8 disk raidz2 vs raidz1 stripped

[fahadshery]

Hi all,

I have 8 Enterprise 12 Gbs HDDs.
I am thinking to make either a pool of:

1. 1 x raidz2 (8 drives in 1 vdev)
2. 2 x raidz1 stripped (4 x raidz1, 4 x raidz1 i.e. 2 vdevs)

I will be hosting nextcloud, gitlab, website/blog data, media (videos/pictures) on this.
I was wondering which option is most suitable for this use case?

Obviously, both options will loose 2 drives to parity.

thanks

 

[QonoS]

Generally it depends on your risk appetite.

"1" offers more redundancy, while "2" comes with higher performance.

How many user do you plan?

 

[fahadshery]

Generally it depends on your risk appetite.

Yes, and the data is fairly important. i.e. family media, blog, nextcloud

"1" offers more redundancy, while "2" comes with higher performance.

That's why I am torn between the two options. Yes, I am loosing 2 drives in both cases but I think nextcloud would benefit from a better performance?

How many user do you plan?

Not more than 10 really.

 

[QonoS]

Imho go with option "2" and do regular backups.

If you really need performance think about getting SSDs in mirrored configuration for performance hungry parts.

 

[pschatz100]

You didn't say anything about what you will actually be doing, or what your hardware is. However, if all you are doing is hosting and serving files over 1 Gb network, then performance of your data pool is not going to be an issue. Use one RaidZ2 for maximum resiliency of your pool.

Don't forget that RaidZ2 is not a replacement for a good backup strategy. You still need backups.

 

[sretalla]

I doubt you will notice a performance difference with Option 2 compared to option 1.

What you will notice is if you have a drive failed and a second drive fails in the same VDEV with RAIDZ1.

See the comparison between your scenarios below (red cells are total pool loss, yellow cells are degraded pool):

As you can see, with RAIDZ2 you have a 100% chance of pool survival in the case of 2 disk failure, but you have a 42% chance (24 in 52) that you lose your pool completely with 2 disks failing in a dual RAIDZ1 setup.

The gamble is yours.