Marcel van Leeuwen wrote:

Hi,

At the moment I'm testing a Seagate st8000. It seems to work okay. I don't intent to use mdadm (software raid). They are cheap, lots of storage and 3 years warranty that why i chose the st8000.

There a lots of people recommending the Western Digitals Red's. If you want to use mdadm (software raid) then use the red's. They also have 3 years of warranty. The greens have 2 years of warranty.

I have my OS on a sdd (256GB) and use HDD for storage.

Cheers for the reply Marcel.

Just to update!

Gone for some toshiba 3TB DT drives and a kingston 60gb ssd. Jumping to the cos7 release.

Kinda pushed as my lad thought it would be a cracking idea to hit the reset button on the server. Trouble is it had 2 old drives in it and one has gave up.

Now to decide on raid config

Not sure if you have seen this article BackBlaze but I found it quite interesting.

FWIW I have been running 3 WD Reds (2TB) with no issue so far. Fingers crossed

Paul wrote:

Not sure if you have seen this article BackBlaze but I found it quite interesting.

FWIW I have been running 3 WD Reds (2TB) with no issue so far. Fingers crossed

hmmm, The toshiba's don't do well in that if i am reading it correctly. Never mind. I will find out in due course I suppose.

Marcel van Leeuwen wrote:

Hi,

At the moment I'm testing a Seagate st8000. It seems to work okay. I don't intent to use mdadm (software raid). They are cheap, lots of storage and 3 years warranty that why i chose the st8000.

There a lots of people recommending the Western Digitals Red's. If you want to use mdadm (software raid) then use the red's. They also have 3 years of warranty. The greens have 2 years of warranty.

I have my OS on a sdd (256GB) and use HDD for storage.

Well I ve kinda of cheated, used the MB raid function. I know I know, but was easier to do. And in all honesty I've not had problems in the past with bois/softraid tbf.

Anyway I went with a small 60 sdd. How I ve done it is

/boot
/
/swap

Is on the ssd

I made a raid 5 array with the 4 hdd's and have

/home on a 2.8tb partition

/var/flexshare on a 4.4tb

and

/var/lib/zoneminder/events on a 1tb part. (I run zoneminder with a 8ch cap card)

Running COS 7 beta and I have to say it's working well. Still a few things missing in the beta but all in all, Stable and quick!

No idea why the beta 3 is pass protected though

I am running my ClearOS with 3 disks in software raid since a couple of years ago with no problems.

I would recommend software raid and not using the motherboard. (If your motherboard dies you will most likely not be able to start up your disks in another system if you are using motherboard RAID if I have understood it correctly).

My disks are 3 x 5600 rpm "green desktop disks" 2TB each. Maybe I am lucky, but I have had no problems with these disks (2 WD and 1 Seagate) and they have been on 24h/day. The RED disks are probably better, but it obviously can work with other disks too.

Since I have 3 disks, I looked around for quite some time before deciding what RAID type to use. I ended up using:
- 3 disk RAID 1 for a 200 MB boot partition (all three disks are bootable!)
- no RAID for the swap (same swap size on all three disks)
- 3 disk (same disks) RAID 5 for the "/"
and it has proven to work ok for me. But then again, I have had no disk problems so I can not say if it will work if I eventually will get a disk crash... However, I did simulate a disk crash by rebooting my server with one of the disks removed. It started OK, and when I rebooted it again with all three disks it did rebuild the RAID systems without problem.

To me it seems like a better idea to spend your money on more RAM rather than buying a SSD. ClearOS will use RAM to cache the disks... But if you already have a 32 GB SSD laying around, then by all means go ahead. Also, using ClearOS 7 later on you will find your server booting super-fast! It is an big difference compared to ClearOS 6 and earlier. I would say that SSD is not needed for the OS unless you have very specific needs. Also, at least in theory, the RAID 1 of the boot partition will enable higher read speeds on these "slow" disks that I have.

One concern I had, using RAID 5, was that it was going to be slow (read more on RAID 5 on Wikipedia if you want) writing large files when doing 1-10 GB file transfers. However, I have not experienced any problems with this. My processor is fairly capable though, Core i5 Sandy Bridge, so maybe that explains it. On the positive side with RAID 5 is that I do have 4 TB of useful storage from "just" 6 TB of raw disk space.

While it took me a while to figure out how to partitioning the drives correctly, it could be done in the ClearOS installation/setup process without problems. It did however take a couple of tweaks to enable booting from any of the three disks... Once up and running, I installed the RAID-app from the ClearOS marketplace, and I can now monitor my disks and get email warnings if something is not OK.

/Fred