FlexRAID shortcomings. NAS? Other Software?

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NotSoSimple

[H]F Junkie
Joined
May 17, 2003
Messages
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I have been using FlexRAID's RAID-F for a couple years now. For the price and ease of setup it was great. However I have been having horrible stability issues. Support for FlexRAID is at a minimum and the developer is less than helpful in most cases. I constantly have problems with the pooled volume disappearing, the services for FlexRAID randomly stopping, etc.

The Box:
Gigabyte P35-DS3L
Intel Q6600
8GB RAM
2x3TB SATA (One Parity One Storage)
2x2TB SATA (Storage)
1x1TB SATA (Storage)
1x80GB SSD (OS)

All drives in JBOD mode.


Environment:
Two HTPCs using a shared database living on my pooled storage
SONOS Play 1 utilizing iTunes library on pooled storage
Central storage for all personal files (Home videos, TONS of pictures, etc)
CrashPlan is backing up everyday from pooled storage>cloud
IP Security Cameras storing video (Not live recordings, they migrate from the NVR at specified intervals)

Storage is not my forte. The entire family uses it and I am tired of having to repair it a couple times a week and having instability and weird issues around the storage. I am to the point of wondering if a NAS enclosure would work. Just throw my drives in and not have to worry about it. Is there another option to consider?
 
Your absolutely right about support for the product being MIA. And the dedicated forum over there is pretty much dead at this point. It really is a shame considering how great the product is. I'm not sure how much better support you'll get with SnapRaid.

That being said, what sort of stability issues are you having exactly? I've been running FlexRaid Raid-F in expert mode, minus the pooling feature with a much larger data set "50TB " for the last two years and haven't encountered any real issues with the stable version. I literally just restored a failed 90% full, 3TB DRU a few days ago in roughly eight hours.I've never tried the pooling feature so can't comment on that aspect.

I did have to rebuild once after suffering some parity corruption after removing a DRU. Besides that it really has been a rock solid product otherwise
 
http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php?topic=3800.0

There is my thread over there with my issue. Unfortunately even setting the logs to Trace level do not show any errors. I was having a similar issue last year and they swore up and down it was memory related. I replaced the RAM and the same thing happened. I rebuilt the entire RAID and it fixed the problem... Then morphed into what I have now.
 
I have encountered issues in the past with some of the beta builds where the service would stop suddenly and couldn't be restarted. I can't quite remember what the fix was. I also had an issue where WHS 2011 backups for some reason would cause updates/validates to fail. Never figured out why, just moved the backups to a drive outside the snapshot set and all was well.

If you're fairly certain that your hardware's good, I'd stop or uninstall crash plans scanner/service and see if that has any effect. You could also uninstall FlexRaid, quick Reboot and then re-install everything. You should be able to reuse the existing parity data and be back up fairly quickly.

Or you could take the Nuclear option and just rebuild the whole thing. Shouldn't take more than a few hours to initialize 8TB.
 
Village Idiot said:
I have encountered issues in the past with some of the beta builds where the service would stop suddenly and couldn't be restarted. I can't quite remember what the fix was. I also had an issue where WHS 2011 backups for some reason would cause updates/validates to fail. Never figured out why, just moved the backups to a drive outside the snapshot set and all was well.

If you're fairly certain that your hardware's good, I'd stop or uninstall crash plans scanner/service and see if that has any effect. You could also uninstall FlexRaid, quick Reboot and then re-install everything. You should be able to reuse the existing parity data and be back up fairly quickly.

Or you could take the Nuclear option and just rebuild the whole thing. Shouldn't take more than a few hours to initialize 8TB.
Click to expand...

2.0u12 final [Snapshot 1.4 stable / Storage Pool 1.0 stable / Real-Time 1.0 experimental]
more is my current version and according to their site it is the latest stable. This week it has been pretty good, but the next time it happens I will kill CrashPlan and give it a shot. Don't want to go back through the uninstall/reinstall route due to me doing it before and it is just a bandaid.
 
mrkazador said:
I use snapraid on my media server and its very basic so theres not much that can go wrong. For pooling I use Junction folders. Its all free and it works :D
Click to expand...

Thats what I thought about FlexRAID :p And it is simple to setup and manage. When something goes wrong though, good luck!
 
Someone mentioned to do a full drive test to see if there were some drives failing. Unfortunately I find out my older 3ware Escalade 8000 series card will not allow any HD Diag tools to run on the drives behind it. So now to find a new card I guess.
 
NotSoSimple said:
Someone mentioned to do a full drive test to see if there were some drives failing. Unfortunately I find out my older 3ware Escalade 8000 series card will not allow any HD Diag tools to run on the drives behind it. So now to find a new card I guess.
Click to expand...

If the controller is in JBOD mode than you don't use the controller to do tests. You'll want to use something like Smartmontools to kick the drive into a long SMART test or something like HD Tune to do a surface read.
 
I used to use FlexRAID, but their software was having too much instability on my Windows machine. I decided that maybe I should reformat the same exact machine with Linux and see if FlexRAID was more reliable in that environment. NOPE, they wanted me to PAY FOR ANOTHER LICENSE just to use the same software on the same computer.

Now, I understood from the terms at the time of purchase that the license would be locked to that specific hardware and I was ok with that, because I didn't have any plans for hardware upgrades for many years to come. But NOWHERE did it say that the license would be permanently locked to that OS as well. That caveat was only revealed to me when I contacted their support via email on assistance transferring the license to the new OS. When I asked for links or documents showing the terms of use spelling out this restriction explicitly, they only directed me to forum posts where other users attempted to do the same thing.

Because of this ABSURD "customer service" and the fact that the software was so unstable, I completely dropped in favor of Snapraid + AUFS on a debian box. All I can say about this choice is that I don't know why I didn't do it sooner. I made this switch almost a full year ago, and the only time my file server has been down was due to power outages. Snapraid is rock solid and very VERY easy to setup. Drop Flexraid like a sack of bricks and switch to snapraid and you won't look back!
 
I got a new JBOD card and found my parity drive was in fact failing. I swapped it with another drive, blew the config away, and set it up again rebuilding parity from scratch. Everything was good, but two nights ago it did the same damn thing again. Ugh.
 
Back on this. Still unstable. Some times it is multiple times a day. I did long SMART tests and analysis on ALL drive using HD Sentinel and no problems found.

Any other product that will do pooling (No matter the size of disk) w/ a parity drive?
 
I use SnapRaid + Stablebit Drivepool. Currently pooling 36 disks in two pools - obviously excluding the parity disks snapraid uses for circa 140TB usable space. Touch wood no serious issues - did have a problem with the NTFS permissions being inconsistent at some stage. I've only done a practice snapraid restores so can't comment fully on the restore functionality in a pressure situation!
 
^ Drivepool + SnapRAID is the correct answer. This particular combo has made hardware raid obsolete for home media storage.

Both are best in breed for what they do. I actually helped design the SSD optimizer plug in for DrivePool :) and a number of things that got implemented in SnapRAID were from my suggestions (and nags) to its developer Andre.

The developer of each software is reachable if you have legit issues.
 
NotSoSimple said:
Thats what I thought about FlexRAID :p And it is simple to setup and manage. When something goes wrong though, good luck!
Click to expand...

You confuse "simple to use" with "simple". You want simple as in "too simple to fail in complex ways". Doesn't necessarily mean it's simple to use.
 
haileris said:
I use SnapRaid + Stablebit Drivepool. Currently pooling 36 disks in two pools - obviously excluding the parity disks snapraid uses for circa 140TB usable space. Touch wood no serious issues - did have a problem with the NTFS permissions being inconsistent at some stage. I've only done a practice snapraid restores so can't comment fully on the restore functionality in a pressure situation!
Click to expand...

DPI said:
^ Drivepool + SnapRAID is the correct answer. This particular combo has made hardware raid obsolete for home media storage.

Both are best in breed for what they do. I actually helped design the SSD optimizer plug in for DrivePool :) and a number of things that got implemented in SnapRAID were from my suggestions (and nags) to its developer Andre.

The developer of each software is reachable if you have legit issues.
Click to expand...

I will look into these. Thanks guys for the constructive feedback.
 
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