Software RAID5... is it good enough for my needs?

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farscapesg1

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Two of my storage drives (WD 500's) decided to up and bite the dust on me with the wonderful clicking-noise-of-death syndrome. Unfortunately, one of them had our document files, including family pictures, and of course the last time I remembered to back stuff up was in February :rolleyes: Needless to say I'm in the doghouse at the moment. Luckily, almost all the pictures had been uplaoded to Photoworks, so it is just a matter of downloading them one at a time....

Previously I just had the drives installed on a Asus M2V-SLI Deluxe without any Raid setup. I had tried to set them up in a software RAID5 on the board, but kept running into issues with loosing the drives out of the array and other issues, so I gave up on it.

Now that I have two replacement drives being shipped to me, I am thinking about putting all 3 in a Dell GX620 which has 4 onboard SATA ports and running FreeNAS. My idea is to use them to store AVI files, as well as other files I won't be accessing very often. As for TV recordings, those will be recorded on stand-alone drives on the ASUS board (which is running SageTV).

So, really as long as the software RAID5 setup will provide enough output to watch AVI files over the network (on SageTV clients and a SageTV HD Extender), my only other question is the reliability of software RAID. While I would love to get a hardware RAID setup, I just can't justify the cost.

Should this work for what I need?
 
With software you are risking your array if your mobo fails. Going to a compleatly different one is a nog as far as I know. You will have to stickto that chipsed to be at least somewhat safe.

But that amount of data is not much and stil very much in afordable backup capabilites.

Software R5 would me more than enough bandwith wise for your needs and it should protect from 1 drive fails. So if you decide to go software route investing in a big backup drive that you would keep disconnected would be a even more smarter.
 
what!? no he wont. software raid 5 can be moved from system to system chipset to chipset if the board dies, or you swap hardware..

i know this, i run graid5 and gmirror on freebsd 6 and 7, no issues moving machines
 
Sorry, i meant that mostly as onboard, chipset version of raid. Not special software raid developed independantly.

@P3N1Y0R: Can you use you array going to different OS's like you can going to different machines?
 
XS Janus said:
@P3N1Y0R: Can you use you array going to different OS's like you can going to different machines?
Click to expand...

Kernel RAID is typically only compatible with other flavors of the same base OS. You won't be seeing Linux software arrays on a Windows machine or a BSD software array on a Linux machine.
 
OK. Thanks!

But lets say he goes software Raid will he be able to do exp. XP->Vista type moves?
 
XS Janus said:
OK. Thanks!

But lets say he goes software Raid will he be able to do exp. XP->Vista type moves?
Click to expand...

That I don't know. I don't have any experience with software arrays in Windows; all the servers I deal with are *nix based or use hardware cards.
 
About two years ago I tried to move a Windows Server 2003 software raid5 array to a Windows Vista beta without any problems so Id say it should work. I think Windowsbased raid is based on the same principals between the systems that supports it.
 
Does Windows Vista even support software RAID 5? I've tried to search for information on how to do it but I haven't found anything.
 
I'm currently planning for a FreeNAS build, I'm also using software RAID, It's quite easy to set up and replacing failed drives in a raid5 array is an extremely easy process.
My only complaint about FreeNAS with software raid is that it uses graid5 which does not support expanding the raid5 array. So in my case, I wanted to add drives to the array later when I can afford more 750gb drives, this won't be possible using software raid5 under FreeNAS.

Just a heads up.
 
Id say it does, at least the Ultimate version does. Works the same way as usual in Disk Management.
 
personally for things like pictures and other important documents i usually only recommend RAID1... because thats the simplest form of RAID to get your data back in case of some sort of catastrophic software/hardware failure...

do you really have more than 500gb of family photos?

make a RAID1 for all your really important stuff and then a RAID5 for whatever large media files you need to store ;)
 
Not a bad thought with the raid1 for documents, but I would probably use the same drives and just setup some sort of weekly backup system (incremental or 1-1) that would make allowances for the occasional PEBKAC error.
 
Thanks. I'm thinking I may pick up a Dell AAR-2610SA card from ebay for around $70. I'm sure it won't be the fastest Raid5 setup (PCI-X card that is supposed to be compatible to run in a standard PCI slot), but it supports RAID migration and expansion and has 6 SATA ports.

I've already got an external 250GB drive that I use for backups, just have to find something to schedule the backups on a weekly basis so I don't have to worry about remembering to do it myself. I may decide to pick up a larger external for backing up other stuff at a later point.
 
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I got the AAR-2610SA card in and have been playing around with it. I also got another 500 GB drive cheap.

So far I haven't had much luck. My plan was to put it in my media server (ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe), but with two Nvidia DualTV cards that only leaves one PCI slot open for the PCI-X card. I put it in and it is recognized in windows, but as soon as I configure an array (either 4 drives in RAID5 or even just a single drive as a simple volume), the system won't boot. It gets to where I should see the splash screen and just hangs up.

I may try moving cards around, to see if it is an issue with that PCI slot. Otherwise, I guess I could throw it in a case with an older ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe board (Athlon XP 2800+) and run Freenas on it. I was hoping keep the number of boxes to a minimum though. I would use the GX620, but it only has room for 4 drives, and that would require mounting one in the floppy bay and the other in the second cd-rom bay, so cooling would be an issue. At least the older system is an Antec Sonata case so I have 4 hard drive bays and I can toss in a 4x3 cage in the 5.25 bays to hold another 4 drives with a fan.

As far as backups, I have an external USB drive I can backup my documents to. I just have to make myself set up a batch file to copy the data on a regular basis...

I also snagged an old DLT-IV tape drive, Adaptec 39160 card, and 6 blank tapes from work (they were just going to toss it all in the trash). I've thrown the card in my desktop system and if I can get some backup software I should be able to do weekly backups to tape of the critical info also.

I'm really hoping that I can get the 2610sa to work in my media server so I don't have to set up another box...
 
Got the card working (had to disable the card's BIOS settings so the drives don't show at Post as bootable devices).

Set up 3 drives in a RAID5 and let it build/verify which took about 24 hours. I'm already seeing the need for saving for a better card though. I expected slow performance, but 27 Mb/sec HDTach scores on a RAID5 array is quickly becoming annoying. The read speeds seem adequate for my needs at the moment (feeding AVI and ripped DVDs to my SageTV HD Extender and client systems), so it will get me by for now..... once I finish transferring all my data to the array.

I'm going to hold off on adding the 4th drive to the array so I have something to transfer my files to when I get a better card (in addition to multiple 250 GB drives I have laying around).

Now I just have to decide if I want to take a chance with the Dell Perc 5/i cards on Ebay (I'm seeing mixed results with getting them to work with an ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe), or save up for an Areca 8-port card (which are really pricey).
 
Ive had no problems with my Highpoint RAID controller. It's quasi-hardware raid (uses your CPU, but otherwise a HW RAID controller). You get all the benefits of OCE/ORLM, failure notification support and ease of setup.
 
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