Slashdot Mirror
RAID's Days May Be Numbered
storagedude sends in an article claiming that RAID is nearing the end of the line because of soaring rebuild times and the growing risk of data loss. "The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology's limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future — and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable. The bottom line is this: Disk density has increased far more than performance and hard error rates haven't changed much, creating much greater RAID rebuild times and a much higher risk of data loss. In short, it's a scenario that will eventually require a solution, if not a whole new way of storing and protecting data."
Now that's a stupid article.
It basically says, you can't read a harddisk more than X times before you get an error on some sector, so RAID is dead. That's a logical nonsequitur. RAID is a generic technology that also applies to flash memory cards, USB sticks, anything you can store data on basically. The base technique says "given this reliability, you can up the reliability if you add some redundancy". There's no link to harddisks other than that that's what they're used for right now.
Disclaimer: I work for a storage vendor.
> FTA: The real fix must be based on new technology such as OSD, where the disk knows what is stored on it and only has to read and write the objects being managed, not the whole device
OSD doesn't change anything. The disk has failed. How has OSD helped?
> FTA: or something like declustered RAID
Just skimming that document it seems to claim: only reconstruct data, not white space, and use a parity scheme that limits damage. Enterprise arrays that have native filesystem virtualisation (WAFL for example) already do this. RAID 6 arrays do this.
Lets recap. Physical devices including SSDs will fail. You need to be able to recover from failure. The failure could be as bad as the entire physical device failing, or as bad as a single sector being unreadable. In the former case a RAID reconstruct will recover the data but you'll hit RAID recovery errors due to the raw amount of data that needs to be recovered. Enterprise arrays mitigate the risk of recovery errors by using RAID 6. They could even recover the data from a DR mirrored system as part of the recovery scheme.
And when RAID 6 has a high enough risk that it's worth expanding the scheme everyone will start switching from double parity schemes to triple parity schemes since their much less expensive in terms of spindle count than RAID 6+1.
One assumption is, at some point in the future, reconstructions will be a continual occurring background task just like any other background task that enterprise arrays handle. As long as there is enough resiliency and performance isn't impacted then it doesn't matter if a disk is being rebuilt.
The article assumes that when within a RAID5 array a drive encounters a single sector failure (the most common failure scenario), an entire disk has to go offline, be replaced and rebuilt.
That is utter nonsense, of course. All that's needed is to rebuild a single affected stripe of the array to a spare disk. (You do have spares in your RAID setups, right?)
As soon as the single stripe is rebuilt, the whole array is again in a fully redundant state again - although the redundancy is spread across the drive with a bad sector and the spare.
Even better, modern drives have internal sector remapping tables and when a bad sector occurs, all the array has to do is to read the other disks, calculate the sector, and WRITE it back to the FAILED drive.
The drive will remap the sector, replace it with a good one, and tada, we have a well working array again. In fact, this is exactly what Linux's MD RAID5 driver does, so it's not just a theory.
Catastrophic whole-drive failures (head crash, etc) do happen, too. And there the article would have a point - you need to rebuild the whole array. But then - these are by a couple orders of magnitude less frequent than simple data errors. So no reason to worry again.
*sigh*
I admit I haven't RTFA, but I don't quite get your statement of "And name 3 people you know who run raid-5 on their personal PCs, and I'll show you 3 guys who can't afford an SSD drive.", I can't see how an SSD is a replacement for a raid-5 array. Everyone I know who uses a raid-5 uses it for large amounts of storage with a basic level of protection against data loss. I could justify replacing a raid-0 set up with a SSD.
That said I definitely couldn't afford an SSD that would be able to replace the raid-5 in my pc (4x500GB usable space of 1.34TB), the largest SSD listed on ebuyer.com are 250GB @ £360 each, I would need 8 to match my raid 5 setup which is £2880 which is probably enough to build 2 reasonable machines both with a 1.34TB raid-5 using normal HDDs.
And name 3 people you know who run raid-5 on their personal PCs, and I'll show you 3 guys who can't afford an SSD drive.
Huh ? That's like saying show me 3 people who have a nice pair of running shoes and I'll show you 3 guys who can't afford a car.
Enterprise arrays are also very VERY different from what most people know as RAID. Smart controllers, smart drive cages, drives that are a magnitude better than the consumer grade garbage.
The Summary talks about how speed has not kept up with capacity, Yes that is correct in the low grade consumer junk. Enterprise server class RAID drives are a different story. The 15,000 RPM drives I have in my RAID 50 array here on the Database server are insanely fast. Plus server class drives are not silly unstable capacities like 1Tb or 1.5Tb they area "OMG small" 300gb size but are stable as a rock.
So I guess the question is, Is the summary talking about RAID on junk drives or RAID on real drives?
Raid when used for protecting your computer will not protect your data it just makes your system able to tolerate hard drive failure.
... Which will protect my data when a drive fails.
RAID-5 means that I can have 3x500GB drives with 1GB of space, and not have the same worry (total loss of data) that I would if a 1x1TB drive failed.
We know it doesn't replace backup. We know it doesn't protect against theft, fire, malicious data destruction etc etc. You do realise who you're talking to, don't you? This is an IT article on Slashdot. Telling people on this thread that RAID isn't a replacement for regular backups is like telling a mechanic that a stick of celery is not a suitable replacement for a piston.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/