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Is RAID still needed? (programming.dev)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I'd say "old" RAID could be dead if you have proper backups and have the ability to replace a defect drive fast in the case uptime is crucial. But there's also modern RAID like btrfs and zfs that also can repair corrupted filed, caused by bitrot for example. Old RAID can't do that also hardware based RAID couldn't either when I used it until years ago. Maybe that changed but I don't see the point of hardware based RAID in most cases anymore

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Hardware raid can 100% do any of the above tasks, and has always been able to do them. You need an actual raid card, not some half assed baked in mobo raid.

Hardware RAID was doing all of the above before software RAID was available to end users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

But AFAIK real RAID don't perform CRC, thy rely on drive to report bad sector. In case if on one drive data got corrupted, it would return data from one drive or another. In case of mirroring. If we aren't talking about RAID 6 I think.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I wonder how to detect real raid card from simple switch? I guess to look at price and it should be really high?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Most discrete raid cards will do the job, but look for on card caching and a battery for "quality."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

AFAIK only officially supported RAID modes in BTRFS are RAID0 and RAID1.

RAID56 is officially considered unstable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Raid56 is a risky one in more filesystem than just btrfd though, but if you have a ups as backup, you should be fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

UPS won't protect from Kernel Panic, sadly

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

True

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

What about dm-raid? Is it still risky? I guess so, because it's separate devices. So any software raid with 5-6 would be problematic?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'd say "old" RAID could be dead if you have proper backups and have the ability to replace a defect drive fast in the case uptime is crucial.

RAID and backups serve different purposes. Backups are to prevent data loss, RAID is to prevent downtime in case of hardware failure. They are not interchangeable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Different purposes true, but not exclusively. RAID only has effect on drive failure specifically. If downtime is intolerable then it's not the right solution to just use RAID and you should look into total redundancy of the hardware and more. It also comes with performance bottlenecks or improvements depending on the setup, that's another factor to take into account. So in the end it really depends on your requirements and backups can actually serve as an alternative, depending on your setup and as long as it meets your RTO