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DIY NAS advice

K

kohl

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 5, 2004
Messages
290
Greetings!

I am doing some research into building a NAS for my home network. The purpose of the NAS would be mainly to store media (we have 3 media center PCs) and also misc. data; mp3's, word docs, etc. Ideally, I would like to run RAID-5 but am concerned about possible failure of the controller hosing all data (I have mirrored storage now so I can just remove the drive in case of server failure and mount it in another computer.. no biggie).

I also run Acronis True Image Home 2010 and would be interested in possibly doing backups of our computers to a central location, versus having usb drives attached to every computer.

So three questions.
1. Does anyone have any experience with SATA RAID controllers such as:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116043 ? Would this be overkill? I don't want to break the bank but also would like to have plenty of room for additional drives down the road, considering how cheap large drives are getting.

2. Does anyone have multiple computers and use some kind of backup application to back up to NAS/network share and what kind of experiences have you had?

3. If a RAID controller itself dies, under what circumstances would a RAID-5 array be recoverable? Would you need to just reinstall an identical brand/model?

Thanks in advance!
 
1. Can't help you there. I only use intel, adaptec, and areca.

2. WHS seems to work quite well but I've not had to recover from a crash yet.

3. I don't know about 3ware controllers but I have personally attached raid5 and raid0 arrays to newer controllers of the same brand without issues. I've not risked cross branding but I've heard it sometimes works. I've even taken a raid0 array from ich7 to ich10 and was able to boot from the array fine and recover all the data. I wasn't about to leave it like that long term but it may be possible. Raid configs are stored on the drives, that I know for sure.
 
Thanks for the info! I am really open to any brand so I will have to check out what is available at the various price points. I am mainly looking for a card with at least 8 SATA ports.

In your experience, how much benefit is there in a card that has an onboard controller versus a "software" raid controller?
 
kohl said:
Thanks for the info! I am really open to any brand so I will have to check out what is available at the various price points. I am mainly looking for a card with at least 8 SATA ports.

In your experience, how much benefit is there in a card that has an onboard controller versus a "software" raid controller?
Click to expand...

Hardware raid is more for performance while software is less expensive. For home file serving, software is fine. On the other hand, whs duplication is generally good enough for documents, music, and whatnot and not required for videos since the physical disks are your backup.

Personally I'm just using a couple supermicro mv8 cards in addition to the onboard sata ports and pooling all the 2tb drives for my whs.
 
I've used it at work a few times, we usually use LSI, Adaptec, and Areca, but when its a rush and we're out of stock of those 3 brands we use that 3ware card and performance is basically the same but seems more expensive for no apparent reason. but it could just be a volume buying thing from our distributors we buy tons of LSI, Adaptec and Areca but only a hand full of 3ware. If your looking for a cheap solution look into highpoint its a cheaper card that works well and they have a card for just about any configuration you could want to do
 
kohl said:
3. If a RAID controller itself dies, under what circumstances would a RAID-5 array be recoverable? Would you need to just reinstall an identical brand/model?
Click to expand...
Like ibdoomed2 says, there's a chance a newer version of a card from the same vendor will work. Alternately, there's a chance you can get one used on eBay or similar.
However, seeing how you're big on reliability, i'd tend to assume nonrecoverability and have some kind of backup scheme in place.

I'd highly recommend software RAID (not driver RAID, like you get with cheap "RAID" controllers.) For example, with Linux' software RAID, you can move the disks to another computer and it will "just work".

What kind of OS are you looking at? No reason to suggest something suitable for sysadmins if you've only ever used Windows.
 
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