Config for my new Repo

[JamesMcG]

Looking for some advice on setting up my new repository. Currently Veeam running on a VM targeting an old EqualLogic over iSCSI. I'm replacing it with a physical Dell R630 running Windows 2019, and a SuperMicro JBOD populated with 10TB HGST disks (15). I'm torn on a few things.

RAID level, what should I use? 6, 10, 60?

ReFS for the filesystem right? Seems to be the most recommended right now.

I've been doing a bit of NAS backup (small amount of NFS). It's recommended to go full licensed MSSQL when doing NAS backups, so far my Express edition is handling it well. Should I still go ahead and buy MSSQL? If I don't know is there an easy upgrade path in the future if I need to?

[soncscy]

Hey James,

As far as I know, NAS Backup isn't using Sql -- at least, on my clients servers doing non-trivial NAS backups (tens of millions), they're not having to touch their SQL DB at all, nor have the DBAs complained. Based on what I see for the description of a NAS backup file, the SQL DB itself is not relevant at all.

We had good luck with RAID 10 as it doesn't look like NAS backup is doing much fancy with its backups, but I would love to know what the official recommendation is.

[nitramd]

Hello James.

Assuming using all 15 disks:
RAID 6 would give you ~130TB of raw capacity; minimum of 4 disks. This RAID level has great read speeds and mediocre write speeds.

RAID 10 would give you 75TB of raw capacity; minimum of 4 disks. This RAID level has good read speeds and very good write speeds.

RAID 60 yields ~110TB of raw capacity; minimum of 8 disks. Not certain of the performance but it's very expensive to implement; it's usually described as overkill.

In simple terms, use RAID 6 for capacity and RAID 10 for speed (frequently used for highly transactional databases).

Don't forget to set up a Global Spare disk while creating your array; you'll then have 14 usable disks.

Good luck.

[JamesMcG]

Thanks for the tip. In the end I'm going RAID6. If I set two hot spares (as I did), then RAID 10 is limited to a drive group of only 6 disks (since it can't be uneven number of 7). So I'd end up with 2x6 disk drive groups, and 4 hot spares. Really inefficient! Besides the ancient Equal Logic over 1Gb iSCSI is getting it done for us, so I'm not too worried about RAID6 write speeds.