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I'm building a household Ubuntu 14.04 server and just installed two 3TB drives for the files and media. The box (HP DC7900 SFF) uses Intel Matrix RAID which, according to wikipedia is neither hardware nor software RAID but firmware RAID. I'm thinking of installing two partitions on each drive (four total) and mirroring (RAID1, ~2.5TB) the files with one partition from each drive and striping (RAID0, ~1TB) the media with the other two partitions, for a total of ~3.5TB.
The other option is to mirror/RAID1 both drives, so a lesser total of ~3TB.
If we're streaming a movie, listening to music, and reading/writing files, would the first RAID0 & RAID1 configuration give us the best performance or would just going straight RAID1 be faster? I understand if each partition was on its own disk it would be faster, but don't know if there are performance issues with the configuration I'm proposing. I like the extra 0.5TB we'd get from the first configuration but would be happy to give it up for better performance. I need the redundancy, so going all RAID0 isn't an option.
Thanks for the thoughts, but I'm not interested in RAID10 since that would give me mirroring on all my data which isn't what I want for me media. If I had four disks, I'd RAID0 two for the media so I'd max the disk space and speed and I'd RAID1 the other two for mirroring important files. What I'm proposing is 4 partitions (2 on each drive) and doing a RAID0 with one partition from each drive and a RAID1 from the other partition of each drive. I'll update my question to make it clearer. – buttonsrtoys – 2015-08-02T00:29:18.360
Its a little non-standard as you normally raid entire drives but that doesn't matter as long as it works. With only a single partition on each drive you wouldn't have to worry about size of the individual partitions. But if you have two partitions on each drive you have to estimate the needs of both before creating. Resizing would probably not work on the fly. – Christian Isaksson – 2015-08-02T10:04:45.293