Newb wants infomration/help

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mrmagoo_83

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 8, 2002
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Computers I know, RAID I do not, so I need a little help on what it will take to do what I am wanting to do. I have done some research, but nothing really pops out as "what to do if you want to do this" type information.

I have a 1U server, as well as a 4U Machine. Nothing fancy, just some acquirements I received. My plan was to throw in an IcyDock 5x3 SATA cage into the 4U machine, and use it as media storage, combine it with a sixth drive for redundancy. I am guessing RAID 5 would probably be best, or would RAID 1 be better? I want it so that if a drive crashes I dont lose it all or lose any part of it. Speed isn't really that big of an issue, as it is just a media server for movies, music, and pictures that will be streamed via wireless network to my HTPC in the living room.

The question, is I guess I need a motherboard, or RAID card that will handle 6 drives SATA drives, correct? With that said, if I get a motherboard with say 10 connectors, can I use 1 connector as a regular drive, and then 6 for the RAID, or when I tell the motherboard I want to use RAID does it put all the SATA connectors into RAID mode?
 
Should be able to. As long as all the connectors are RAID capable. My old A8N-SLI had 8 connectors, only half of which could be RAIDed. As far as RAID 1 vs 5, you'd have to ask someone else.

EDIT: This page seems put it in a nice perspective.
 
jay2472000 said:
What OS do you plan on using?
Click to expand...

Yes. lol. I have no idea what OS. I am starting to think this is a waste of effort attempting to get this type of setup running, and I would be better off doing something else with these cases, possibly modding them to take an ATX board.
 
Heh, dont get discouraged. I started off with a small XP Pro machine set up as my personal server and now Im pushing almost 10 Tb :D I would say, lets figure out a budget,what equipment you currently have, and what other personal preferences you have, then go from there. Raid is not too difficult, (and understand my experiences are limited, so I dont mean to be "humbling" to those sysadmins that manage huge server rooms)
 
Budget is small, my simple plan is to wait till 2TB drop to around $99, then pickup up a batch of them. Currently I do not have a board capable of running many SATA drives, so I will have to purchase a MB or RAID controller card. I want to update my main rig this spring, so I might be able to use it as the primary board with an add on controller, or I have an older MSI S9393 setup currently running my HTPC, so I might do a switch-a-roo. Use the MSI to run the 'server', put my current setup into the HTPC and upgrade my main rig.

Right now my main rig, which is also functioning as my media server, is running XP Pro, with 6 or 7 PATA & SATA drives, I think I have just over a TB all together. Most of my media is in ISO format, which I am trying to reduce down to AVIs, but it takes an hour + on my machine to recode the video, so that gets old fast when you are talking about a few hundred ISOs. And then my AVI storage drive is about full, so it has just snowballed into requiring more and more space. I figure a RAID 5 at 10TBs should be enough to hold for a while...I hope. I am finally getting my wife into the idea of having one touch access to all our DVD collection, instead of having to find a DVD an put it in. Plus, she really likes the MediaPortal application I am using, as with the cover art being displayed on the TV my 2 year old can pick out the movie/cartoon he wants to watch by seeing the pictures.
 
Ok, the HTPC stuff is way out of my comfort zone so Im gonna concentrate on the server side. If it were me, knowing I had an upgrade planned I would buy the following first . http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136317 and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145027 This will give you a convienent way to add space, and I personally have that particular enclosure and its been super helpful as it will do IDE and Sata to USB and eSata connections so youll use it quite a bit if you do any kind of HD recovery , etc for friends/family. Then I would wait until I had my new pc built, and convert the older one over to a WHS setup. At that point you would wanna get one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009 and hopefully the 2Tb drives have dropped in price enough to make those a worthwhile investment.

Now, if you decide to use WHS, you can eliminate any raid worries, as it has its own form of JBOD built in. Also, the usual caveat applies to WHS machines as any server, its not a backup, hence why I have 2 WHS , one server backs up all my data to another WHS machine.

There are other ways to do it, IE, using Freenas as your OS, etc and Im sure youll get varying opinions Im just comfortable with Windows, aven though its not perfect, I have learned to use it quit well and dont wanna learn a new OS.

Good luck
 
WHS is what I was thinking, $100 or so and pretty easy to configure from what I hear.
 
New thought branching from other project. Will a 2.8GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM run WHS? I have a machine from work that is an industrial machine with a CPU daughter card, its out dated for what we required at work so it was decommissioned. I was going to attempt to make it into a multiprocessor setup, but found out it would be more expensive and tedious than worth while.

But it does have like a dozen PCI slots, I can stick one of those $100 SATA cards listed above in it. Home network is 10/100 and wireless so no need to get a GB card or anything.

Might could just slap WHS on it, and a card, cage, and HDDs, and go from there...maybe.
 
As far as basic RAID info, RAID1 is mirroring. For every data drive, you have a backup copy of that drive. The controller simply writes the data to two drives instead of one. If the drive dies, you have a spare copy of it. It's pretty simple with low overhead, but you have to buy twice as much disk space as you want to use.

RAID5 uses parity. In a simple 3 disk array, it puts data on two disks' worth of space and the results of the parity calculation on the third. If any single drive dies, you use the parity calculation to figure out what bits should be on that missing drive. You only lose one drive's worth of space, but the parity calculations can make things slower.

A problem with RAID5 is that when a drive fails, the array needs to read everything on both the other drives to do the parity calculation and rebuild the data on the replacement drive. This increased activity can lead to other drives failing, especially if the drives are all from the same batch (i.e. if one wears out, that means that an identical drive is probably likely to fail too). Until the new drive finishes rebuilding, your data is unprotected, and with drives getting bigger the rebuilds are taking longer. With RAID1, at least you have a fully functional spare copy of the disk that can be read independently. RAID6 is meant to help the issue of RAID5 rebuilds. RAID6 adds another parity disk so you can have two drives fail simultaneously and still have enough info to reconstruct the failed drives. It's not really a fix so much as just throwing in another drive to make it less likely that you'll lose too many drives to recover from.

One other thing...
RAID IS NOT BACKUP.
RAID is designed to keep a system running despite a physical drive failure. It does not protect against someone deleting a file, a power supply blowing up and taking out the whole server, or a fire burning the building down. For any disk problem other than a physical drive failure, RAID will not help you one bit. You may be better off building a single-drive backup server for your single-drive PC (offsite is best, but even onsite is good) than having a single system with a pair of RAIDed disks. With a separate backup server, any sort of disk problem on your machine can be fixed up to the point of the last backup. Spilled Mt. Dew in your PC? Restore the backup copy. Virus corrupted some data files? Restore the backup copy. ID10T error resulting in deleted files? Restore the backup copy.

For best results, you should go into this expecting a drive with important data to fail. If you expect that and are prepared for it, you should be set.
 
I understand RAID is not a backup, its a simple redundant method I am looking for. I will not have heavy traffic on my setup, its a simple home media server. The only reason I was thinking about going with RAID was that I could have large storage capacity with the chance to not lose 5+TB of data because I had one drive fail. Since there are not 5+TB drives out there now, there is no way to do a single drive backup of all the data I have, and the data itself is not important as I already have all of the media backed up on the original DVDs, it would just mean a lot of time to reconvert everything back to AVIs.

There is nothing important about this data, but as I said the only way I see to get the best odds of not losing the entire thing is RAID. JBOD doesn't seem like a good idea because if I lose one in the middle the data from it is gone, right? With RAID5 I should be able to recover that disc, hopefully without destroying the others with a rebuild. I am simply looking for the most logical and cost effective way of storing all my DVDs and CDs while giving myself an out if something dies. Right now I have 6 different hard drives with data spread across them, all of which are nearly full, and I have already had to deal with one of them dying and losing all the data on that drive. I am trying to avoid that event happening again.
 
mrmagoo_83 said:
I understand RAID is not a backup, its a simple redundant method I am looking for. I will not have heavy traffic on my setup, its a simple home media server. The only reason I was thinking about going with RAID was that I could have large storage capacity with the chance to not lose 5+TB of data because I had one drive fail. Since there are not 5+TB drives out there now, there is no way to do a single drive backup of all the data I have, and the data itself is not important as I already have all of the media backed up on the original DVDs, it would just mean a lot of time to reconvert everything back to AVIs.

There is nothing important about this data, but as I said the only way I see to get the best odds of not losing the entire thing is RAID. JBOD doesn't seem like a good idea because if I lose one in the middle the data from it is gone, right? With RAID5 I should be able to recover that disc, hopefully without destroying the others with a rebuild. I am simply looking for the most logical and cost effective way of storing all my DVDs and CDs while giving myself an out if something dies. Right now I have 6 different hard drives with data spread across them, all of which are nearly full, and I have already had to deal with one of them dying and losing all the data on that drive. I am trying to avoid that event happening again.
Click to expand...

Correct. JBOD is the same as having 5 separate 1TB drives, just combined into one big 5TB drive. If any drive dies, the data on that particular drive is gone. Getting at the good data on the other 4 drives may or may not be very easy, depending on the filesystem and controller. With RAID5, you'd have 5x1TB disks for data plus another drive for parity. You'd get 5TB of data storage out of 6x1TB disks. If any single drive failed, the other 5 disks with the parity calculations could rebuild that drive's data. If a second disk failed before the replacement finished rebuilding, all 5TB of data are gone. With RAID1 mirroring, you essentially have a spare copy of every disk. You have to buy a backup drive for each data drive you want to use (10x1TB drives), but all 5 data drives could die and you'd still have the 5 backup copies.

RAID1 gives you more data protection, at the cost of a lot more drives. JBOD gives you no data protection. RAID5 gives you an extra drive's worth of protection. You only have to buy one extra drive, but you can only handle a single drive failure and you have extra workload from the parity calculations.


criccio said:
Forget RAID.

WHS

/thread
Click to expand...

The data mirroring in WHS may be the easiest way to go. I think it's less efficient on space than RAID5, but it also doesn't require a special controller or complex setup. It might be the best way to get what you're after with minimal work.
 
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