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Extendible RAID-style systems (snapraid, flexraid etc)

A

ajm83

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Jan 25, 2012
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Looking for an extendible RAID type system for home use (storing BR rips, photos, music and so on).

What I want to do is start with two x 2tb discs, then add a third ... up to a total of 5 discs. Ideally without deleting/restoring any data.

The other factor is CPU usage, I'll be using an Atom or similar CPU so it must be efficient enough to be able to serve 1080p BR rips back to XBMC running on another box.

So far I've got Snapraid and Flexraid on the list. Is there anything else worth looking at?

I guess that using flexraid will allow me to continue using my files until the broken drive is replaced, where as snapraid will not. Is that right?

Thanks
 
I just built an unRAID server. I've got 3 2 TB drives right now, and have 3 more on the way. It does support adding more disks without having to rebuild any data. Just stop the array, add the disks, and start the array back up, and presto. More space.

Free supports up to 3 drives, plus version supports up to 7, and pro supports up to 21. (Not including parity disks.)
 
I've been running unRaid for over four years from the 3.x versions, currently on 4.7 and will hop onto the 5.x either when it is realease or maybe go with the current RC. I am very happy with it, especially the ability to access (read and write) files on a drive that is down/offline/broke, the ability to add any ole' drive of any size with almost no restrictions to the array and the ability to easily replace a drive, either because it is failed or just to replace it with a larger size.

I've replaced drives at least a dozen times on my two unRaid boxes, either because the drive failed or just to upgrade the size without any issues.

unRaid is very easy on hardware, lots of folks on the unRaid forums are running Atom based unRaid builds.

As much of a fan I am of unRaid, it, like any other solution is not the best for all. You need to identify your needs and see which, whether unRaid, FreeNAS, FlexRaid, SnapRaid, WHS, etc is best for your needs.
 
Hadn't considered unRAID. The only thing that puts me off is the lack of checksumming but I guess that's not a show-stopper. The web UI looks good.

Thanks
 
How about Windows Home Server 2011 with one of the add-ons like Drivebender?
 
Thanks again for your help everyone.

I've now received my HP N40L microserver and stuck some drives in. Seems like a really nice bit of kit for the price.

At the moment I've got it set up using SnapRaid for data integrity and MHDDFS for pooling. Write performance is poor (30mb/s) but adequate for my immediate needs, SnapRaid however is working excellently using the underlying mountpoints directly (approx 180mb/s). I hope there is some room for tuning the write performance of FUSE/MHDDFS, but other than that I'm very happy.

-UnRAID was a non-starter, the USB stick simply wouldn't boot. Will revisit this in the future after BIOS is updated.

-FlexRaid looked good, but I had a lot of glitches in the web UI, and some reoccurring permissions problems. Not seeing many reports of that, so perhaps it was user error. Also the pooled performance was poor, at approx 15mb/s seq. writes. Not quite quick enough.

WHS + DB Pooling will have to wait until I get a bigger boot volume (using a 16gb stick for linux)

One final thing, I've had endless problems getting my mixture of drives to use power management properly. My Seagate 2TB barracudas will spin down after a few moments, regardless of the -S setting, and the Hitachi 2tb 5900rpm drive will not spin down at all, regardless of APM settings. I've turned it all off for the time being, but it seems the seagates are still parking the heads or something.
 
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ajm83 said:
At the moment I've got it set up using SnapRaid for data integrity and MHDDFS for pooling. Write performance is poor (30mb/s) but adequate for my immediate needs, SnapRaid however is working excellently using the underlying mountpoints directly (approx 180mb/s). I hope there is some room for tuning the write performance of FUSE/MHDDFS, but other than that I'm very happy.
Click to expand...

Consider aufs instead of mhddfs, it is MUCH faster for writing (its impact is almost irrelevant, while mhddfs slows downs a lot and is a cpu hog while writing).

Aufs is included in most linux distros.
This is a typical fstab line for aufs.

none /mnt/allDisks aufs br:/mnt/disk1=rw:/mnt/disk2=rw:/mnt/disk3=rw,sum,create=pmfs 0 0
 
GioF_71 said:
Consider aufs instead of mhddfs, it is MUCH faster for writing (its impact is almost irrelevant, while mhddfs slows downs a lot and is a cpu hog while writing).

Aufs is included in most linux distros.
This is a typical fstab line for aufs.

none /mnt/allDisks aufs br:/mnt/disk1=rw:/mnt/disk2=rw:/mnt/disk3=rw,sum,create=pmfs 0 0
Click to expand...

ah great! Thanks for that. :cool: 100mb/s and low cpu load. Now I've set each disc up with the same directory structure, it's doing just what I want.

Oh and I sorted the discs waking up. All it took was removing 'udisks', which seems to be some kind of userspace disk querying software and disabling webmin. Guess that is polling the discs to keep the UI up to date.

BTW useful debugging tool is to run echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump. This lets you see anything which does block access to a device and logs it to dmesg (ensure you're not logging dmesg to disc first or you'll get stuck!) Doesn't seem to log ioctls but useful nonetheless
 
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