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RAID stripe starwind drives

Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2024 4:28 pm
by chell
Hi All
I'm after any recommendations on when/where to do RAID.
I'm setting up a two node cluster. Instead of running a raid stripe on each node, I was thinking of creating a starwind device for each drive and then RAID striping them all into one drive.
The advantage of RAID striping the starwind devices instead of striping the drives on the node, is when a single drive goes down, only that one drive is sourced from the other node. The rest of the drives are still available locally, where doing a stripe RAID at the node would result in the node going offline for a single drive failure.
Am I on the right track or is there a better way?

Re: RAID stripe starwind drives

Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2024 5:15 pm
by yaroslav (staff)
Thanks for your question.
StarWind VSAN does not do striping, it does mirroring.
RAID grants local data redundancy. It also allows you to address the storage failures (sure if addressed timely) without doing full synchronization of your HA device.
Please see the recommended RAID configurations here https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware. ... ssd-disks/
Speaking of striping StarWind HA volumes this might result in performance drops due to potential overheads and need for using the software RAID that, in turn, may be quite tricky to set up. Also, you can always turn on caching on the hardware RAID (if there is a battery module there).

To sum up, I'd rather go with StarWind HA devices on the physical RAID array if possible. If there is no possibility of the hardware RAID, try software RAID (e.g., MDADM in CVM or MS StoarageSpaces), and check if its performance alone is OK.