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We have some servers that provide a web server with about 4,000 files with 1GB of each.

Always have a problem on bandwidth that server can’t produce on more than 800Mbps and it’s from the read speed problem on disks (By disks monitor graph).

Now we want to increase speed on most performance, and the amount of servers and disks is not important.

In the past we used RAID 6 for parity and speed but always have problem on speed.

Some sites say RAID 1 will just support 2 disk maximum.

So…

  • If we use RAID 1 with 8 disk of 4TB , then we have 8x more read speed ?
  • Is the RAID 1 the best choice for most speed? Is there any other type that better than RAID 1 for just speed?
  • We use RAID 6 in past and have read access limited to about 400 concurrent access files , it will be increase RAID 1 ?

EDIT

For anyone that reach this question, as one of comments (@EugenRieck) said , The main problem was not solved even with 24 Hard disk in raid 10, the problem exactly from concurrent read access files that reach the HDD limit . on final We solve it by replacing HDD to SSD.

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  • If it is only 4TB, then why not use al-cheapo SSDs ?
    – Eugen Rieck
    Dec 4, 2019 at 14:33
  • @EugenRieck We have many 4TB disks in our warehouse.
    – Root
    Dec 4, 2019 at 14:34
  • If money's not important, why not get a server with 4TB of RAM and push everything from cache?
    – mtak
    Dec 4, 2019 at 14:35
  • @mtak we have about 20 pcs of idle server with about 160 pcs of 4TB idle disks.
    – Root
    Dec 4, 2019 at 14:36
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    No matter how much of a wrong solution you throw at a problem, it will still not solve the root cause. This root cause is access time on the spinning disks. You might be able to get a bit more out by using different RAID levels or other tricks, but it won't solve the root cause: Rotating disks are not good for concurrent streams.
    – Eugen Rieck
    Dec 4, 2019 at 14:41

1 Answer 1

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As has been said above, faster disks will get a better improvement than any RAID setup.
But to answer the questions:

If we use RAID 1 with 8 disk of 4TB , then we have 8x more read speed

Yes, but RAID 1 (mirroring) takes 2 disks. With 8 disks you will have 8X increase in read speed but 50% capacity when using RAID 10. RAID 10 is a stripe of mirrors:

enter image description here

Is the RAID 1 the best choice for most speed? Is there any other type that better than RAID 1 for just speed?

Speed is achieved by striping, the more the better (limited by the disk controller). The best RAID method that can give a good amount of parallelism with many disks is the RAID 10.

The number of disks that can be added here is not unlimited, and with expansion the time will come to have a look at Nested RAID levels or at expensive disk vaults.

We use RAID 6 in past and have read access limited to about 400 concurrent access files, it will be increased in RAID 1 ?

With N-disk RAID 6, the read speed is (N-2) times faster than the speed of a single drive.

With RAID 10 the read speed will be N times faster. RAID 10 is still the best on speed.

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  • Thanks, But what about the concurrent access files on RAID 1 vs RAID 10 ? which one have more read concurrent access files ?
    – Root
    Dec 8, 2019 at 13:55
  • I try to achieve the highest speed and more concurrent access files, is RAID1 is better than RAID 10 on this situation ?
    – Root
    Dec 8, 2019 at 14:06
  • RAID 1 and RAID 10 are the same for performance, as RAID 10 just multiplies the number of RAID 1 pairs. RAID 10 stands for RAID 1-0 meaning (RAID 1)0, for RAID 0 stripping applied to multiple RAID 1 mirrors.
    – harrymc
    Dec 8, 2019 at 15:51

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