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Oneiroi
Asked: 2011-11-15 08:28:50 +0800 CST

HP DL180 G6 P410 8x SATA 1TB, what is the optimal configuration?

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I have a HP DL180 G6 with a P410 raid controller.

Presently this runs using 4x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint SATA drives, in a RAID10 configuration using default settings.

I am about to add a backplane to increase the drive capacity from 4 to 12 drives, and I plan to install 4 more 1TB SATA Drives.

  • The drives are matched and have close serial numbers (They arrived together in the Manufacturers pallet).
  • Model HD103UJ 1000GB/7200rpm/32M
  • Rated for 3GB/s

I will also be installing RHEL 6.1 x86_64.

My question is what would be the optimal RAID settings (stripe etc.) for this configuration?

To recap:

  • 8x Model HD103UJ 1000GB/7200rpm/32M
  • Rated for 3GB/s
  • RAID 10 configuration.

Thanks in advance.

Update for role:

  • Server is to become an iscsi target for an internal openstack deployment currently underway. (Glance)
  • Will also provide virtualisation through KVM
raid configuration hp hp-proliant raid10

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    A few quick things...

    Does the Smart Array P410 controller in your system have a battery-packed or flash-backed cache unit? If not, you will want to add one in order to have acceptable write performance (and possibly allow expansion of the drive array).

    Are you doing this as a complete rebuild of the server, or are you looking to expand in-place?

    I'd recommend RAID 1+0 in general, but especially with high-capacity low-speed drives. You can probably get by with the defaults suggested by the HP Array Configuration Utility.

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  2. I always use RAID10 in iSCSI setup especially for virtualization.

    To me it's the ideal balance between performance and reliability. And on top of it, it's much faster to rebuild a failed disk than in RAID 5 configuration. Especially with slowish 1TB drives.

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  3. My default answer to any of these questions is always RAID 10, unless there's very special circumstances anyway. It's a great balance of performance and resilience, that said trying to get the best performance out of big slow consumer drives always strikes me as an odd choice - it's a bit like entering the Indy 500 in a tricked out Honda Civic, it'll start but will it end. Specifically I'd be worried that those disks have a 30% duty cycle, like every other cheapo 7.2k SATA, and driving them significantly over that will massively impact their MTBF, make sure you have at least two spares very close to hand. I'd also be a little worried about using non-HP disks with that controller but they're the choices you've made I guess.

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