Questions tagged [software-raid]

RAID solution handled by the operating system.

Software RAID is implemented in the OS. It uses CPU to handle the RAID setup. It is cheaper than hardware raid. It often doesn't support features which you can find with hardware raid like:

  • hot spare
  • fast rebuilding of an array
  • hot swapping
  • high write throughput

Another problem is that it uses the CPU and memory of the computer to perform all the tasks (hardware raidcards have a special cpu and memory for this task). Therefor generating more load on your system.

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Can Windows 7 do software RAID 10 (1+0)

Can Windows 7 do software RAID 10 (or RAID 1+0 depending on terminology)? There appears to be a lack of information about software RAID for Microsoft Windows products. Even a search of the microsoft.com offers zero articles about the subject, just a…
PP.
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Linux Software Raid 10 hung after 1 drive failed, mdadm will not let me force remove the faulty device

I have a Linux software raid 10 setup consisting of 5 RAID 1s (Two drives per mirrored setup) and a RAID 0 across all 5 RAID 1 pairs. To test that none of the drives were going to fail quickly under load I used badblocks across the RAID 0 with a…
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Do any software RAID solutions support the TRIM command?

This is a broad question -- I'm not asking about a particular RAID level or OS.
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Amazon AWS Ephemeral disks and RAID1

Some AWS instances have "ephemeral disks" attached, which are much faster than EBS. But ephemeral disks will be blank and uninitialised when your instance is stopped and started. The data on disk generally survives an instance reboot…
Criggie
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EMC ScaleIO vs Starwind Virtual SAN

I'm setting a test lab to evaluate best solution for future production use. The production farm intended for an SMB, so budget is present, but it is also limited. Goal for production: 3 hyperconverged servers with Windows Server 2012 R2 failover…
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RAID-1 to RAID-5 using mdadm

As per subject. When converting from RAID-1 to RAID-5 using mdadm, why must a RAID 1 array contain 2 devices and not more than 2 devices? I don't understand RAID strong enough to pinpoint a reason. Background: My three RAID-1 arrays contain 3…
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Using software-RAID vs "firmware"-RAID (a.k.a. FakeRAID)

We recently bought a tower server on which I want to install Debian. I thought the device had hardware RAID, as I could see a BIOS screen. As it turns out, it's still a software RAID. When I configure the RAID drives through that firmware, I can…
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Linux file system cache: Move data from Dirty to Writeback

My software RAID can write 800 MB/s sustained. I see that happening when cat /proc/meminfo |grep Writeback: returns > 2 GB. However, most of the time the writeback is round 0.5 GB which gives a performance around 200 MB/s. There is plenty of data to…
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What would happen if I did a raid on a SSD and an HDD?

I am building another server (cheap) and would like to go with a 256GB SSD drive for my boot and data. This will be enough for my needs, but just having one SSD scares me for a couple of reasons. If I did a mirror raid with a SSD and an HDD, what…
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Raid 1/10: Kernel panic- not syncing: attempted to kill init

I have setup Raid 1 & Raid 10 in Virtual Box for learning purpose. The following Partitions for 4 Hard Drives: I make a 100mb partition (/boot) on four drives and make that a raid 1 partition. Then with the remaining space on each drive, I've setup…
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Poor Linux software RAID 5 performance with NCQ

While salvaging a 2-disk failure in my 3-disk RAID 5 setup, I happened to notice reconstruction was faster with NCQ disabled (~90M/sec) than with the NCQ enabled (~50M/sec). Running bonnie++ to benchmark the two configurations also revealed…
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Can I throttle tar without ionice?

My tar command tar --remove-files -cvif 2011-08-02_14-05-09.tar 2011-08-02_14-05-09 Writes 80MB/s. That's beyond the capacity we can spare because MySQL starts queuing up writes and eventually we get monitoring alerts cause systems won't wait…
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Where is the best place for LUKS to sit in a RAID/LVM/LUKS stack?

I am implementing a server storage setup making use of software RAID, LVM and LUKS. I can think of three combinations this configuration could take: RAID, LVM, LUKS RAID, LUKS, LVM LUKS, RAID, LVM In which order would these best be configured in,…
etheros
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Where should my swap partition/s live when using software RAID1? Performance? LVM?

When I search around for example RAID1 installations, it seems that admins tend to place their swap partition under RAID1. To me, it is more intuitive to have two disks, each with a large partition for use by RAID1 and the system partition and with…
andyortlieb
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USB drive RAID array

I am trying to contemplate how stupid an idea this would be... I was inspired by some foolish fellow, who soon after the release of Mac OS X 10.0 took 5 USB floppy drives, plugged them into his iMac, and set up a RAID5 array on them. Floppy RAID…
geoffc
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