Storage Setup Options Without Separate Server / NAS?

S

St0ry

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Oct 20, 2006
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Many years late I'm sure but I'm finally looking to set up a RAID. My media collection has grown to span 3 drives now and it's just a hassle to find which show/movie is on which drive.

I've been doing some reading on different RAID setups but everything seems to need a ~$500 NAS or a $1000+ server. What are my options if I want to keep it inexpensive and keep all the drives in my main machine? I want to stay away from Windows Storage Systems, read some horror stories about that.

A few specific questions:

1. I'm using an ASRock Z77 Extreme 3 motherboard that supposedly supports RAID 0/1/5/10 but I've been reading that software RAID 5 is a bad idea. How true is this?

2. My mobo has 2x SATA3 and 4x SATA2 connectors, can I do RAID with a mix&match of these connectors?

2. Just how vulnerable is my data running RAID 0? Will everything be unrecoverable if a single drive fails? Everything I put on it is replaceable but it will just be a huge inconvenience to have to reacquire multiple TBs of data.
 
I'll leave the other RAID formats to someone that perhaps has experience with your motherboard and chipset and their findings with them. But I'll tell you this, RIAD 0 is for speed and speed alone. So "yes", if you lose one drive everything is gone.

How much data are we talking about?
 
You could take a look at Snapraid - it's an application you run to provide raid style protection, but you can implement it with your current data - plus the latest versions have a pooling feature so that all your data drives can be made to appear as one - best of all it's free - all you need to do really is add a drive for Snapraid to use for parity (or clear an existing one)
 
1/ If more than one drive fail, you lose all your data.
2/ Yes.
3/ #2 answered your question.

Billy_nnn said:
You could take a look at Snapraid - it's an application you run to provide raid style protection, but you can implement it with your current data - plus the latest versions have a pooling feature so that all your data drives can be made to appear as one - best of all it's free - all you need to do really is add a drive for Snapraid to use for parity (or clear an existing one)
Click to expand...

Totally agreed. Just one point needs to be cleared. Yes, all your data will be shown as one with pooling feature. But it's just symbolic links that show you a list of files/ folders names no more no less.
 
How are you backing up your data? RAID is great but its not a backup, just a redundant way of storing your data. Frankly a separate NAS is the simplest way to go IMO, maybe not the cheapest, but certainly the most hassle free.
 
If you do this for a while you'll figure out why so many here spend that extra grand for a separate server.

3 drives becomes 4 with parity becomes 5 when you need to expand becomes 8.
Extra space, heat, and noise considerations that comes with expanding drive arrays.
Normal [H] behavior with your main rig causing crashes, system down time or just plain exploding your CPU and having to wait for the new one to arrive causing downtime for other connected devices too.
Urge to explore other computing and IT related fields other than just serving media files (VMs and such).

When you consider some of the features those $500 NAS's give in addition to independence from your main rig, they start making more sense.

That said if you really intend to only store media to your array then despite the poor RAID-5 write performance of soft RAID, it should be fairly insignificant for write once read many style data.
 
After doing some more research a proper, separate NAS does seem like the way to go. I think I'll stick with my JBOD setup for now while I still have some unused space and then take the plunge into a proper RAID 5/6 setup.

Reading about RAID 5 and URE has me leaning towards RAID 6 now, or am I overthinking it?
 
While RAID isn't backup, restoring from backups does suck so I'd rather spend the extra money for RAID-6 and have less of a risk of having to restore from a backup than save a few bucks and be hoping that second drive doesn't fail and no URE's while waiting to get the replacement drive and for the RAID to rebuild.
 
I highly recommend FlexRAID. It's similar to SnapRAID in that it's a Snapshot based parity RAID system, but also incorporates a very robust Drive Pooling technology into it as well. This is the major advantage to FlexRAID over SnapRAID. You can also mix and match drives of varying size/make/model (Essentially by combining multiple drives into "DRU's" - Data Risk Unit - of the same size, thus getting the full usefulness/efficiency out of a parity based RAID system).

Other benefits:
- Drives are formatted in NTFS, and thus are individually readable in any Windows based computer (pull it out of the array, chuck it into any computer, read the contents).
- Adding a drive to the array is non-destructive. You can combine all those drives you have already without moving the data elsewhere.
- Online array expansion. Adding new drives to make the array larger is very easy.
- Files are not spanned across multiple drives (This relates to point #1 also). This means that if the array fully fails for any reason, you only lose the files on the dead drive. Any remaining drives can be plugged into any computer and read from.

FlexRAID runs on pretty much any modern version of Windows, and doesn't need to be ran on a "server". It has fairly low overhead, so it won't slow your system down too much (Only a bit during parity updates, which you can schedule during the night or whenever is most convenient).

It DOES however, cost money. The fully featured version is $59.99 (Includes both drive pooling and RAID Parity). It's a "sale" price (reg $99) but I've never seen the sale end. It's been "on sale" basically since the first official release came out. You can try a 14-day trial as well.

You can also purchase the 2 individual components separately in "scaled down" versions:
$40 for the RAID features
$30 for the Drive Pool features
Though honestly if you're gonna buy it at all, you may as well get the full version.

There are other benefits as well, but you can check out the website, or someone else can list any I missed.
 
I assume with Flexraid you don't need a raid controller, just a MB with a lot of SATA ports for all your drives? Being that its software RAID, whats the performance like?
 
Bear in mind that "snapshot based parity systems" like that lack certain features from regular RAIDs.

Protection isn't real time, you're not protected until it takes its snapshot.
You don't get the performance/IOPS increase that using multiple drives at a time can give.
Since it doesn't span drives if you have one drive with 5GB free and another drive with 5GB free and you need 10GB of space well fuck you.
Less suited to frequently updated data, so while it's fine for write once read many media files, you might not want to save your diary on it as if the drive with the diary crashes you will lose any changes up to the last snapshot.

Since you're posting this at [H] you should take a good hard look at not only what your current usage patterns are but how performing this upgrade might impact your desire to expand your home network in the future. A lot of us here were doing our storage system upgrades and expansions during a time when things were still growing at a fairly reasonable rate, so systems were getting upgraded every few years not just due to our changing demands but because the hardware available was much better as well, but if you've noticed these days the rate of change has slowed substantially in the last few years. Hell half people here that used to upgrade every 12-18 months are still using sandy bridge CPUs going on almost 3 years now because there's no compelling reason to upgrade, and how long have HDDs been stuck at 3-4TB?

The point of all of that is something that you build now easily has the potential of lasting you 5 years or more these days if you build it right from the beginning, so no matter if you pick RAID card, ZFS, NAS, or snapshot RAID, be sure to save yourself the hassle of having to rebuild the system in 2 years because you only store media files right now.
 
-Dragon- said:
Since you're posting this at [H] you should take a good hard look at not only what your current usage patterns are but how performing this upgrade might impact your desire to expand your home network in the future. A lot of us here were doing our storage system upgrades and expansions during a time when things were still growing at a fairly reasonable rate, so systems were getting upgraded every few years not just due to our changing demands but because the hardware available was much better as well, but if you've noticed these days the rate of change has slowed substantially in the last few years. Hell half people here that used to upgrade every 12-18 months are still using sandy bridge CPUs going on almost 3 years now because there's no compelling reason to upgrade, and how long have HDDs been stuck at 3-4TB?

The point of all of that is something that you build now easily has the potential of lasting you 5 years or more these days if you build it right from the beginning, so no matter if you pick RAID card, ZFS, NAS, or snapshot RAID, be sure to save yourself the hassle of having to rebuild the system in 2 years because you only store media files right now.
Click to expand...

No comment on SnapRAID but totally agree on this! I personally use ZFS RAIDZ2 on a virtualized Solaris and my plan is to keep this architecture in the long foreseeable future.
 
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