Recommendations for 20TB RAID 6 system

[JoeComp]

If you can't recongize your own biases then your ability to provide advice is greatly compromised; hardest lesson I have learned on my engineering life.

Unfortunately, you have not learned the lesson. The most biased person is the one who thinks he is not biased. It is hypocritical for you to accuse others of bias when you clearly have an agenda.

 

[Rectal Prolapse]

"it also spins all drives in the pool to watch a single movie" <-- actually, I've had drives remain spun down on my 30 TB ZFS pool, because I added more drives to the pool later, when the original pool was already at 90%.

So JoeComp is unbiased?

 

[haileris]

Sure, I must say first though that the amount of knowledge that has been transpiring back and forth on this thread has been most educational to read and I thank all of you for it.

To address your question, I have currently about 12TB of media that I wish to transfer over, and as all media collections go that will grow. I have large files (40GB video files) and small files relatively (MP3's and JPEGS). Most of the space is the video section and that is what I am concerned about the most as the rooms in the house can each stream them from source to their corresponding screen. The SONOS is nice but as the bit rate for that to each section is negligible compared to the video stream.

I have time to maintain the storage system each week but it is not something I want to worry about and baby either. I have systems that I do rsync backups to now that rotate and use off site storage for the most critical.

If things happen to go sideways, other than being a very unhappy person, I would be able to restore a significant portion of the data.

Any other questions I may assist with so that I can take advantage of the brain power in this thread please let me know.

Regards

The nicest feature about snapshot-type RAID is that it doesn't change the hosted data one bit. If 3 disks fail with 2 parity disks etc then you lose 1 disk worth of data. There is no special recovery or anything like that needed, as is typically the case on h/w RAID.

I think there are a number of ZFS SME's here who can cover the recovery angle off for you if you want to go down that route

 

[_Gea]

each technology has advantages and disadvantages
ZFS for example was not designed for low power media servers at home

It is unique with
real data checksum covering disks, cables, controller and controller driver
self healing Raid against silent errors (any disk failures are repaired on access or during online scrubs due to checksums)
highest available Raid-Z3 level (allows 3 failed disks without any data-loss)
datasnaps without time delay or initial space consumption (due copy on write)
conversion of multiple small slow writes to one large fast sequential write (due copy on write)
striped fast Raid system (performance scales with number of vdevs/disks) without write hole (due copy on write)
expandable 128bit pools with no reachable limits within the next thousands years, partitions that can grow up to pool capacity

these are the enterprise features (mostly unique because they need real data checksums and copy on write to reach this level)
at home, you have the limit that

- you cannot reach storage limits but should expand pools with several disks each time (no single disk to add)
- all disks are always active during use (striped Raid), so power consumption depends on total number of disks, although you can use multiple pools
- must use Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux or OSX (best in this order)

so it depends on your expectation and needs, nothing is always the best

 

[madrebel]

you could do a low power setup for home based on 5300 rpm drives (can even do sas if you wanted too), low power CPU, and lvdimms. performance would be acceptable for home use.

at some point though you just have to swallow the reality pill that 10+ hard drives consumes power.

or just go with all 800GB SSDs .

 

[J Macker]

Do those Norco rackmount cases have room for the motherboard & psu? Everything fits in it?

They look nice, but it's very expensive for the shear convenience of having all the bays hot swap in rackmount form. I don't need rackmount, and I can live with opening the case, so I think I may just use a standard tower case to save some money.

 

[haileris]

Do those Norco rackmount cases have room for the motherboard & psu? Everything fits in it?

They look nice, but it's very expensive for the shear convenience of having all the bays hot swap in rackmount form. I don't need rackmount, and I can live with opening the case, so I think I may just use a standard tower case to save some money.

Yes they do. I suspect that on the whole they have better airflow than the typical tower case, especially if you start using cheap 4-in-3 hard drive boxes.

Btw, with one of my coolermaster stackers I can probably get 16 drives in one case, 20 drives with 4 x 5-in-3 boxes but then they are so expensive typically you could have bought the Norco by then.

I don't believe that its a bad choice to go for a tower, but if you want to get a heap of drives over time maybe buying the rackmount case is a better choice.

Having said that, Norco used to have crap quality control with their backplanes so hope that are better now.

 

[mikehunt114]

Do those Norco rackmount cases have room for the motherboard & psu? Everything fits in it?

They look nice, but it's very expensive for the shear convenience of having all the bays hot swap in rackmount form. I don't need rackmount, and I can live with opening the case, so I think I may just use a standard tower case to save some money.

1 X cheapish case with lots of 5.25 in. bays = approx. $120
4 X 5-in-3 adapters = approx. $400.
Max. drives = 20

My conclusion was that I might as well just buy the Norco at $400 and have room for 24 drives.