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I have configured the Dell R740 to use Raid 5 (mixtured of HDD/SDD storage) to run citrix xen server for VMs. In the past it was configured as Raid 1 mirroring and resulting insufficient storage. therefore we reformatted the hard disk and set it to Raid 5, the storage space is increased.

However the performance is very slow when a single VM is turned on, the navigation in Windows is very lag.

I would like to try to set the Raid to 0 if it will helps to resolve the slowness issue.

Can I do it without reformatting the hard disk? so that i do not need to backup the VM which already has multiple snapshots.

user12158726
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  • RAID5 is terrible for performance. As I suspect are the specifications of the hard drives. – Greg Askew Jun 09 '23 at 09:02
  • is RAID 0 best performance? and formatting is a must? – user12158726 Jun 09 '23 at 09:07
  • @user12158726, with RAID0 any failed disk will destroy entire information on the array. Yes, you will have faster access, but the risk is huge – Romeo Ninov Jun 09 '23 at 09:17
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    And you can't change on the fly from one RAID to another. – Romeo Ninov Jun 09 '23 at 09:18
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    https://serverfault.com/questions/339128/ – HBruijn Jun 09 '23 at 09:21
  • i only use it to run VMs internally. I would have export backup image every 3 months. – user12158726 Jun 09 '23 at 09:32
  • Combining HDD and SSD in a RAID0 you'll lose performance of your SSDs. They will work as slow as slowest HDD in an array. (However, you already did that and this is what you have now.) Never mix HDDs and SSDs in an array unless you are knowing for sure why and what you are doing. In particular, as I can deduce from the question, you certainly don't know enough about this, so *you* should never mix them. – Nikita Kipriyanov Jun 10 '23 at 14:42

2 Answers2

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No. You will have to reformat all of the drives to change the RAID type.

Paul
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The Answer is No,

Switching from RAID 5 to RAID 0 on your Dell R740 server can potentially improve performance, as RAID 0 offers better read and write speeds by striping data across multiple drives without redundancy. However, it's important to note that RAID 0 does not provide any data redundancy, meaning that if one drive fails, you could lose all the data.

While RAID 0 does not provide any fault tolerance, so it's crucial to have a proper backup strategy in place to mitigate the risk of data loss

Zareh Kasparian
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