Raid 10 vs raid5 performance on FreeNAS

[R0n1am]

Hi everyone, I am new here, and new to FreeNAS. My need for NAS Storage in my home is getting stronger recently, so I would like to ask this question, before that I just google it and search for answer I want.

The question is , How does raid 10 and raid 5 perform on FreeNas?

First of every thing, I know it depends on so many perspectives, but I would like to ask if some have use same computer config with both raid 5 and raid 10 on FreeNAS, in both read and write performance.

The reason why I ask this question is first I got limited budget for the NAS, I would build NAS by myself rather than buy a NAS from QNxP or SxxxxxxY. So I choose FreeNAS as my NAS' OS. However, I have read so much posts about raid performance on FreeNAS, so I really want some to help me clarify that.

Secondly, I would build my NAS with raid 5 or raid 10, which has many argument about these raid on the internet. But from internet I got different answer about this question. Someone said that raid 5 completely beat raid 10, someone said they are nearly same, someone said raid 10 is better.......

In my case, the size of raid 5 and raid 10 (even raid 6 ) is not much concerned me, as I would like to but 4 x 3TB HDD for my new NAS. 6TB or 9 TB is good at me as well. I have more concern on the performance between this two raid on FreeNAS, especially I wouldn't get any RAID card due to my budget. I don't want to have rebuild too painful if my NAS is down, and I heard that raid 5 rebuild would be bad if motherboard is dead,etc.

This question really confuse me, and I really want the answer based on FreeNAS, which I could find any in google.

I would really appreciate if someone here can help me. Many thanks!!!

 

[cyberjock]

Well, RAID5, RAID10, and RAID6 are all hardware RAID designs, so performance will depend on the hardware controller used.

If you want to talk about ZFS RAID, there's plenty of comments on how they compare in the forum if you want to do some hunting. I know I've talked about it PLENTY of times. As such, I don't really want to hash it out.. yet again.

 

[Richman]

Secondly, I would build my NAS with raid 5 or raid 10, which has many argument about these raid on the internet. But from internet I got different answer about this question. Someone said that raid 5 completely beat raid 10, someone said they are nearly same, someone said raid 10 is better.......

Doesn't sound like you even know the differences of the two..... or else you wouldn't have asked that question, or at least asked it in a different way.
Lets see .......... I will analyze
RAID 5 or 10 .......... some say nearly the same??? Hardly
RAID 5 requires min. of 3 disks where you wold loose 1/3 of the disk space to redundancy. With 5 disks you loose 1/5 to redundancy
RAID 10 (a striped mirror) you need an even number of disks, at least 4 and you will loos 1/2 to redundancy any way you look at it. Hardly the same. You can loos 2 disks in a RAID 10 with just 4 disks and retain your data but not always under all circumstance. Depeds on the combination of drive failures. Also RAID 10 is not as efficient on disk space but if one was considering RAID 10, most will tell you that RAID 6 is a better choice and more efficient on disk space.

Well, RAID5, RAID10, and RAID6 are all hardware RAID designs, so performance will depend on the hardware controller used.

Doesn't FreeNAS do a software version of RAID 5, RAID 6 or RAID 10 ?

I don't really want to hash it out.. yet again.

Maybe 1/2 a hash .......... huh, huh? Or 1/4 of a hash :D

 

[TFS_Rein]

From a performance perspective, RAID 10 will win on writes vs raid5 and Definitely on raid 6 due to the way 10 is setup. It just needs to mirror all data, no parity calculation needed. This is also the reason 10 wins on rebuilds after a disk failure as well.

From a reliability perspective... it depends on the number of disks, how they are setup, and which disks fail. Raid 5/6 can have any one/two disks fail. Raid 10 could have 1-x number of disks fail depending on how it's mirrored and number of disks in the array.

Raid 5 almost shouldn't be used anymore due to the size of todays disks. a multi-terabyte raid 5 array will take days to rebuild, and it is very stressful on the disks so you better hope you don't lose another drive (all data would be gone). Raid 6 is better because you can lose any two disks, instead of just one. It has a bigger write penalty though because the parity calculations are more complicated.


If you need the best performance, go RAID 10. If you want to balance between reliability,space and don't need super fast writes, go raid 6.
Ignore RAID 5 at the array size you're talking about.


I'm not saying they are equal, but as far as redundancy goes they are, For your reference:
hardware RAID-------ZFS Raid
Raid 5 = RaidZ
Raid 6 = RaidZ2
Raid10 = Striped Mirror

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/187502-type-of-raid-is-best