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Best performance drive setup for IPS: 1 SSD or 2 SSDs in RAID 0?


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I want a faster IPS community. The forum is the most used IPS feature of my website, with short data being read and written to MySQL DB.

As long as the data that is written and read is not big, 2 SSDs in RAID 0 are going to be faster then 1 SSD?

I fear that the latency of 2 SSDs in RAID 0 could be higher than for only 1 SSD, and for small data transactions, 1 SSD could perform better than 2 SSDs in RAID 0.

Has anyone tried these setups?

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My preference would be Raid 1 SSD, there is no need to for raid 0, the ssd drives (if you use a good one) are more than fast enough, doing raid 0 would be a waste. If you are not worried about drive failure then a single ssd is fine, but I like redundancy.

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My preference would be Raid 1 SSD, there is no need to for raid 0, the ssd drives (if you use a good one) are more than fast enough, doing raid 0 would be a waste. If you are not worried about drive failure then a single ssd is fine, but I like redundancy.

Agree, can't recommend RAID0 for production unless you are 100% happy with losing that data at any moment.

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its not so much a reliability issue as it is the intricacies of raid 0.

all it takes, in raid 0, is for 1 of the 2 drives to have an issue and everything is lost. No date on EITHER drive is any good.

with raid 1 (or if you had $$ 1+0, etc) one could fail and you would probably not even know it.

then replacement hot swapped in and system keeps running while array resyncing.

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Are SSDs not reliable yet? I see that most answers have concerns about SSD failure. I thought that today's SSDs were better than HDDs in terms of hardware quality.

Yes they are very good, as long as you use a good one, however you should always have redundancy no matter what drive type you have.

I don't agree with AlexJ though, you should not use a single drive imo.

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you should always have redundancy no matter what drive type you have.

this,

because CRAP HAPPENS !!

some are willing to lose the redundancy for the speed and have another drive with backups in the machine to quickly restore from, it all depends on your acceptance level of downtime.

me, well if it can go wrong it WILL go wrong for me so I run raid 1. sadly not ssd due to $$ but I have had a new enterprise drive have issues and it was hot swapped with no noticeable loss of speed.

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As many others have already said, simply upgrading to an ssd will be sufficient for your needs of performance. Raid 1 is suggested for redundancy value, not the increase in performance value because you likely won't reach a usage point where it actually makes a difference.

Speaking in general, you also should consider how the data is being used when considering raid types. If you write all the time, raid 0 will be twice better than raid1 or no raid, but if you only read all the time, raid 0 will be no better than raid 1. And a forum would clearly have more reads than writes. For simplified example, as I write this one post, I looked at the 10 posts above. So, there was already a 10x more read than write. Caches and lot of things change their ratios, but it's rare for something to need more writes than reads, thus demanding the performance of a raid 0 above alternatives.

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Also, for what it's worth, please remember that RAID is not a backup solution.

RAID offers redundancy and can keep your server online in the event that one of your drives fail, and on top of that it can save you from any potential data loss, but it's not guaranteed to do so, and in the event where the worst happens please be sure you're keeping off-site backups somewhere safe. For the data you care about anyways (a key emphasis on database backups).

I have a software RAID 1 2x128GB SSD setup on my servers, combined with a hardware RAID 5 standard disk array for storage, and it works wonderfully.

If you want to squeeze some more performance out of your SSD's, don't forget to optimize things on the software layer, it's not just about the hardware.

https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization

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