Serveral disk volumes or just a big one

[mesasinmantel]

Hi,
I bought a ReadyNAS 3200 two months ago. It's a big monster but easy to use. I'm just using the last 8 slots for a big RAID 5 4 x 2GB Hitachi hard drives. I am using just one big volume and left empty the 4 first one just to install 4 3 TB drivers since they are not compatible if installed in the other ones.
Question is... what would be faster:
2 RAID 5 of 4 x 2 TB disks each, volume C and volume D
or
1 big RAID 5 of 8 x 2 TB disks?

It would be easier for me to run with different volumes since I am mirroing each one into several different other ReadyNASes

If I configure a Volume with 4 x 2 TB disk in RAID5, would it be readable on a ReadyNAS 1500 or Business PRo 6 machines?

Since I have a lot of spare disks, I'd like also to mount different 4 x 1 TB RAID5 volumes. The goal is to swap them as needed. Is it possible? Should I have to turn the ReadyNAS 3200, change HD kits and restart it?


Other thing,
Is RAID 5 faster than RAID 6 (2 hd for redundancy)?

Any thoughts will be very useful.

Thanks very much,

[mdgm]

SATA connectors are designed for a limited number of pulls and handling disks bare you risk damaging them. Swapping disks in and out of the units regularly may sound like a good idea to save time, but it's a bad idea. Frontview backup is very powerful and is very useful for backing up data to/from different ReadyNAS units.

RAID-5 is faster than RAID-6, but depending on how many gigabit connections you are using you may well find the gigabit ethernet is the bottleneck not how many volumes or what type you are using.

[mesasinmantel]

Hi, thanks for your answer. The idea around all this is not to switch trays every day, is just to have the possibility to jump to a new array of 4 disks after the current one is running out of space.
My goal is to have 3 different arrays of 4 HD each, I'd just want to know if by doing so I'll loose performance.
What is faster: 1 big array of 8 HD in RAID 5 or (2) arrays of 4 HD each? - always using (2) netwoerk connections -
Thanks again,

[TeknoJnky]

What is faster: 1 big array of 8 HD in RAID 5 or (2) arrays of 4 HD each? - always using (2) netwoerk connections

really, it depends mostly on the type of workload, and how much space you need for the volume.

if you can spread out the load on 2 separate arrays, then in theory you're potentionally increasing the total possible performance because either array are not sharing the load (or lack of) the other.

The individual performance may or may not be of much difference, and if you need a volume of more than 5.5tb (4x 2tb raid5), then your only option is a big array of 8 anyway.

if space is not a problem, another option is raid 10 instead of raid5.

I would suggest the only best true answer you can find is by testing with your disks and the workload(s) you need to use, with the various modes available.