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."

Comments

Bogus outdated thinking

[twisteddk]

The author says it himself in the article:

"And running software RAID-5 or RAID-6 equivalent does not address the underlying issues with the drive. Yes, you could mirror to get out of the disk reliability penalty box, but that does not address the cost issue."

but he hasn't adressed the fact that today you get 100 times as much diskspace for the same cost as you did 10 years ago when cost was a factor. In real life cost isn't a factor when it comes to datastorage, simply because it's really low in real life projects, as compared to the other costs in a project requiring storage. So if you want the reliability you go get a mirror. Drivespace is dirt cheap.

As for the rebuildtimes, fine, go buy FASTER drives. I dont see the problem. HP and many other vendors have long been trying to sell combined raid soltions (like the EVA) where you mix high storage with high performance drives (like SSD vs. SATA).

The only real argument for the validity of this article is the personal use of drives/storage. 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.

Re:Worked-around a Long Time Ago

[Anonymous Coward]

But really none of that should be necessary for the general case. Storing data in different physical locations is a good but entirely unrelated issue- the main problem of disk reliability is still very much in need of a solution. That's pretty much the point of the article: You can come up with various solutions which move the problem around, give multiple fallbacks for when something goes wrong.. but there's still the problem of things going wrong in the first place. I shouldn't need to use 12 separate disks spread across the globe just for basic reliability / redundancy

RAID concept is fine, it's that HDs are too big

[trims]

As others have mentioned, this is something that is discussed on the ZFS mailing lists frequently.

For more info there, check out the digest for zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org

and, in particular, check out Richard Elling's blog

(Disclaimer: I work for Sun, but not in the ZFS group)

The fundamental problem here isn't the RAID concept, is that the throughput and access times of spinning rust haven't changed much in 30 years. Fundamentally, today's hard drive is no more than 100 times as fast (both in throughput and latency) than a 1980s one, while it holds well over 1 million times more.

ZFS (and other advanced filesystems) will now do partial reconstruction of a failed drive (that is, they don't have to bit copy the entire drive, only the parts which are used), which helps. But there are still problems. ZFS's pathological case results in rebuild times of 2-3 WEEKS for a 1TB drive in a RAID-Z (similar to RAID-5). It's all due to the horribly small throughput, maximum IOPs, and latency of the hard drive.

SSDs, on the other hand, are no where near the problem. They've got considerably more throughput than a hard drive, and, more importantly, THOUSANDS of times better IOPS. Frankly, more than any other reason, I expect the significant IOPS of the SSD to signal the death knell of HDs in the next decade. By 2020, expect HDs to be gone from everything, even in places where HDs still have better GB/$. The rebuild rates and maintenance of HDs simply can't compete with flash.

Note: IOPS = I/O Per Second, or the number of read/write operations (irregardless of size) which a disk can service. HDs top out around 350, consumer SSDs do under 10,000, and high-end SSDs can do up to 100,000.

-Erik