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Hardware Raid questions.

I

Ideon

n00b
Joined
Oct 17, 2012
Messages
63
This may be a pretty “noobish” question but I’ve never done a lot with Raids before besides the one I did with my SSD’d in my sig but I want to build a Win 7 Pro based server / PVR / HTPC. I’ve looked around but can’t really find a solid answer but my question/s are
1. For redundancy Raid 10 over Raid 5? I’m leaning more towards 10 from what I’ve read.
2. If I build a raid with the mother boards built in raid (either 10 or 5) and if and when a drive were to fail, if I remove the bad drive and put a new one in will it automatically rebuild the new drive and get it caught up? Or would I need an actual server mobo or real raid card to achieve this?

I’m looking at using 3tb drives. So 4 drives for raid 10 or 3 drives for raid 5 for 6tb of storage.
My goal is to have a system that if a drive does die on me I can replace the drive and the other drives will repair and copy over the information it should have on it. Which is why I am leaning more towards raid 10 then raid 5.

Thoughts?

Thanks in Advance!!
 
Raid 5 or Raid 10 will do that yes, however I would suggest going simply with 2 sets of mirrors and using software raid. That way your array is not tied to any specific hardware, and mirrors are a lot harder to mess up as you can always just take one of the drives and use it as if it was never in raid in the first place.
 
But if i do a mirror that's just two drives in raid 1 which would give me only 3tb of storage. I'd like to do 6tb roughly as I'm already running a 2tb drive that is almost full as it is and I'd like to some what future proof myself for a good while to come.
 
If you're using 3Tb drives, then RAID 5 would actually give you 9Tb storage, assuming using 4 drives.
RAID 10 would give you 6Tb.
RAID 5 can handle the loss of one drive, and should rebuild automatically when you replace the dead drive, but comes with a performance overhead. You need a decent CPU.
RAID 10 can also handle the loss of 1 drive, and has a 'chance' of being OK with the loss of two.
For example, if you have 4 drives arranged like this:
A1 - A2 (stripe)
B1 - B2, (mirror of stripe)
So if A1 failed, you could lose another one, as long as it's not B1. Make sense?

Weigh up the options. Lose 25% of your capacity, or give up 50% for slightly better redundancy. But you should have a backup anyway. RAID is not backup.
It will cover you for drive failure only.
 
I understand that Raid is not a back up but what i am thinking is that if a drive dies in the Raid that the lost data that was on that drive would be recovered by the other drive/s having mirrord that drive already. Or does the raid only recover the drive back into the raid array and that data is plainly just lost for good?

I guess this is what I am trying to figure out.

Also I thought you could only run a raid 5 if you have an odd number of drives with 3 being the minimum? I thought drives 1-2 would be stripped in a sense and the 3rd drive is for parity? I've been around on different sites reading different things so I'm starting to credit what they are saying.. :( But i guess that's what the [H] forums are for, getting real answers lol. And thanks guys for the info it is helping me a lot and figure out what all I've been reading and what I want to do here for me media and files.
 
Yes, it will recover the data too, not just the array. If a drive fails, you pull it out and replace with a new one.
It takes hours to rebuild, but you'll have all your data back.
No, RAID 5 doesn't use a dedicated parity disk, it uses 'distributed parity'.
So in a 4 disk array, 25% of each disk is used for parity.
I think 3 is the minimum no of disks, but really, there's no actual limit. I'm using 4, I know people using 5,6,7....etc.
 
Ok that is what I am shooting / hoping for lol. But my plan is to build a low power unit but I've also read that using for example the WD green drives can cause problems within a raid because when they are active for a while they spin down and some raid controllers drop the hard drive from the array or think the drive has failed. is this true? If so i was looking at the WD red drives even though they are little more money it would be worth it to avoid such problems down the road.
 
I think the problem with greens is not the low power spin down, I have 2 in my NAS running RAID 1 and never had any issues.
I think the problem is with error recovery, it's normal for an HDD to take a while trying to recover a bad sector, which is fine normally, but in RAID the controller might think the drive has failed because it's not responding (it's busy trying to fix the error).
The reds have TLER (time limited error recovery) meaning they won't spend more than a few seconds trying to fix a bad sector.
 
This is the configuration I am looking at minus the hard drives and the raid config (still thinking about it)
I have a File server / HTPC already but upgrading to something like this.

Mobo: MSI H77MA-G43 LGA 1155
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130648
CPU: (Chose this CPU due to it only being 35W) Intel Core I3 2120T SB 2.6Ghz
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115094
GPU: (already own) ATI 5450 video and sound via HDMI
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102877
SSD: (for OS and already own) Crucial M4 64gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148441
Ram: (unsure of 8 or 16gb for PVR) Corsair DDR3 1600mhz
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233255
TV Tuner: Centon Quad Tuner
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815706001
PSU: 300-350W depending on what I need in the end that is also “green” seeing this unit will run 24/7 in my house.

The OS drive I was thinking will have Acronis installed on it to back up an image onto the raid as well so if something happened I can reimage the SSD being it will be a stand alone drive.

My future plans is to build a WHS in a separate box but that will cost even more money and I’m just a tech support / help desk tech so I don’t make the big money so I do with what I can :(
 
Ideon said:
But if i do a mirror that's just two drives in raid 1 which would give me only 3tb of storage. I'd like to do 6tb roughly as I'm already running a 2tb drive that is almost full as it is and I'd like to some what future proof myself for a good while to come.
Click to expand...

Two sets of mirrors. Thats 4 drives, in two groups.

Be careful with RAID5 and large drives (2TB+) as you can run into an error during the rebuild, and then lose the entire array. I would suggest going with raid 6 if you do that, but then with 4 drives you might as well have gone 10, or just use two separate mirrors. Keeping it simple is a good thing :)
 
09Avenger said:
Looks like a good setup, but why the video card?
The i3 already has an onboard GPU.
Click to expand...

Well I already own the video card, and I'm not sure what kind of load the Centon card would need to record 4 HD channels at once plus playback, streaming files to other computers in the house. I'm just thinking what the max draw on the system could be and knowing at the same time that it won't be running that hard very often. That and if I can dump some if the work load onto the video card then why not.
 
Ideon said:
Well I already own the video card, and I'm not sure what kind of load the Centon card would need to record 4 HD channels at once plus playback, streaming files to other computers in the house. I'm just thinking what the max draw on the system could be and knowing at the same time that it won't be running that hard very often. That and if I can dump some if the work load onto the video card then why not.
Click to expand...

I can tell you that you should use the video card if you have it. The output is going to be better for HTPC purposes than what's in SB.
 
Yeah I am pretty happy with the AMD drivers for the audio and video playback of the card. It's a passive card (no fan) so for a HTPC it's a great card. I've been using this card for a couple years now and it's a great / cheap card.
 
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