RAID0, RAID5, RAID10: What to Choose and When for a Seedbox?

There is a multitude of RAID levels we utilize depending on the seedbox service you are looking for, RAID0, RAID5, RAID10. We have talked about this in the past too, but here we want to give you just a quick outline.

RAID10

Maximum performance, very high fault tolerance. Expensive.

This is best when you need very high performance and reliability, but you are not too concerned about the storage capacity and happy to trade capacity for performance and reliability. Also best for frequently changing data. Our Dragon-R seedbox series has this.

RAID5

Good fault tolerance, good read performance, but limited write performance.

When you have significant amount of data, but you are not changing that data very frequently, maybe once a month or less. This is good when you want both fault tolerance, good seeding performance with high capacity but primarily keep the same torrents running for a period of time. Our M10G series uses this, a typical go-to solution for our services.

RAID0

Maximum performance and capacity, absolutely no fault tolerance what-so-ever.

This is best when your data is “throwaway” type, what you can always attain again without any issue and loss of the data is just an minor inconvenience at best. This offers the best write and read performance with highest capacity, but cannot tolerate any failures what-so-ever. If you need fault tolerance, choose RAID5 or RAID10. Only our Value1000 and Managed DediSeebox (MDS) series offers this, but on MDS you can change this to RAID5 or RAID10.

In conclusion

RAID0 least expensive/most capacity, RAID5 is somewhere in the middle, RAID10 most expensive/least capacity. Same tradeoff for fault tolerance and performance as swell.

For each to their own, and depending on what you need a seedbox for there is plenty of choice.

This also applies to any server choice, not just seedboxes alone.