Need Help With NAS

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FelixJongleur

n00b
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Nov 11, 2011
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I'm trying to set up a NAS at home to supply my house (and maybe external) with movies, pictures and music.


Here are my requirements
- I would like some data redundancy like RAID5 or RAID6.
- I would like this to be backed up to a cloud service like crashplan or backblaze etc.

Here's what I currently have.

4 x 2TB 7200 SATAII

- Main Rig Win7
- i7 2550K - 8GB DDR3
- GIGABYTE GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3

- Extra Rig
- i7 920 - 6GB DDR3
- EVGA X58 SLI LE


I've already tried installing FreeNAS on the extra rig got all the harddrives working and like the browser interface, but after spending about a week looking and experimenting I couldn't find a good option to back it up to the cloud.

So then I was going to just say screw the extra rig - why have two comps on - put the drives back in the Win7 machine to find out they removed RAID5 support except from win server. So just this morning I installed windows server 2012, created the RAID5 pool and its resynching right now (I've read this can take a huge amount of time even for empty drives).

I like this option because I can still install windows programs for torrents and backing up to the cloud (crashplan supports windows server), I only have one computer on at all times, and although I'm tech savvy and could work my around FreeNAS and other linux options, I know windows a lot better.

AND I could sell the i7 920 rig and get some money in my pocket.

So testing out the read/write speeds on the 5TB+ RAID5 I've been getting about 70Mb/sec read but only 10Mb/s writes. I know that these speeds are impacted because it is currently resynching but I don't think its impacting it that much and 10Mb/s writes is abysmal at best.

So my question is with the hardware I have listed here what's my best option to go with that will suite all my needs.

I don't really have any budget right now to be buying anything so I just have to make due with what I have. I also have a really cheapy "hardware raid" card from rosewill that I tried out using win7 but I was getting similar read/write as software raid in win server.

Thanks in advance!
 
Hi Felix, when you say you are using "Windows Server 2012 RAID 5", can you please be more specific?

Specifically, are you running a "Parity" Storage Spaces array? (Which is basically software RAID 5). I ask because the Parity based Storage Spaces arrays have terribly slow write speeds. Far lower then should be.

My recommendation is this: If you want maximum speed, get a PCIe RAID card, like an LSI (rebranded ones like the IBM m1505 are quite cheap too).

If you just want reasonable performance with a software based solution, WHILE keeping a Windows based OS (For software compatibility and familiarity), then check out FlexRAID

I personally use FlexRAID on my WHS 2011 server (Media sharing/streaming and backups mostly), and I'm using an odd mish-mash of drive sizes and brands, with some drives on the internal motherboard SATA connections, and some inside a SAS expander, and I still get on average, 50MB/s write speeds. If you used all the same size/model of drives, that speed will likely increase a bit, and if all your drives are connected directly to the motherboard, that'll help increase your speeds too.

Flexraid is easy to setup (there are step by step guides for beginners as well), easy to expand, including online expansion, and it's, well, FLEXible, because you don't need to use the same sizes of drives.

It has 2 modes, live RAID, and Snapshot RAID:
- Snapshot RAID has faster read/write speeds, and is best for fairly stagnant data (doesn't change much throughout the day). Then it does the parity calculations on schedule (However often you want, I do once a day, you could do once a week, or anything really).
- Live RAID acts exactly the same as hardware raid or linux/zfs type raid, where it calculates the parity on the fly. This is best for data that is constantly in flux, but there is a small write penalty (not much though, still much faster then Storage Spaces).

Anyway, that's my thoughts.
 
So it looks like my speeds were a little bit off.

10r7sr7.png


But in real world situations large files transfer at about 50 Mb/s and if I do an assortment of file sizes I get anywhere between 10 Mb/s - 80 Mb/s.

All 4 of my HDDs are attached via the motherboard sata, and yes I am using WHS RAID 5 so software raid.

I don't really have the money for a PCIe RAID card, would I see much of an improvement switching to FlexRAID? (Enough to validate having to buy it also)

Thanks!
 
Damn near anything is better than what Windows offers. Yes FlexRaid would work, but then again so would Ubuntu+ZFS. That gives you the speed of ZFS with a whole lot of extra packages that usually don't exist in Unix flavors without recompile. But since you have Windows already installed try FlexRaid first.
 
So I tried using FlexRAID in Windows Server 2012. I had it set up as a real time raid with 4 x 2TB drives with about 5.5TB usable space. Under this configuration here where my new speeds compared to WS2012 software raid.

Read [MB/s]​
seq --> 767.5​
512K --> 844.6​
4K --> 151.6​


Write[MB/s]​
seq --> 382.8​
512K --> 358​
4K --> 55.71​

Since then I've switched back to running Win7 since I was having a lot of compatibility issues and just overall problems with Windows Server 2012, and I also put the FlexRAID under snapshot since its just a media server that wont have frequent changes so calculating and storing the parity at night isn't a big deal, and these were my numbers

33etnno.jpg


So I'm definitely happier with these speeds considering I don't have anything on my network that could write that fast to it or read that fast to it =)
 
There's no way you're getting those numbers without massive caching on 4x 2TB spinners
 
Right? So what do you think is going on?

I have an
- i7 2550K - 8GB DDR3
- GIGABYTE GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
- 60GB OCZ Vertex 2
- 2 x 2TB Hitachi Deckstar 5400RPM SATA3
- 2 x 2TB Hitachi Deckstar 7200RPM SATA2

with all drives just attached to the motherboard.

I have a fresh copy of win7 installed all updated.

Installed FlexRAID with no extras - with cruise control and snapshot selected.
 
If I had to guess I'd say flexraid was doing some massive caching, 1GB of data with 8GB RAM is a fairly trivial cache. Definitely increase the data size to 4GB, if possible take out some of that RAM, might have to test with ioMeter with a much larger data set
 
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