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Is it safe to setup raid 10 with 6 standard desktop drives? So just regular 7200 rpm sata 3 disks? I understand that these disks might fail sooner than enterprise storage disks, but whatother things should I be aware of?

user85116
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4 Answers4

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Enterprise disks won't last longer, they are of comparable quality. Only the feature-set and interfaces are different.

Yes, it is safe to set up RAID10 with 6 disks. The only situation when you have to watch out is RAID5 with disks with low non-recoverable read error rate and high capacity (Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009). It may work all right with Linux MD RAID (as Linux is quite persistent with re-trying to get data off the disk), but I wouldn't risk with hardware RAID or faux-hardware RAID.

Alicja Kario
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Yes, it is safe.

Remember that the original meaning of RAID was "redundant array of inexpensive disks". That did not fit some vendors so it was changed to "redundant array of independent disks".

Their disks were not cheap...

Nils
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One of the other issues you may run into is IOPS. Desktop drives may not support as much throughput as Enterprise drives. Depending on vendor the Enterprise drives come with a 5 year warranty whereas Desktop drives may come with "only" 3 years or some such.

As far as interfaces go, SATA is SATA whether it's consumer or enterprise class drive.

If this is for a business other than your own you may want to advise the client that you recommend enterprise drives but they can settle for consumer grade drives to save some money.

Reality Extractor
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Posting in case others have similar question:

67TB using Commodity Off The Shelf (COTS) SATA controllers, consumer 1.5TB x 45 HDDs & softRAID. Truly inspiring.

Petabytes on a budget:How to build cheap cloud storage

jsmith
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