Raid 60 for mail server

[Max Ma]

Dear Sir,
Can anyone tell me if I can use Raid 60 on the Zimbra Mail server. I am going to testing one.
will there be any problem in performance?

[Dirk]

RAID levels give me a headache at the best of times, I use a simple raid 5 most of the time but I know it's not suited for everything. Adaptec have a really nice page here: Adaptec - Which RAID Level is Right for Me?

Looking at that I'd say you may be better with raid 50 rather than 60 as the performance of 50 is better in degraded mode. 60 gives you the ability to lose two drives, but it's a pretty bad day when three drives fail in a single array (which is what would be needed to kill a 60) I'd go with Raid 50 with a couple of hot spares.

[phoenix]

Depending on the number of mailboxes/users on this server RAID10 might be the recommended choice.

[tachijuan]

There is no standard implementation of RAID 6 or RAID 60. It basically comes down to how your vendor implemented it. Most dual parity RAID schemes, by whichever name the come by, impose a much higher penalty on writes than do single parity schemes. That being said, some of the high end arrays, most notably NetApp, have done a superb job of minimizing or eliminating this penalty.

It would actually help a good bit if you shared which vendor you are looking at since that will really drive the answer to the question.