greg.freemyer@gmail.com wrote:
Linda, I simply think it is obvious raid6 is inherently safer than raid10.
== gory details ==
For the the situation without background data scrubbing:
let's say there is a "x" chance that a drive has undetected bad sectors.
=== At this point, why are we discussing that? I said my raid card does background scanning automatically, once a week (you can change it to a longer time, or you can have it do continuous scanning as well, as well as have it limit itself to 'X'% of the disk BandWidth). Someone mentioned that the mdraid w/linux has an option for doing the same -- so that doesn't appear to be at issue. What is at issue is whether or not it is safer to use RAID6 instead of RAID10+daily backups.
Note: (I scanned about 20 disks out of laptops about 3 weeks ago. One of them had a bad sector. 1 in 20 drives having an untapped bad sector sounds about right to me based on personal experience. My job calls for doing a sector by sector read of my clients drives, so I'm often the person that finds undetected media errors.)
Nearly all times I've run into bad sectors have been when I've used Desktop drives. Many Desktop drives are Enterprise drives w/remapped sectors. I.e. the vendor's tests indicated some need for sector remapping beyond "some" quality threshold. My own experience w/failures: more than once they were they were desktop drives. About 15 years ago, I didn't realize how much difference there was between desktop and enterprise level drives and made the mistake of ordering a batch for use w/a HW raid card. None of them would work -- because all of them had remapped sectors. A second data point was on an order of 26 drives. They were Enterprise drives, but the vendor didn't list or say that they were also 'pre-owned/remanufactured' drives. The LSI-HW raid card labeled 23 of them 'Bad' -- even though they were all Enterprise. A bit of research turned up that their original manufacture-date was over 3 years old. Even though they drives come w/5-year warranty, the OEM had(has) a registry of remanufactured drives and won't honor drives that have been 'remanufactured'. Of special note: I scanned the drives that were rejected. All came up "error-free", but 23 of them had too many remapped sectors that the HW raid card detects as soon as the drive spins up (i.e. it has to be using #defects -- insufficient time for it to have scanned the drive). In my testing I've found that drives with remappings, take longer to scan than drives w/no mappings -- the worst drives took 15% longer to complete a scan than those that didn't. Background scanning that *rewrites* the sector to the same physical media is _potentially_ hiding an issue that Google's statistical data shows has a significantly higher failure chance in the next month.
So if one member of a mirror dies, then there is x chance that the remaining member has at least one bad sector. At least as of a few years ago, mdraid would abort a mirror re-build as soon as it hit that bad sector.
I think for most of us we would agree that in the course of 10 years the odds of at least one drive failure in a mirror pair is effectively 100%, so the odds of a full raid failure are at least x, where I claim x is about 1 in 20.
---- It is recommended that consumer drives be replaced every 3 years, and enterprise in the 4-5 year time frame. If you are still using a 10 year- old drive, might as well play russian roulette. That's scary!
(yes there are ways force data loss for that bad sector and trigger a remap. After that the rebuild should complete, but you still have at least one sector of known data loss.)
With a 4 drive raid 6, you need the exact same sector on 2 of the 3 remaining drives to be bad.
So with a RAID10 (or RAID1), wouldn't you also need the exact same sector to be bad -- as well as in the backup image which is also on a RAID10? If you issue a format command or dd if=/dev/zero of=RAID6, or if you upgrade to a new OS, your machine may be unbootable. RAID6 won't do you any good. My suggestion was, in reponse to the OP -- who was going to have 1 new drive and how could he best use those two drives. best to use the two drives. with 1 extra drive -- use it for incremental backups.
Even if all 3 of the surviving member drives have a single bad sector, the odds of it being the exact same sector are in the billion to one odds range.
Same would hold for 2 separate RAID10's where the 2nd is used for incremental backups. Then lets talk about performance.
In the data scrubbing case:
For this I will assume the drives are "perfect" and have no hidden bad sectors.
Assume the odds of the second drive of a mirror pair failing before a rebuild can complete are y.
Thus the odds of a mirror pair totally failing is simply y (maybe one in 100,000).
For the raid 6 you need 2 additional drives to fail prior to the rebuild completing. Thus the odds are on the order of y^2. (Maybe one in 10,000,000,000)
Thus the odds of a raid6 failure are on the order of 1 in a billion, but the odds of a mirror failing are on the order of one in 100,000.
---- But the mirror is incrementally backed up on a 2nd RAID10. All of a sudden you are talking having at least 4 copies of the data -- all would have to fail. In my use case, I'd have to have 3 additional drives fail before rebuild is complete. How could that not be safer -- protected against soft-attacks that corrupt the data AND HW failures. I've used RAID6 and the performance just wasn't there. But aside from that benefit, I can restore my system from any day in the past 2 weeks and from more spaced apart images going back 3 months right now (Feb 1 level 0 backups). Another benefit of RAID10, say again for simplicity 4 data spindles, RAID1 only needs to write a 2nd disk. RAID6 needs to *read* the 5 other disks in the RAID6, and then do a write to at least 1 parity disk (maybe both). That has to hurt performance.... Also, FWIW, if I got a new disk, the new (usually larger) disk went to backups.. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org