Refs or NTFS for non raid media server

[hifiaudio2]

I am buying Seagate archive 8TB HDs for my media server. I am told the SMR does not play well with raid, so I am just going with either JBOD and a single drive letter or just separate drives and letters. Would ReFS help mitigate any issues at all (as in file repairing capabilities helping with a drive going bad, data loss, etc), or is there little benefit and going with NTFS for performance and / or compatibility would be a better idea?

Thanks!

 

[drescherjm]

just separate drives and letters.

Snapraid would do that well with multiple individual disks and would not cause a performance issue with SMR drives since the parity update is not real time (it is manual). Although I recommend that you use at minimum 2 parity drives so it may not be a good option unless you plan on purchasing 6+ drives.

 

[hifiaudio2]

Sounds like a good idea... and I see that it has a GUI in the form of Elucidate... any reason using that would not be recommended?

I only bought two of the 8TB drives, but could buy a third and run the Snapraid equivalent of raid 5.

I see that the "manual" parity update is just called a snapshot by the developer... is this equivalent to what most enterprise storage vendors mean by a snapshot? A point in time picture of the data as it resides? How much data (as a %) is taken up by a typical snapshot? Does it support keeping multiple snapshots, or just overwrites the most recent, etc?

 

[drescherjm]

is this equivalent to what most enterprise storage vendors mean by a snapshot?

No. Its not really that type of snapshot and you can not have more than 1 snapshot. It will create a parity file on the parity disks at least as large as the most (space) used drive in your pool. When you update the parity by a sync the parity file (located on each of your parity disks) will grow to the new maximum size. when you run a scrub it the parity file should not grow but the integrity of your data and parity files will be checked.

There also is a content file (that is a few MB). That I store on all of 6 of my data disks. This file stores the mapping between files and blocks as well as checksums for the blocks.

I see that it has a GUI in the form of Elucidate

I do not use that so I can not comment. I use SnapRAID primarily on linux and do the sync / scrub .. commands via the shell.