[NBLUG/talk] SSD failure rates and RAID

[Kyle Rankin]

On Sat, Dec 05, 2015 at 11:07:02AM -0800, Omar Eljumaily wrote:
> I'm putting together a new server and wondering if I should bother
> with RAID.  I'm thinking that SSD failure rates are down to below 1%
> per year, probably around the same as or even lower than motherboard
> and power supply failure rates.  Am I just creating more complexity
> by using RAID?
> 
> As an alternative for backup/redundancy, I'm thinking of having a
> standby server that gets mirrored every few minutes.  That would
> give me redundancy for the entire system, not just the disk.
> 
> Anybody have any experience/thoughts on this?  The server I'm
> thinking of will be using two 2 TB ssds and the backup server one 4
> gb hard drive.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Omar
> 
> 

It comes down to whether you want/need this server to keep running
immediately after a hard drive failure. If so, then you need RAID. If you
are fine with the server being down for a few hours or a day if the hard
drive dies (or the cable or SATA port fails), then whether you use RAID is
up to you, but the point of RAID is to ensure that in the event of a hard
drive failure the system doesn't immediately crash.

RAID is NOT backup (to test this theory, delete a file on your RAID array and
try to restore it without a backup) so no matter whether you choose RAID or
not you need some sort of backup scheme to protect against deleted files,
file system corruption, and all of the other threats to your data, at least
if you do want to preserve the data on that server.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
The North Bay Linux Users' Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org