATA speeds ant its sepparate servers. I Thank You for all the advices in advance and hope that will help us out.

Andrius Lukminas
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    Please don't use RAID 5 for anything, we can bore you with the math but basically it's dangerous to use on large (>1TB) disks. Stick to R6/60 or R1/10 and you'll be good. – Chopper3 Apr 12 '16 at 08:47
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    [Canonical Q&A on RAID levels](http://serverfault.com/q/339128) and my [opinion on partitioning a generic server](http://serverfault.com/questions/629439/how-bad-is-it-really-to-install-linux-on-one-big-partition/629479#629479) may be of interest. And of course the vendor recommendations: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage_Model – HBruijn Apr 12 '16 at 08:51
  • And there is no advantage to use separate RAID array for the system and another one RAID array for data? – Andrius Lukminas Apr 12 '16 at 08:56

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As Chopper3 stated, Raid 5 is out. And, these days, Raid 6 is essentially out as well.

Raid 0 is also out for anything other than a temp file on a non-enterprise system, such as a video editing box.

The recommended practice is only Mirror, Raid 1. Raid 1 with a stripe (Raid 0) is fine.

If you can, use a good file system like ZFS.
ZFS is not necessarily faster than a HW raid. ZFS is an awesome SW raid. It is very flexible, reliable, fast, and allows exporting and importing. It allows a lot of features that HW raid doesn't.

Next, whether you make a raid 1 then 0 or 0 then 1. From what I've read, it would be best to make them look like this

A mirror --| to create zvol 1 B mirror --|

C mirror --| to create zvol 2 D mirror --|

E mirror --| to create zvol 3 F mirror --|

Then Raid 0 zvol 1,2,3.

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/ssd-hw-raid-10-or-zfs-raid-10-ssd.26502/

MikeP
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