{"id":339,"date":"2014-12-20T12:30:51","date_gmt":"2014-12-20T19:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ioflood.com\/?p=339"},"modified":"2023-08-11T17:15:30","modified_gmt":"2023-08-12T00:15:30","slug":"cloudflare-agrees-disk-performance-is-improved-when-you-get-rid-of-hardware-raid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/cloudflare-agrees-disk-performance-is-improved-when-you-get-rid-of-hardware-raid\/","title":{"rendered":"CloudFlare agrees: Disk performance is improved when you get rid of hardware raid"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"width: 415px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" title=\"Storage by wwward0\" src=\"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/10629876605_e9f9061b34_hardware-raid.jpg\" alt=\"hardware raid photo\" width=\"405\" height=\"304\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><small>Photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/15802578@N00\/10629876605\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wwward0<\/a> <a title=\"Attribution License\" href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-inject\/images\/cc.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons Logo\" title=\"\"><\/a><\/small><\/p><\/div>\n<p>I know this article is a little old, but I wanted to bring it up as it raises an interesting point. We&#8217;ve had a few articles here about hardware raid, detailing <a title=\"Update: Hardware vs Software RAID: The great debate.\" href=\"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/update-hardware-vs-software-raid-the-great-debate\/\">when we think it&#8217;s a good idea<\/a>, and <a title=\"Hardware raid or software raid? Our take on the great religious debate\" href=\"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/hardware-raid-or-software-raid-our-take-on-the-great-religious-debate\/\">when it&#8217;s a waste of money<\/a> (or worse). In general, if you&#8217;re looking for &#8220;big DD scores&#8221;, or if you&#8217;re running an OS without software raid support, hardware raid can be a good choice. Otherwise, save your money.<\/p>\n<p>Cloudflare had an article a while back detailing their current hardware choices and layout, which is an interesting read if you have the time:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.cloudflare.com\/a-tour-inside-cloudflares-latest-generation-servers\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/blog.cloudflare.com\/a-tour-inside-cloudflares-latest-generation-servers\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>One quote I&#8217;d like to mention is what they had to say about hardware raid:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One thing we pulled out of our G4 setup was a RAID card. We&#8217;d experimented with hardware RAID but found we got more performance addressing each disk individually and using consistent hashing in the algorithm to spread files across disks. <strong>Specifically, we saw a 50% performance benefit addressing disks directly rather than going through the G3 hardware RAID.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Even today, many years after hardware raid is no longer the best way to improve drive performance, you still hear the old wive&#8217;s tale of using hardware raid whenever you care about performance. Although it will probably be many years before this myth is put to rest, I am happy to see one more nail in the coffin.<\/p>\n<p>If you have any questions about this\u00a0information, or want to learn\u00a0about <a href=\"https:\/\/ioflood.com\">ioflood.com<\/a> dedicated servers, email us at <strong>sales [at] ioflood.com<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I know this article is a little old, but I wanted to bring it up as it raises an interesting point. We&#8217;ve had a few articles here about hardware raid, detailing when we think it&#8217;s a good idea, and when it&#8217;s a waste of money (or worse). In general, if you&#8217;re looking for &#8220;big DD [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":425,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[139,111,27,28,14,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloudflare","category-hardware-raid","category-opinion","category-performance-tuning","category-raid","category-sysadmin","cat-139-id","cat-111-id","cat-27-id","cat-28-id","cat-14-id","cat-9-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3093,"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions\/3093"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioflood.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}