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File Storage Server

T

tekneek

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 8, 2011
Messages
103
Looking to repurpose an older computer I have to be a file storage server.

mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186098
CPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103272
PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139001

I'm wanting about 4tb or 5tb of usable storage space with redundancy. I have a license for Microsoft server 2012 that I plan to use for the OS. There are 6 sata drives on the mobo but 1 of the satas will be used for the os drive. I already have 2x 2tb seagate drives.

I have about $300 max for additional drives and maybe a new psu. Not settled on what raid to use for this set up.

I'll be using a couple external drives to back up the super important data from the server.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. THANKS!
 
Kind of leaning towards getting additional 2tb drives and putting them in raid 5 with a hotspare. just kinda paranoid that another drive could fail when the hotspare kicks in
 
Do you really need redundancy? At home I have moved to no raid + backups (with 4TB external drives that I purchased for ~$150 each used as the backup drives). Although at work I have raid6 arrays + some mirroring of the raid6 arrays + 2 drive LTO tape archive with 180 tapes. One thing to point out is raid is no substitute for having a backup or multiple backups. An entire raid can fail (for a multitude of reasons in addition to drive failure) causing some to all data on the raid to be lost.
 
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I don't have a lot of faith or good experiences with any onboard RAID other than RAID 0, and R0 has its downfalls.

Since your datastore is almost small enough that you could use a single 4TB disk, I'd suggest that, with an identical disk to mirror it in an external or another computer.

If you need more than 4TB, I'd suggest doing spanning, or if you really want it, RAID 0, and have good backups (not in RAID preferably)

simple is always better, and in general RAID != simple

your power supply is a good model, and it looks like you're recycling some old parts, which is fine.
 
drescherjm said:
Do you really need redundancy? At home I have moved to no raid + backups (with 4TB external drives that I purchased for ~$150 each used as the backup drives). Although at work I have raid6 arrays + some mirroring of the raid6 arrays + 2 drive LTO tape archive with 180 tapes. One thing to point out is raid is no substitute for having a backup or multiple backups. An entire raid can fail (for a multitude of reasons in addition to drive failure) causing some to all data on the raid to be lost.
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I'd want redundancy as another "feature" in place to prevent total data loss. You are right that I could probably get away without redundancy, but I have to admit that it is reassuring.

I already know that raid is not a substitute for backups, which is why i have a couple external drives for the super important stuff.

with my $300 budget, I'm thinking either get 2x 4tb drives in raid 1 or get 3x 2tb drives and run 4x 2tb drives in raid 5 with 1x hot spare.
 
hotcrandel said:
simple is always better, and in general RAID != simple
Click to expand...

yeah, but it sure becomes a pain to manage data when it doesn't fit onto a single drive.
I've been there, and I still keep the most important files on an external 3TB.

The ideal solution for a relatively small setup (less than 20 drives) is parity +2 and separate backup. I'm plan to switch my drive pool to ZFS to accomplish this and have higher storage efficiency.

With 4TB though, simpler is better. A few years down the road, you'll have more data to store and need a third or fourth drive. Hopefully the 4TB drives drop a little more in price, and we get 6TB drives.

I agree about the onboard RAID though; don't use it.
 
J Macker said:
I agree about the onboard RAID though; don't use it.
Click to expand...

So since i'm using microsoft server 2012, it is considered to be a software raid since the os will be doing the raid, right? I was under the impression that onboard raid is the raid you set up via bios
 
If your data is media files or similar, then you should go with snapshot RAID, either SnapRAID or FlexRAID. If most (but not all) of your data is media files or similar, you should still go with snapshot RAID, but you should separate out the other type(s) of data and handle them separately (which should be easy since they only take up a relatively small amount of space).
 
JoeComp said:
If your data is media files or similar, then you should go with snapshot RAID, either SnapRAID or FlexRAID. If most (but not all) of your data is media files or similar, you should still go with snapshot RAID, but you should separate out the other type(s) of data and handle them separately (which should be easy since they only take up a relatively small amount of space).
Click to expand...

it looks to be that snapshot RAID is done through applications like SnapRAID. So I'm assuming I'd just install SnapRAID after the os and use it to set up the RAID arrays?
 
tekneek said:
it looks to be that snapshot RAID is done through applications like SnapRAID. So I'm assuming I'd just install SnapRAID after the os and use it to set up the RAID arrays?
Click to expand...

Yes. The nice thing about snapshot RAID is that you can easily start (or stop) using it at any time. You keep your data on each HDD separately, and the snapshot RAID program does not touch your data -- it will always be intact. When you are ready to start using snapshot RAID, you just dedicate one or more parity drives to the snapshot, and run the snapshot RAID program to generate the parity data (and checksums).
 
JoeComp said:
If your data is media files or similar, then you should go with snapshot RAID, either SnapRAID or FlexRAID. If most (but not all) of your data is media files or similar, you should still go with snapshot RAID, but you should separate out the other type(s) of data and handle them separately (which should be easy since they only take up a relatively small amount of space).
Click to expand...

++ to FlexRAID. No hardware required, very flexible, and maximize your space.

RAID5 doesn't make a lot of sense for a home server. It really doesn't check many boxes that you probably need.

Also, RAID5 with a hotspare is minimum 4 drives - you would get the same space, and better fault tolerance from 4-disk RAID10 (no downtime to rebuild, for one).
 
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