SSD - redundand storage, or not?
SSD - redundand storage, or not?
With SSD storage, what what your thoughts on redundant storage devices (e.g RAID1), is it a waste, a nice to have or a must?
what are your experiences and thoughts on this ?
Appreciate your opinion, as I will probably move from HDD to SSD.
I'm quite disappointed by most comments so far talking about RAID and data loss. That is not what RAID is for at all.
RAID is for uptime/availability. When a drive fails, the system will keep running and working. For companies, that would lose thousands of currency per hour with a downtime, this is super important that the system keeps running. At home, it's convenience that you can order a new drive and replace without hours of setting up and copying before you can watch the next episode again.
Backups are against data loss. If a single drive fails, a RAID fails or you get some encryption malware or an employee destroys stuff on purpose, then everything is destroyed. It doesn't matter if it was a single, any RAID, HDD or SSD. You order a new drive, make a new volume and restore the data from your backup.
Well, more specifically it is protecting against a specific form of data loss, which is hardware failure. A good practice if you're able is to have RAID and an offsite/cloud backup solution.
But if you don't, don't feel terrible. When the OVH datacentre had a fire, I lost my server there. But so did a lot of businesses. You'd be amazed at how many had no backup and were demanding that OVH somehow pry their smouldering drives from what remained of the datacentre wing and salvage all the data.
If you care about your data, you want a backup that is off-site. Cloud backup is quite inexpensive these days.
I also thought that way in the beginning, but then disaster recovery is too inconvenient and will take weeks to set everything to your standards, while with raid you just replace the drive and go
Not to mention that "temporary" directory that was supposed to last one week and wasn't included in the backup script, but then happened to last several months holding important files
I have to agree, RAID has only one purpose - keep your data/ storage operating during a disk failure. Does not matter which RAID level or SW. Thank god you mentioned it before.
There can be benefits in addition depending on RAID level and layout, for example read & write speed or more IOP/s than an individual disk (either SSD or HDD). However, the main purpose is still to eliminate a single disk as a single point of failure!
Back to topic - if you have a strong requirement to run your services which (rely) on the SSD storage, even if a disk fails - then SSD Raid yes.
For example.: I have s server running productive instances of Seafile, Gitea, and some minor services. I use them for business. Therefore those services have to be available, even if one disk fails. I cannot wait to restore a backup, wait for a a replacement disk and tell a client, Hey, sorry my server disk failed” (unprofessional)
For protection against data loss - backups: one local on another NAS, one in the cloud. 👌🏼
SSD's are cheap nowadays. They're also much more reliable than HDD's. That said, when they fail it's usually catastrophic failure with total data loss.
If your data that's important to you, I would still use redundant storage. Especially since the cost is minimal.
The cheaper SSDs can be very failure-prone though. I actually use second-hand spinning disks in my server and I have a whole bunch of spares waiting in the wings. I am still backed up though.
I’ve had SSDs go bad. So if it’s something you really care about I’d approach it the same as hard disks.
At least with spinners you often get enough advanced warning of impending doom via SMART. Critical stuff I am still keeping on spinning disks backed up to tape and a privacy-respecting cloud service.
Depends on how attached you are on your data, if you have a backup, if you can do without the data created between backup cycles and how long you can wait for the restore to finish.
Everything will fail. For me, everything on single disk is expendable or backupped and can be done without when I loose a day/week of data. Everything else is on raid 1 (hdd) and in a backup schedule (external hdd).
It depends how valuable your data is, what backup strategy you have, and how long you're prepared to wait to get access to your data when a drive fails.
Personally if/when I migrate my main dataset to SSD, I'll stick with RAIDZ2/RAID6.
Maybe as a side note: a mirror raid does not only provide data redundancy but also improves read speeds. For SATA limited SSDs this can be interesting.
SATA SSDs don't really make sense nowadays anymore. Last time I checked, they cost the same and are actually the exact same thing, except SATA SSDs have a big, mostly empty, plastic case around them and use a slow connector
(just to add, and clarify - no more than 2 disks)
As someone else has pointed out, it really depends on your use case. Although I personally keep my drives (SSD & HDD) in a redundant RAID configuration as my data is largely mission-critical.
Ask you a single question: will you break a sweat of you lose your data?
If the answer is anything but a clear, immediate "NO", go with raid even on SSDs.
Like others said: it depends.
In my opinion the most important thing to have is an off-site backup. If you have achvieved that, it's only a matter of how long you are willing to wait for the recovery. If your answer is something like "it cannot wait" then you should go with at least raid 1 and consider additional meausres for the event when your whole array fails.
Raid5 (well raidz1) has saved my ass multiple times. Just dont forget to also raid your efi and swap partitions
I think it depends on the usage actually. Will there be lots of read and writes? SSDs are quite reliable nowadays.