Hi there.

 

i assume this is a question that has been asked various times before but I would also guess different hardware will get a different response.

 

i have a dual socket 2011 supermicro server with a flash backed hardware raid card and fully populated with 4tb disks.

 

what I have done is created a handful of 8tb 2 disks stripes and Unraid does detect them as single disks.

 

is there any reason why I couldn’t use these as a solution to achieve better read/write speeds as long as I still keep the dual parity disks there too.

 

i obviously realise that a disk failure will take out both disks on that stripe but with the dual parity would this really be an issue??

 

i have 12 disks at the moment but soon as I see a decent 24bay chassis come up I will be changing it over and adding more disks. I also plan on a separate controller for the future disks to spread out the bandwidth across a second pci express slot.

 

just looking for some constructive experience.

 

thanks.

Remember that you are at the mercy of one piece of hardware-- that RAID card.   What do you do if it fails...  If I understand you correctly, you have setup a number of two disks RAID0 arrays.  Yes if one of the disks in those arrays happens to fail, you can recover that pair by rebuilding from parity.  If that RAID card fails, you could easily lose all of the data on all of the drives.  You need a plan to address that failure scenario. 

I have already thought of this and have ordered a spare p420 from eBay and as far as I can tell the virtual disk config is held on the drive not the controller as after a recent card firmware update the configuration from the card was dropped and was able to reimport the foreign config and back running in a few minutes.