May 14, 2012
tom

Replace a 3.5″ hard drive in a RAID 5 array with an SSD?

Question

With a 3ware 9650SE on Debian 6, can I replace a drive in a RAID 5 array with an SSD? The goal would be to eventually replace each 3.5″ hard drive in the array with SSDs. Is there anything I should know about attempting something like this? Any background info?

Asked by harmonic

Answer

The drive has to be of equal or larger capacity than the drive it’s replacing, which is still difficult (read: expensive) to do, depending on the age of the array.

Things you need to know:

  • You won’t get much of a speed increase until all the drives are replaced
  • The 9650SE isn’t SSD aware, meaning that you lose TRIM functionality. This can lead to a decreased lifetime of the drive.
  • I don’t know what the throughput of the 9650SE is, but it’s entirely possible that the RAID card could be a bottleneck once you get all of your drives installed
Answered by Mark Henderson

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