Storing harddrives. New to the field.

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Apr 2, 2014
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Hello

I decided to buy 4 x 2TB Western Digital Enterprise WD2000FYYZ hard drives and a Cooler Master HAF XB case.
I assumed such a case would have slots for 4 hard drives, but I was wrong.

However I have a feeling I am going to need more hard drives now anyway so I am wondering how to tackle this?
I have seen user sigs on here where some people have 10-30 hard drives, I guess any normal PC case is out of the question for this amount.

I am planning to read/write to the pool not so often. which raid setup would you recommend?

Thanks in advance.
 
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We had 16 3.5" hard drives mounted in a Fractal Design Define XL. Ten in the stock bays and six in 3-in-2 bays. If you want more look at a Norco 4224.

Do you need RAID? Have you got backups? How much redundancy do you want?
 
If you don't need an optical drive you can put the other 2 drives into the 5.25" bays. You could also try contacting CoolerMaster to inquire about purchasing the hard drive cage for the HAF XB-Evo which is the same case but redesigned to replace the 2.5" cage with a 3.5" cage.
 
We had 16 3.5" hard drives mounted in a Fractal Design Define XL. Ten in the stock bays and six in 3-in-2 bays. If you want more look at a Norco 4224.

Do you need RAID? Have you got backups? How much redundancy do you want?

I have been looking at the Norco 4224 and the SuperMicro SC846 along with the PDF manuals. Do people use these cases just for personal storage and RAID setups? I got the feeling from the manual that these racks can be used with alot of other hardware to provide different functionality that I possibly wont need/use? (also perhaps for just a raid storage setup there are other cases/simple racks?)

I definitely need RAID along with some form of backup in case failure.

"How much redundancy do you want? " I don't understand fully what you mean here, I thought once I selected a RAID plan(1,6 etc) that this was automatically chosen?

As for the RAID setup, I will need to tie together around 4-12 hard drives once all totaled I estimate, I saw regularly from posts on this forum that RAID 6 seemed to be "in trend" but also noticed some talk about snapraid, mdadm, ZFS and NAS which I assume have a different approach but I have no knowledge about yet.

Is there a preferred OS setup/software setup used best with or for RAID/any other types?

Thanks.


If you don't need an optical drive you can put the other 2 drives into the 5.25" bays. You could also try contacting CoolerMaster to inquire about purchasing the hard drive cage for the HAF XB-Evo which is the same case but redesigned to replace the 2.5" cage with a 3.5" cage.

Yes I might have to buy some hd trays for the 5.25 inch bays.
Unfortunatly I learned about the EVO after my purcahse.
As for replacing the 2.5 cage its not possible. The HAF XB has the 2.5 cage welded in place, the HAF XB-Evo has some type of detachment mechanism.
 
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I have been looking at the Norco 4224 and the SuperMicro SC846 along with the PDF manuals. Do people use these cases just for personal storage and RAID setups? I got the feeling from the manual that these racks can be used with alot of other hardware to provide different functionality that I possibly wont need/use? (also perhaps for just a raid storage setup there are other cases/simple racks?)

I definitely need RAID along with some form of backup in case failure.

"How much redundancy do you want? " I don't understand fully what you mean here, I thought once I selected a RAID plan(1,6 etc) that this was automatically chosen?

As for the RAID setup, I will need to tie together around 4-12 hard drives once all totaled I estimate, I saw regularly from posts on this forum that RAID 6 seemed to be "in trend" but also noticed some talk about snapraid, mdadm, ZFS and NAS which I assume have a different approach but I have no knowledge about yet.

Is there a preferred OS setup/software setup used best with or for RAID/any other types?

Thanks.




Yes I might have to buy some hd trays for the 5.25 inch bays.
Unfortunatly I learned about the EVO after my purcahse.
As for replacing the 2.5 cage its not possible. The HAF XB has the 2.5 cage welded in place, the HAF XB-Evo has some type of detachment mechanism.

The SuperMicro is used a lot and should fit your needs.

As for RAID level, a few things to consider:
-RAID 5 is out of the question for enterprise use.
-RAID 6 is nice but has slow write speeds because of parity information needing to be written. Any two drives within a LUN/VDEV can fail without you losing data.
-RAID 10 has much better write performance but can only have one drive fail per mirror/VDEV. But if you have 20 drives, 10 of them can fail and you don't lose data, as long as they're all in different mirrors.

Is there a preferred OS setup/software setup used best with or for RAID/any other types?

No such thing really. Depends on your requirements. What will be accessing these drives? Clients over the network, one server, multiple servers?

For backups you can create an identical machine but with cheaper slower drives and have it RSYNC nightly to the primary one.
 
The SuperMicro is used a lot and should fit your needs.

As for RAID level, a few things to consider:
-RAID 5 is out of the question for enterprise use.
-RAID 6 is nice but has slow write speeds because of parity information needing to be written. Any two drives within a LUN/VDEV can fail without you losing data.
-RAID 10 has much better write performance but can only have one drive fail per mirror/VDEV. But if you have 20 drives, 10 of them can fail and you don't lose data, as long as they're all in different mirrors.



No such thing really. Depends on your requirements. What will be accessing these drives? Clients over the network, one server, multiple servers?

For backups you can create an identical machine but with cheaper slower drives and have it RSYNC nightly to the primary one.

Thanks for the response.

Only I plan to access the drives, I plan to have them located within 10M of me.
Also I will probably need to add drives to the array when I begin to run out of space, is this just a matter of plug and wait for it to be recognized? I am guessing this can cause some problems with some types of RAID setups?
 
Thanks for the response.

Only I plan to access the drives, I plan to have them located within 10M of me.
Also I will probably need to add drives to the array when I begin to run out of space, is this just a matter of plug and wait for it to be recognized? I am guessing this can cause some problems with some types of RAID setups?

Ok so 10 meters isn't unheard of for use with SAS cables. (You'll probably want to go with active cables. More experienced forum members can chime in on this.)

Do you want this storage to run on its own operating system or do you want your PC to see it as if it were just HDD's inside your PC? (We call this block level storage)

Depending on what setup/configuration you choose, you will more than likely be able to just add drives to the JBOD when you want more storage.

What is the OS of your PC?

EDIT: Also, if this is for home use and not enterprise, you can put RAID 5 back on the table, as long as you have good backups.
 
Ok so 10 meters isn't unheard of for use with SAS cables. (You'll probably want to go with active cables. More experienced forum members can chime in on this.)

Do you want this storage to run on its own operating system or do you want your PC to see it as if it were just HDD's inside your PC? (We call this block level storage)

Depending on what setup/configuration you choose, you will more than likely be able to just add drives to the JBOD when you want more storage.

What is the OS of your PC?

EDIT: Also, if this is for home use and not enterprise, you can put RAID 5 back on the table, as long as you have good backups.

What would be the benefits to run the storage on its own operating system? Is this what the additional hardware slots are often used for in the SuperMicro/Norco racks?

Overall I do just need to access this data like it was a big hard drive on my PC, but I am also curious as to other methods.

The OS of my PC will probably be linux, I haven't used this before but I may aswell start now.
 
The benefit of running it on its own OS is that it would run independent of your PC. You could do anything to your PC, including re installing or installing a new OS without it affecting the data on the storage appliance. (If you didn't have it running its own OS, you would have to export and import the RAID config every time you changed OS's, and there's no guaranteeing it would work, depending on the OS you change to).

If you just want a simple config with block level access and you're using Linux, you can just connect to the SuperMicro disk chassis to your PC with HBA Cards and SAS cables and run XFS with software RAID.

XFS allows "online growing" so you can add HDD's even when the computer is on.

If any of that is confusing or doesn't make sense, let me know.
 
The benefit of running it on its own OS is that it would run independent of your PC. You could do anything to your PC, including re installing or installing a new OS without it affecting the data on the storage appliance. (If you didn't have it running its own OS, you would have to export and import the RAID config every time you changed OS's, and there's no guaranteeing it would work, depending on the OS you change to).

If you just want a simple config with block level access and you're using Linux, you can just connect to the SuperMicro disk chassis to your PC with HBA Cards and SAS cables and run XFS with software RAID.

XFS allows "online growing" so you can add HDD's even when the computer is on.

If any of that is confusing or doesn't make sense, let me know.

So if my OS was on a singular separate SSD and the RAID was at block level access on say 10 HDs, The RAID is setup specifically for the OS/SDD config? It sounds like running it independent with its own OS is much better in general, I have seen alot of talk on here about Solaris, perhaps this is a recommended OS for this?
Also with its own OS I should be able to read/write data from multiple PCs with all different OS setups?

Thanks for the help.
 
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