4TB hard drives bring RAID 6 to its limits - SNS Europe

4/21/2014

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SNS Europe Data storage and IT management:

4TB hard drives bring RAID 6 to its limits

Higher rebuild times call for triple parity, writes Heiko Wst, sales engineer at Nexenta Systems.
Date: 16 Dec 2013
4TB hard drives are becoming increasingly common and affordable, but many administrators are doubtful
whether they should really use them. The problem is that a hard drives rebuild time increases in linear fashion
along with increasing size. It can take two to four days for a new 4TB drive in a RAID array to be filled with data
from the failed disk. The danger is that two further hard drives might fail in this time. RAID 6 can tolerate two
simultaneous hard drive failures, but as soon as a third one fails, data is lost.
What at first glance seems unlikely - the failure of three disks within a short period of time - is statistically more
likely with an increasing volume of data, higher disk capacity and longer rebuild times. If you believe the hard
drive manufacturers, an individual disk should fail every hundred years, or even more infrequently. But where
hundreds or thousands of hard drives are in use, this hardware defect is an everyday occurrence and the Mean
Time to Data Loss (MTTDL) is shorter. The risk of failure in 4TB drives is at least eight times as high as in
500GB drives right from the outset due to the rebuild time.
The rebuild time is determined not only by the write speed on the replacement drive but also, primarily, by the
read speed on the other drives. The crux of the matter lies in that the system remains live and that, in practice,
the hard drives are already 90 percent busy. This means only around 10 percent of the read capacity is
available for the rebuild. Now you have a choice: either you speed up the rebuild times at a cost of performance
while the system is live or you learn to live with the long rebuild times.
RAID Z2 corresponds to RAID 6 (double parity) and with an array of twelve hard drives has a MTTDL of around
100 million years, RAID Z3 (triple parity) increases this to around 100 billion years. Todays 4TB hard drives
increase the rebuild time and reduce the MTTDL.
Thus, it is clear that increasing hard drive size increases the probability of data loss. But there is a cure: triple
parity. A RAID array with three parity bits can even withstand the simultaneous failure of three hard drives. This
puts the MTTDL back in the desired regions.
Parity is something fundamentally different to simply storing the same data in multiple copies (like mirroring in
RAID 1). One must think of parity as being when parity bits are connected with live data bits in such a way that
the lost data in a RAID system can always be recalculated based on the remaining data (interpolating), and can
therefore be recovered. Simple parity, like in RAID 5, is calculated using XOR, so is based on the fact that digital
data consists only of ones and zeros. The second parity, like in RAID 6, corresponds to orthogonal calculation.
Triple parity, like in RAID Z3, is far more complex. This means that every piece of information could be
recovered using an equation involving three unknowns should three hard drives simultaneously fail. The fact
that this is possible at all has to do with the fact that three is the smallest factor of 255 (the largest value of
unsigned bytes).
RAID Z3 is currently the only system that allows triple parity unless someone decides to implement
quadrupled data storage (a 4-way mirror). However, RAID Z3 actually offers more benefits than just data
security in the event of a third hard drive failure. The Z stands for the ZFS data system and this adds further
considerable advantages in terms of data security.
This means that the Unrecoverable Bit Error Rate (UBER) goes down to zero. This describes the frequency with
which data blocks become unreadable due to their age, i.e. that ionising radiation or magnetic fields have
altered them. RAID Z3 solves this problem of creeping data corruption. It does not rely on the reliability of the
hard drive, but rather guarantees consistency of all data at all times using a checksum tree, similar to a
database. UBER is rarely considered in the MMTDL calculation. An Unrecoverable Bit Error is however more
common than a complete hard drive crash and can also lead to rebuilds, which are particularly time
consuming and risky in the case of large hard drives. In these cases, RAID Z3 simply restores the bad blocks
without going through a complete rebuild.
Thanks to the copy-on-write process, RAID Z3 is innately protected against write holes. These occur in
standard RAID systems when the system fails between data being changed and the recalculation of parity
data. The result is false parity data. Should the original data ever be restored from this parity data, then this
results is completely unusable data. RAID Z3 avoids this problem from the outset because it never overwrites
the original data with new data. Rather, the changed data is reallocated and the entire checksum tree is
recalculated. This method keeps data in ZFS consistent at all times.
One advantage of how RAID Z3 is controlled using software as opposed to a controller like in other RAID
systems is that RAID Z3 distinguishes between used and free data blocks and only restores occupied data
blocks during rebuilds. Hard drives in storage systems tend to be between 50 and 85 percent occupied in
practice. This alone reduces the rebuild time in RAID Z3 by 15 to 50 percent and increases the MTTDL
accordingly.
It makes perfect sense for storage administrators to optimise the capacity and cost efficiency of their storage
systems with 4TB hard drives. Even those already using 3TB drives with RAID 6 can increase their live memory
by using 4TB drives and RAID Z3. Let us assume there is an array with 12 slots for hard drives: A typical set-up

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4TB hard drives bring RAID 6 to its limits - SNS Europe

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today would be RAID 6 with 9+2+1. i.e. the equivalent of nine hard drives are used for live storage, the
equivalent of two hard drives are used for parity information (in reality all of this data is split between the eleven
hard drives). One hard drive is working as a hot spare, so rebuilding can start automatically and immediately
in the event of a defect. This means 3TB drives provide live storage of 27TB (9 x 3TB). In RAID Z3 the equation
is 8+3+1, thus with 4TB drives we come to 32TB (8 x 4TB) of live storage.
The data security concerns surrounding 4TB hard drives are justified because rebuild times become incredibly
long. The problems can be resolved, however RAID 6 is then brought to its limits. The solution is triple parity;
preferably with the software-controlled RAID Z3 in the ZFS file system. This increases the cost efficiency of the
storage and allows an even greater level of data security than anything before.
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