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I am thinking about moving my 2 x 2TB drive software (mdadm) RAID 1 to a RAID 10 setup. I have been reading online and it looks like RAID 10 has good performance and redundancy.

I currently have the Intel D525MW motherboard which has an Intel Atom D525 CPU, 3GB RAM and an 80GB 2.5" hard drive which has Ubuntu Server installed. My 2 x 2TB Western Digital green drives are connected to a cheap SATA card and are in software RAID 1 using mdadm.

What would the performance differences be when using 4 x 2TB WD green hard drives in RAID 10. Also bear in mind I will be using software RAID (mdadm) on an Intel Atom D525, which is a dual core and has 4 threads.

my current raid 1 setup

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What will you be using this for? A NAS, a web server, etc.? – sblair Aug 19 '11 at 19:48
This will be used as a NAS – Dean Perry Aug 19 '11 at 23:08
In that case, this might be a duplicate of How to setup a RAID for a fileserver?. There are a lot of options beyond Ubuntu and RAID, and ZFS is my personal favourite :p I have a 4x2TB NAS running FreeNAS with RAID-Z1, using a 330 Atom (slightly older and slower than yours) and I've never seen CPU usage over 30%. – sblair Aug 19 '11 at 23:30
Hmm interesting. I will have a look at that. Is ZFS easy to expand in the future? And how many GBs would I lose? How much storage space do you have with your 4x2TB hard drives? – Dean Perry Aug 20 '11 at 17:11
5.18TB of usable space - similar to RAID 5. Expanding with ZFS is tricky at the moment (it should be improved in the future though). It depends what you want to do. You can add more vdevs to a zpool, and you can gradually replace drives in RAID-Z with larger drives. But you can't add drives to a vdev. In other words, you can do this, but can't do this. – sblair Aug 20 '11 at 22:22
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closed as too localized by techie007, sblair, Breakthrough, Tom Wijsman, Nifle Aug 22 '11 at 11:52

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