Hi guys I just got 4 SSDs for my FreeNAS box. This server is only used to serve a single iSCSI extent to my Citrix XenServer pool and was wondering if I should setup them up in a RAIDZ or a RAID 1+0 configuration.
This isn't used for anything in production, just for my test lab so I'm not sure which one is going to be better in this scenario. Will I see a major difference in speed or reliability?
Currently the server has three 500GB Western Digital Blue drives and it's dog slow when I deploy a new version of our software on it, hence the upgrade.
Best Answer
I'm not really all that familiar, but this blog here seems like a good writeup.
http://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z
Now... the blogger makes the point, you make a tradeoff and its probably speed vs. capacity. Now, he compares RAIDZ to RAID5, but you're comparing it 1+0 which gives you N/2 for capacity. I would assume that RAID-Z gets better recovery performance than RAID5, but still won't outperform RAID10. Since you have SSDs which should be bloody fast... I would go for RAIDZ, but be sure to familiarize myself with the scenarios in which it is degraded or rebuilding before putting into production.