Going from SSD back to RAID 6

[Patrick]

Interestingly enough, I have two Lenovo RD640 servers in the lab. They have fast processors (E5-2690 V2) and 4x 8GB RDIMMs installed.

The drive configuration is a LSI 9260-8i w/ 512MB RAM. The servers came configured in a 3 drive RAID 6 using 1TB Western Digital RE4 drives.

Windows Server 2012 R2 is installed so I am using a lot of GUI. I cannot believe how slow traditional disks feel. This is the first time using a Windows GUI with a non-SSD backed storage setup since 2012.

For those wondering, 67dba @ 3m during boot.

 

[Diavuno]

3 drive raid 6?
.... You sure about that?

 

[Patrick]

3 drive raid 6?
.... You sure about that?

Believe me I did a triple take. MSM, RAID card BIOS, inspect the physical hardware. There are surely three drives. If you look at the Lenovo RD640 configurator, 3 drive RAID 6 is an option. It yields about 1TB of space or 1 drive capacity.

 

[Diavuno]

I wonder why... A 3 way mirror seems more logical, maybe it can only migrate parity arrays from a parity array?