LSI 9260-8i w/ 6 256gb SSDs - RAID 5, 6, 10, or bad idea overall?
- by Michael Pearson
We're provisioning a new production server for our reasonably busy website. Our choice of host have available a 6 drive configuration with a LSI 9260-8i card.
My initial thought was to fill all six bays with SSDs (Intel 520 256gb) and set them up in RAID. Good, bad, or terrible idea?
Can the card handle it? Should we be using RAID 5, 6 or 10? This would be the first time the provider have filled all six slots for this rackmount with SSDs, so they're a bit hesitant. I'm wondering if somebody else with this card has done something similar in a production environment.
We do about 43gb of writes per day and currently use about 300gb of storage. The server acts as webserver, database, and image store for approx 1 million files. The plan is to underprovision the SSDs by approximately 10% to 20% to increase their overall lifespan & performance.
The fallback option is 2x480gb SSDs in RAID 1 and another 2x1TB HDDs in RAID 1.
The motivation behind this is that the server rental cost difference between 2xSSDs and 6xSSDs is minimal (compared to the overall cost of the rental). We do not have any special high-IOPs requirements. However, if the configuration is known to work, I don't see a good reason to not use it and not have to worry about having separate 'fast and small' and 'slow and large' disks.
