16TB Raid 0 Failed 5tb worth of blurays gone lol... Need advice

M

Modboxx

Gawd
Joined
Nov 6, 2008
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521
Hey guys,

I have an intel 128mb SRCSATAWB Raid card plus 8x2tb westend digis plus two Istar backplanes

I'm going to redo my system but this time no raid, but my card for some reason does not allow for the drives to come up unless i put them in raid. However, i can put a single drive in Raid 0 so thats cool i guess, i doubt that it will crash since all the data is on the same drive.

Anyway, few question for you storage gurus
Should i enable the disk cache since its single drive or leave it off
Files on the drive will be big (MKV's) should i do a 1mb stripe?

If i unplug this drive from my array and plug it into say an ich10 will the drive come or will it only work on this raid card?
 
Good thing it is just bluerays so you can just spend time and reload them.

This is the only case where I would imaging using raid0 with that many drives.

For my HTPC I just use individual drives and the htpc software knows where to look to present all of the storage in one place via the frontend however that is on linux and I assume you are on windows.
 
drescherjm said:
Good thing it is just bluerays so you can just spend time and reload them.

This is the only case where I would imaging using raid0 with that many drives.

For my HTPC I just use individual drives and the htpc software knows where to look to present all of the storage in one place via the frontend however that is on linux and I assume you are on windows.
Click to expand...

Yeah i got i two old 1.5tb filled that i never deleted so its not to bad.

Home server(vail)
 
drescherjm said:
For my HTPC I just use individual drives and the htpc software knows where to look to present all of the storage in one place via the frontend however that is on linux and I assume you are on windows.
Click to expand...

You can get the same functionality on Windows with something like MediaBrowser (Media Center plugin), or just run XBMC in Windows.
 
john4200 said:
You can get the same functionality on Windows with something like MediaBrowser (Media Center plugin), or just run XBMC in Windows.
Click to expand...

I had it set like in media center yeah but it was just sweet to have a 16tb raid 0 drive.
 
Question on raid 5?

I just set one and its not that bad, it came out to 12tb's only loosing 4tb's not bad. I was reading about it and it says that if one drive fails, i can rebuild the array after replace the drive and that i'll still be able to use the array untill i fix but performance will suffer. My question is will this work on files sizes 5-30gb's?
 
Why would one have a 16TB, 8 drive, RAID 0 array that is 5TB full? You could have RAID 1 and still be only 63% full...

At 15MB/s 5TB of data is like 5600 minutes. 40GB files = 125 physical media swaps too. So basically 4+ days of downtime.

I would strongly consider RAID 1, 10 or RAID 6 (+ the BBU) with that controller or just to use Vail or WHS V1 duplication. Just the amount of time that takes has to be worth the loss of two disks of capacity... especially since this will happen again.
 
pjkenned said:
Why would one have a 16TB, 8 drive, RAID 0 array that is 5TB full? You could have RAID 1 and still be only 63% full...

At 15MB/s 5TB of data is like 5600 minutes. 40GB files = 125 physical media swaps too. So basically 4+ days of downtime.

I would strongly consider RAID 1, 10 or RAID 6 (+ the BBU) with that controller or just to use Vail or WHS V1 duplication. Just the amount of time that takes has to be worth the loss of two disks of capacity... especially since this will happen again.
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It was movies so it wasn't that big of deal, i made a bad choice.

would you recommand raid5 or 6? or just stick with the raid 0(single drive) format.

Again the file sizes will be 5 - 30tb also
 
RAID 6. Had this discussion in another thread. 12TB total.

RAID 60 or 10 would be faster, but you'd be down to 8TB total.
 
For buleray storage would it make much of a difference?

Raid 6 would have better read speed and write speed should not be a problem.
 
drescherjm said:
For buleray storage would it make much of a difference?

Raid 6 would have better read speed and write speed should not be a problem.
Click to expand...

Thats my real question.

Should i go raid6 and have 10tb of space or just use a single drives?
 
I like single disks for my htpc. And the big reason is I want to spin down disks when they are not in use. With raid the whole array has to be idle which happens a lot less than only 1 disk being in use. In either case the performance is not an issue. I mean what is blueray or even h264? A few MB/s? Now compare that to drives that do 100+ MB/s or 75 MB/s on the slowest part. Sure with 8 drives and raid 6 you can read at 600MB/s but do you need that?
 
drescherjm said:
I like single disks for my htpc. And the big reason is I want to spin down disks when they are not in use. With raid the whole array has to be idle which happens a lot less than only 1 disk being in use. In either case the performance is not an issue. I mean what is blueray or even h264? A few MB/s? Now compare that to drives that do 100+ MB/s or 75 MB/s on the slowest part. Sure with 8 drives and raid 6 you can read at 600MB/s but do you need that?
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lol i hear ya and yes i need it 600mb's ooooo but no. lol

I'm going with single should i do 1mb stripe?
 
Honestly, you have a lot of options. Performance wise, if you are streaming multiple 1080 ISOs then you may need more than 1 disk (since you may need spindles at that point over a single disk's random IO).

Personally I would either RAID 6/ RAID-Z2 (too big of an array for RAID 5 due to UBEs), do RAID 1 for redundancy (see Vail and WHS V1 for other options), or even just pass disks through individually. Leave maybe one volume as a RAID 1 array for important docs and such. Worst comes to worst your exposure on single disks is 1.8TB or so which is much better than 5TB+ in RAID 0. Performance wise you really aren't using 100MB/s.

On the spin down thing, if you are watching 1 video per day, that is 2hrs say where all drives are going in RAID 6 which isn't bad. Sure, 1-2 drives 2hrs a day would be better, but drives are max 7-8w each so you are talking about say 77-88w of hourly draw while reading from the array over a single disk. Not much for redundancy.
 
8 drive RAID 0? Yeah, that's not too surprising that you had a failure lol. Personally, I would go single disk myself. If you have a backup, which you MUST, then since we're talking about your movie collection, I'm assuming uptime isn't an issue and we have decided that speed is not an issue as well. I say go without RAID because RAID improves uptime and speed and neither of those are an issue here. By going single disk you have a few benefits:

-lower power draw like drescherjm said
-free to mix, match, add, and remove drives
-you don't have a risk of total array loss due to solely to 1 or 2 disk failure (RAID 5/6)

Any front end worth anything will have library features to make the movies being on separate volumes completely seamless and if a disk fails, just restore whatever is lost. How do you have your backup now, just the disks themselves?

I would keep one copy of the rip on a HDD in the machine and one on a HDD not in the machine (off-site if possible) and when you fill up that one disk, add a second in the machine and a second backup not in the machine. If you only have 5TB of data at the moment, you can do this...3 in the machine, 3 for backup. When those fill up, add the fourth disks in and for backup. When those fill up, you have to make a decision between the cost of buying more drives and how much time it would take you to rip the lost BDs again...I'd just buy 2 more drives.

Point being, if you don't have a BACKUP then you're running the risk of getting screwed regardless of what RAID, if any, you use.
 
Modboxx said:
I had it set like in media center yeah but it was just sweet to have a 16tb raid 0 drive.
Click to expand...

:headdesk:

weigh the cost of a drive or two lost to parity in raid5/raid6 against your time having to re-rip "5tb of Blurays" (or re-download 5tb of MKV's, whatever the case may be). is your time really that worthless? then at least run the drives JBOD and store files to them individually. raid0 for media storage makes no sense whatsoever unless its for temp space and you've got the data duplicated elsewhere.
 
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I use single drive mode on my controller 4port sas controller. I also use hard drives for back up. I have 10 x2tb in my server and 10 x 2tb drives in a fire proof box. I hot swop drives as I back up the server. The server is full of my movies.
 
I cant put it into single drive mode. i can only setup raid0 with a single drive which is the same i guess.
 
Don't use RAID0 unless the data is not important at all. i.e. cache disks or something where throughput is priority number one. Zero is the amount of redundancy RAID0 has. Also, as people say; RAID is not a backup.

RAID5, 6, 10 or better is recommended.

RAID5 will give you the most space, up to one drive can fail.
RAID6 will give you a bit less and up to two drives can fail.
RAID10 will cut your disk space in half, be pretty fast and up to four drives can fail. Just take note on wiki or something to understand how those drives can and cannot safely fail.***

That being said, RAID6 might be your best bet, however rebuild times will be up there on 2TB disks.
 
For an array that size I'd go raid 6 imo, or at least raid 5. The more drives you have the greater chance of one failing.
 
RAID50 is the best choice but you need good controller. RAID0 = "I'm doubling my chance of loosing data and I don't care"
 
drescherjm said:
Its a lot worse than that when you use 8 drives in raid 0..
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Indeed, that would be eight times more likely. :(

Actually I'm not good with things like that, it may be considered an even higher risk than that. But for simplicity's sake, every drive you add to RAID0 is asking for a higher risk of failure.
 
Modboxx said:
Question on raid 5?

I just set one and its not that bad, it came out to 12tb's only loosing 4tb's not bad. I was reading about it and it says that if one drive fails, i can rebuild the array after replace the drive and that i'll still be able to use the array untill i fix but performance will suffer. My question is will this work on files sizes 5-30gb's?
Click to expand...

you could even set one drive as the hot-spare; so, if a drive fails, the RAID controller should automatically replace the failed drive with the hot-spare, and automatically rebuild itself. Note; this also depends on the capabilities of the card. This would also cause you to lose 8tbs, if using a hot-spare.
Parity is striped across all the discs, so yes it would work fine even with 5gig+ files.

Modboxx said:
I cant put it into single drive mode. i can only setup raid0 with a single drive which is the same i guess.
Click to expand...

some RAID cards only work in RAID, and cannot work as a regular HDD controller.
You would need to move the drives onto the onboard controller, or get a separate plain-jane SATA controller card.

vsboxerboy said:
Can you elaborate on this? How do you not have a JBOD option?
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JBOD is even worse. If a drive fails, you won't even know which one it is. You may find what files are missing, but won't know which physical drive they are on.
 
JBOD is even worse. If a drive fails, you won't even know which one it is.
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I don't like an 8 disk JBOD or even a 2 disk JBOD. A JBOD of raids is fine.

However I think he meant since the raid card did not support individual drives maybe it had a way to create a 1 disk JBOD array for each drive. I have seen several different terms for the same purpose on raid cards.
 
drescherjm said:
I don't like an 8 disk JBOD or even a 2 disk JBOD. A JBOD of raids is fine.

However I think he meant since the raid card did not support individual drives maybe it had a way to create a 1 disk JBOD array for each drive. I have seen several different terms for the same purpose on raid cards.
Click to expand...

ah, good point.

I looked up the card it does not support JBOD, only RAID.
 
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