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Need Help Setting Up a Storage Server

A

All Killer No Filler

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 29, 2005
Messages
257
I have two PC's, one that is my primary machine, mainly used for gaming, and one that is simply for storing media (pictures, movies, documents, etc.) The file server (for lack of a better term) has a 2 TB drive in it that is almost full. I am backing up some of that data to an external 1.5 TB hard drive daily. What I would like to do is remove the external drive from the equation and set up a RAID that has parity. My questions are:

1. Which RAID level should I use to do this? 5? 10?

2. Should I do this at the BIOS level or is it better to use software?

3. This probably depends on the RAID, but how easy is it to expand storage by adding additional drives?

4. All the drives have to be identical correct? If so, when one fails, and the disk isn't manufactured anymore, what do you do?

The file server does not need to access the data as quickly as possible. I only really need it to be fast enough to play movies over my home network.

Any advice would be appreciated!
 
You will still need a backup solution, RAID does not equal a backup, only redundant storage and you can still lose it all. If you have the budget RAID 10 gives you better performance and redundancy then RAID 5 but at double the cost, otherwise RAID 5 is fine. Expandability is dependent on the RAID controller, usually its as easy as adding more drives and hitting 'expand' in the controller BIOS or web gui, but again it depends on the controller. When doing RAID the drives have to be the same size, yes. When one fails, simply replace it with the same size, manufacturer doesn't matter, if its a 7200 RPM drive, replace it with a same size 7200 RPM drive. Not sure what you mean by BIOS level, either you are going to do hardware RAID or software RAID, you may want to look into the various software RAID solutions out there like SNAPRAID which allows you to use drives of various sizes.
 
ashman said:
You will still need a backup solution, RAID does not equal a backup, only redundant storage and you can still lose it all.
Click to expand...

Confused about this. I thought that the benefit of RAID 5 or RAID 10 was that it is not necessary to backup data because if one drive fails, a replacement drive will "fix" the RAID and no data will be lost. Not true?

Sorry if these are really dumb questions.
 
All Killer No Filler said:
Confused about this. I thought that the benefit of RAID 5 or RAID 10 was that it is not necessary to backup data because if one drive fails, a replacement drive will "fix" the RAID and no data will be lost. Not true?

Sorry if these are really dumb questions.
Click to expand...

What if you delete the data? What if two drives fail? What if a controller problem causes corruption? What if someone steals your computer? Or the house catches on fire?
 
I'd add that raid-5 really doesn't cut it anymore, especially as drive sizes have gotten so large, meaning rebuild time increases. You have a drive fail, there are a lot of nervous hours as you stress the remaining drives to rebuild the new one. If another drive fails in that time, ALL of your data is gone. Raid6 should be the minimum parity raid level.

My new archive server for example, is raidz3, meaning it can withstand 3 drive failures without loss.
 
Raid does not equal backup.

Setup a raid 5 or 10 depending on how much you want to spend. Use an external hdd for backups.

My setup is 3x1tb drives in software raid 5 backed up to a 3tb external. I went with software raid 5 because I can add more drives if I need them.
 
If the data is important, and considering you want to use redundant storage ie RAID, I am assuming it is. You want at least a second copy of your data somewhere, where and what that is, is up to you. As other mentioned, any kind of accident can destroy your data from something as small as a power outage to the house burning down. If you can keep a copy of the data offsite, say in the cloud, great, if not, some people rotate external drives and keep one in the trunk of their car or at a friends house. How much data you have will make it easier in some cases to choose any of the aforementioned solutions. I happen to have about 26TB of media between two NAS's in my basement, all of that is replicated to a storage server with a single RAID controller connected to 16 2TB drives in a RAID 5 with hot spare config, its not elegant or fast, but its a second copy of my data. I also have a fraction of that media burned to BDR disks as well, for archival use, they get stored offsite.
 
There are lots of options.

Personaly, for this case, I would go with a raid6, and an cloud backup service.

Now what kind of raid6, depends on your technical knowhow.

The simple, but more limited, would be, to get a hardware raid controller that does raid6. If it fails, your likely limited to using a like controller for recovery, and expanding depends on that controllers limitations.

If you are more able, I would recommend software raid. As then you are not limited or locked in to any specific brand, or model line of raid card. But software raid, when it has issues, is more user intensive to deal with.

Software raids type you could use, would be linux mdadm, snapraid, unraid, zfs, even windows has some too.
 
1) As others have said, a form of RAID 6 would be your best bet.

2) Software in general since the onboard RAID for a lot of motherboards don't support RAID 6.

3) Depends on the software RAID you're using. Some are really easy to do and some requires a different line of thinking in regards to "expansion".

4) They don't have to be identical.

patrickdk has listed many of the more commone software RAID types.
 
Thanks for the suggestions guys! Since I was mistaken in my assumption that I could treat a RAID with parity as a backup, I will probably just get a larger external hard drive (for backup) and put any addition drives I get for the server in RAID 0. Simple.
 
All Killer No Filler said:
1. Which RAID level should I use to do this? 5? 10?

2. Should I do this at the BIOS level or is it better to use software?

3. This probably depends on the RAID, but how easy is it to expand storage by adding additional drives?

4. All the drives have to be identical correct? If so, when one fails, and the disk isn't manufactured anymore, what do you do?

The file server does not need to access the data as quickly as possible. I only really need it to be fast enough to play movies over my home network.

Any advice would be appreciated!
Click to expand...

Look into snapraid which can run on top of windows, basically any hardware can work with it. It can support 6 parity drives and any number of data drives of different sizes, they don't need to be identical. Expanding is as easy as adding the new drive in the settings file. If one drive fails, you can replace it with any drive of equal size or a larger one as long as it doesn't exceed your parity drive size.

I use snapraid on my mediaserver and has fixed a few silent errors and recovered some accidentally deleted media.
 
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