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Is RAID still needed? (programming.dev)

submitted 8 months ago by Clydesdalecrusher@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Me and my friend were discussing this the other day about how he said RAID is no longer needed. He said it was due to how big SSDs have gotten and that apparently you can replace sectors within them if a problem occurs which is why having an array is not needed.

I replied with the fact that arrays allow for redundancy that create a faster uptime if there are issues and drive needs to be replaced. And depending on what you are doing, that is more valuable than just doing the new thing. Especially because RAID allows redundancy that can replicate lost data if needed depending on the configuration.

What do you all think?

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[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

a dedicated battery to keep the I/O buffer alive in case of hardware failure

Unless I'm misunderstanding, that sounds like you're worried about the write hole, which RAIDZ doesn't have

[–] neidu2@feddit.nl 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It's mostly a matter of making sure any writes that are interrupted part way through (power failure, etc) are kept alive until the issue has been resolved. The raid controller caches everything until the write is complete.

It's not so much about disks being out of sync, but more about preventing data loss.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

RAIDZ is copy-on-write, and will notice and correct parity discrepancies if interrupted partway through. Doesn't help if you don't get at least one copy of the data written, but I'd take RAIDZ and a UPS over a hardware raid any day

[–] neidu2@feddit.nl 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

And at the scale I'm operating, I'll take hardware raid over raidz any day. I did some performance benchmarking when initially building these clusters, and beegfs really doesn't like raidz.

I use raidz at home, though.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 months ago

That's fair. My biggest concern with a hardware raid is the risk having trouble finding compatible hardware if/when a controller dies, but I expect that's not really an issue at larger scale; you probably buy hardware in bulk and have replacements on hand