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First RAID box

M

MrHood22

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Aug 21, 2007
Messages
4,312
I'm about to create my first RAID box. I currently have a QNAP but decided to piece together a small build to use my 4x1TB. I plan to use RAID 5. On my QNAP it monitors everything such as drive health, raid health, etc. So if something was going wrong I heard an annoying little buzzer to make sure I took care of it before I ran in to trouble.

Now with my Windows 7 machine I will be on my own. So I'm wondering what software people typically use to make sure they don't wake up to lost data? Is there certain maintenance that I should do?

Basically, is there anything that the QNAP has been doing automatically that I will now need to do manually?
 
At work I have my raid servers under linux and use nagios for monitoring.
At home my ~12TB of storage for my htpc is just individual disks backed up to 4TB externals.

Also QNAP is a linux based device.
 
drescherjm said:
At work I have my raid servers under linux and use nagios for monitoring.
At home my ~12TB of storage for my htpc is just individual disks backed up to 4TB externals.

Also QNAP is a linux based device.
Click to expand...

I agree that Linux would be best for a Raid box but it's not the best for HTPC's. I would prefer RAID but I think back to my pre-QNAP days when I just had several hard drives hooked up and I guess it really wasn't that bad. Since this won't be my main box I don't think it would be the end of the world without RAID.
 
MrHood22 said:
I agree that Linux would be best for a Raid box but it's not the best for HTPC's.
Click to expand...
Where did you get that information? Provide more details (facts) please.

MrHood22 said:
I would prefer RAID but I think back to my pre-QNAP days when I just had several hard drives hooked up and I guess it really wasn't that bad. Since this won't be my main box I don't think it would be the end of the world without RAID.
Click to expand...

Is there a reason why your NAS and HTPC have to be on the same box?
 
ezno_matrix said:
Where did you get that information? Provide more details (facts) please.



Is there a reason why your NAS and HTPC have to be on the same box?
Click to expand...
half the amount...

hardware
space
energy
cost
etc


In regards to the OS of choice, it's just what I've heard. If you think Windows 7 is a better OS choice then just pretend I said "I agree that Windows 7 would be best for a RAID box".
 
I should have been more clear. I was referring to the HTPC portion of your statement. IMO, windows dominance is only with games and this is being trashed by dedicated gaming systems these days. I have yet to see a windows HTPC setup that was better than Linux. I don't even thinks a windows base media player exists.

You are already aware that Linux will meet your RAID requirement, i.e, you will get all sort of notifications from SMART and mdadm. So the big question is, what are your HTPC requirements?
 
ezno_matrix said:
I should have been more clear. I was referring to the HTPC portion of your statement. IMO, windows dominance is only with games and this is being trashed by dedicated gaming systems these days. I have yet to see a windows HTPC setup that was better than Linux. I don't even thinks a windows base media player exists.

You are already aware that Linux will meet your RAID requirement, i.e, you will get all sort of notifications from SMART and mdadm. So the big question is, what are your HTPC requirements?
Click to expand...

Honestly I can't imagine one thing I'll be doing where Linux couldn't do it. The thing is if I want to do something I just want to navigate to the location on the folder, I don't want to open terminal to download and install a package, etc. I know that is a vague explanation but the point I'm making is it's not as polish as Windows 7.

I've tried Ubuntu on a previous HTPC and didn't really care for it. It wasn't bad but I preferred Windows 7. Linux is fun to tweak with when I feel like learning and tinkering but at the times when I just want to get on with it I feel that Windows 7 is preferred.
 
Fair enough. In that case, you should look at a hardware RAID card. Most come with monitoring software and some even have a speaker for beeping warning.
 
ezno_matrix said:
Fair enough. In that case, you should look at a hardware RAID card. Most come with monitoring software and some even have a speaker for beeping warning.
Click to expand...

I looked in to that but it looks like any card that's worth a damn is ~$150+. I spent $150 for the computer so I can't justify doubling the cost. $300 is still dirt cheap but It's hard to justify the money for the backup server of my backup server. I intend to use the built in RAID controller on the board.
 
If you really want raid on a windows based HTPC I would use snapraid and make backups with external 4TB drives (the ones that go on sale for $125 shipped). The builtin raid5 on Intel and AMD motherboards is slow and not so reliable.
 
drescherjm said:
If you really want raid on a windows based HTPC I would use snapraid and make backups with external 4TB drives (the ones that go on sale for $125 shipped). The builtin raid5 on Intel and AMD motherboards is slow and not so reliable.
Click to expand...

I have no interest in spending money on this so I'm working with the hardware I have. My QNAP is still my main NAS. I just had 4 hard drives sitting around so I figured I would spend $150 to buy the mobo, cpu, psu, and RAM. This is just a backup for my backup so it won't be used too frequently.
 
Regarding care and maintenance... I agree with the other posters that a dedicated hardware card of a major brand name will go a long way towards ensuring good writes, good cache, and less failures. I switched to hardware RAID about 8 years ago after a software array kept dropping a perfectly good disk.

Many people under-provision the size of the array or the volume on the array to preserve some sectors on the disk. This is more of a concern with SSD arrays.

I have used Symantec Backup Exec in the past to make my backups. I found it difficult. Now I use a script I wrote to copy to both a network NAS and a single external disk for backup.

You can usually check the SMART status of your individual disks in your array from the management console on your RAID controller - this is usually a web interface. On some brands and models, you can configure it to email you when a probable impending failure is detected.

EDIT: I would recommend disks that have Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) for your array. A disk can get caught up in an error recovery routine, stop responding to RAID monitoring poll, and then the array will drop it. You'll need to rebuild. A four disk RAID 5 array could take a whole day to rebuild.
 
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Is a good RAID card (4+ hard drive support) about $150+?

I see that even crappy brands with 2 drive support are ~$40.

I may end up just forgetting about RAID and mapping each of these drives as a network drive. I still have 6TB+ of usable RAID space in my QNAP which will be more than enough for the stuff I absolutely can't do without.

I'm reconsidering my Linux (ubuntu) vs Windows decision. However, if I'm just mapping my network drives I feel like it will still be way easier to do through Windows. I've done it through Ubuntu in the past and don't recall how to do it but I'm sure if I asked someone they'd say:

"Oh that's easy! Open terminal, download this package, if it doesn't download go to this link <link>. When that's downloaded open this ini file, it can be configured 1 of 12 ways so spend 3 hours reading each of these 12 documents to see what's best for you. They're in Russian so make sure you have a good translator".

I know that's a little extreme, just taking a jab at it. I love to tinker with Linux but sometimes I just want to get up and running and unfortunately Linux just isn't there yet.
 
If you are going for a NAS device, I recommend Synology, the 8-port model is $1000.
If you are building your own you can go SW RAID or HW RAID.
It all depends on how important your data is to you.

>> Is a good RAID card (4+ hard drive support) about $150+?
Most are $300+

I have a 3ware-9650SE-4PML I am not using if interested..
 
war9200 said:
If you are going for a NAS device, I recommend Synology, the 8-port model is $1000.
If you are building your own you can go SW RAID or HW RAID.
It all depends on how important your data is to you.

>> Is a good RAID card (4+ hard drive support) about $150+?
Most are $300+

I have a 3ware-9650SE-4PML I am not using if interested..
Click to expand...

I don't want a 2nd NAS. I want a HTPC a little bit and some more storage a little bit more. I don't want either of them enough to build dedicated machines but if I can get them in the same box I'll spend the money. So far I spent $150 (AMD A4 based) and I already have about 5TB of hard drives laying around.
 
Are they all of the same brand? Or a mixture? How much do you want to protect your data? If you want a small HTPC, you could just get 2 x 4TB and put them in RAID-1 either with BIOS RAID (not great, but it works) or a RAID card.
 
war9200 said:
Are they all of the same brand? Or a mixture? How much do you want to protect your data? If you want a small HTPC, you could just get 2 x 4TB and put them in RAID-1 either with BIOS RAID (not great, but it works) or a RAID card.
Click to expand...

They're different brands.

2x 1TB WD green
2 x 1TB Hitachi

and another WD and Hitatchi (<1TB).

I have no interest in spending money on this as I have a fully functionally 4x2TB QNAP. This is more of a backup for my backup.

I want to protect my data but I don't want to double my investment in this. If I can build a somewhat safe RAID (at least one I can have a chance to save before it fails) I'll be happy. If not I'll just install an OS and map them out to my network.
 
As others have mentioned, RAID is not a backup, if you don't want to spend more money, use the other drives as backup drives and backup throughout the course of a week to different drives.
 
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