To RAID or not to RAID

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unclerunkle

Weaksauce
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Nov 9, 2010
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Hello all - I've been lurking and have found great advice and knowledge here so kudos to everyone!


As this type of question can be long and drawn out and annoying, I want to keep this short and sweet and as painless as possible.
This is what I am currently looking at getting:

NORCO RPC-4220 w/20 SATA/SAS Drive Bays LSI Internal 9211-8i HBA (Wanted to go for the areca ARC-1880i RAID, but it costs $600!)
HP SAS Expander
Intel G2 80GB SSD for OS Drive

WHS v2 (Vail Final - I can wait) or Server 2008 or Win7 Ultimate
WHS RAID (if it can be called that) or FLEXRAID or RAID6 w/RAID card?


My budget is anything under $1,500 total but as always cheaper the better.
My goal is to start out with 4TB (w/redundancy) and expand further as needed - not sure what hard drives to get though. Searching didn't lead to anything conclusive - maybe I'm blind?
I find Linux hard to learn, but this may be the push I need. I will need quite a bit of help along the way if I do go this route though.
I'm willing to devote a lot of time to this if needed.
Purpose of the build is to store media and stream to XBMC - movies, pictures, and some files. Nothing that should be I/O intensive.

Sorry lots of various questions I have mixed in with my post, but anything you can answer would be a good help. Thanks for helping a stranger ;)
 
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Lets see how many posts we can go without ZFS being mentioned (this sentence aside). To answer a few questions, apart from the fewer number of drive bays, the 4220 has room for 2 internal hard drives and an optical one as well. The 4224 has hot-swap fans however, though that won't make a difference if you plan on getting the 120mm fan bracket. If you want to have the most usable space out of all the hard drives you have, RAID 6 with a cheaper HBA is the way to go. While the Areca 1880i is nice, you could get an LSI 9260-4i for about half the price. Might as well run Windows Server 2008 if you have the license too, but Windows 7 will work as well if you want to save a bit. Most of the large builds on this forum (at least going by the thread stuck to the top of this subforum) use similar setups.
 
Thanks Blue Fox, you and Oddity are the most active around here.

I guess for my purposes the 4220 case would make the most sense. 20 drives should do I would think :D

The LSI 9260-4i card is nice, but:

A) Will a single SAS link be enough bandwidth? (I guess so as I'm only going to be streaming over a max of dual-1Gb aggrated links.

B) Should I be waiting for the LSI 2208 series which should be out soon?
http://www.lsi.com/news/product_news/2010/2010_09_14.html
 
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I'm always curious as to why there aren't more pro-FlexRAID suggestions in threads like these. I'm not running a FlexRAID setup at the moment but I am waiting for my components to arrive.

Wouldn't it make sense to run Windows 2008 and FlexRAID with 2 disks dedicated to parity? That's what I plan on doing unless others have a good reason not to.
 
unclerunkle said:
Thanks Blue Fox, you and Oddity are the most active around here.

I guess for my purposes the 4220 case would make the most sense. 20 drives should do I would think :D

The LSI 9260-4i card is nice, but:

A) Will a since SAS link be enough bandwidth? (I guess so as I'm only going to be streaming over a max of dual-1Gb aggrated links.

B) Should I be waiting for the LSI 2208 series which should be out soon?
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Your network team can do up to 250mb/s. The connection between the LSI 9260 and SAS expander would be 2400mb/s. RAID array won't do nearly that much, but it will be well over 250mb/s. As for the 2208 cards, I can't really say, I haven't looked into it.
TheWanted_ said:
I'm always curious as to why there aren't more pro-FlexRAID suggestions in threads like these. I'm not running a FlexRAID setup at the moment but I am waiting for my components to arrive.

Wouldn't it make sense to run Windows 2008 and FlexRAID with 2 disks dedicated to parity? That's what I plan on doing unless others have a good reason not to.
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It's not popular because there is little support for it.
 
I'd go with either any WinOS + FlexRAID (or possibly Vail without FlexRAID) for the media files. Either way, any non-media important data that you have that is regularly accessed and/or changed should be separated out. It is probably much smaller in total than your media files, so you can likely fit it on a single HDD. That HDD can be mirrored if you like, but most importantly, have a good backup strategy for that data (that is independent of mirroring).
 
Blue Fox said:
It's not popular because there is little support for it.
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Does it need much support? Doesn't seem like an awfully difficult product to use. My biggest reason for not punting WHSv1/2 is that it doesn't use parity. You have to waste a lot of disk space "protecting" your data by making duplicate copies. I personally feel that I don't need to backup some of my data as it's easily replaceable, however I would like to protect it against disk failure by sacrificing 1 or 2 disks to parity.

Not trying to hijack your thread :). Just throwing some questions out there as we appear to be in the same boat.
 
As Blue Fox mentioned, FlexRAID is still in its infancy (as far as RAID solutions go) and that makes me lean more towards RAID6 for this application. WHSv2 also has a disadvantage of having a block-based RAID1 type of setup that seems to only be compatible with WHS.

As for RAID backup, I subscribe to Mozy currently which for the price and features is hard to beat. I can only use that with Win7 though (a non-server OS). I have considered running lite XP in a VM and doing the network drive hack in Mozy to be able to backup the servers files though. Note that I would only be backing up the files (around 2TB worth) not the entire media collection.
 
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TheWanted_ said:
Does it need much support? Doesn't seem like an awfully difficult product to use. My biggest reason for not punting WHSv1/2 is that it doesn't use parity. You have to waste a lot of disk space "protecting" your data by making duplicate copies. I personally feel that I don't need to backup some of my data as it's easily replaceable, however I would like to protect it against disk failure by sacrificing 1 or 2 disks to parity.

Not trying to hijack your thread :). Just throwing some questions out there as we appear to be in the same boat.
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What do you do when something goes wrong though? Online forums aren't really necessarily the best place to get help. Setting up and maintaining the RAID array on my Areca card is probably even simpler that that thing too.
 
In my opinion, a large collection of movie files should be kept separate from other data, since the best way to handle the movie files is usually different. Movie files are special in that they are usually very large, are written once and the files never altered, and are usually replaceable in the case of data loss (re-ripping, etc.). As a result of these characteristics, FlexRAID looks like a good choice despite the fact that it does not have commercial support.

To answer the question about what to do if something goes wrong with a FlexRAID array -- post your problem on the FlexRAID forum, and possibly a few other forums, and hope for the best. That does not sound very reassuring, I know, but the thing about a FlexRAID of movie files is that there is not a lot of serious things that can go wrong, and even fewer that are time critical. Maybe one of your HDDs failed, and you are having problems regenerating the lost data from parity. But with FlexRAID, all of your other HDDs are still fine and you can keep using them. So all you lost were the movies on that one HDD. And since they are just movies, you can either watch others until the problem is fixed, or go back to the original movies. Should not be a big deal.

Such a situation would be a lot more serious if you had important, non-movie data on your FlexRAID. But I do not recommend using FlexRAID for that sort of data. Keep it separate and use some other protection and backup method for non-movie data.
 
Blue Fox said:
What do you do when something goes wrong though? Online forums aren't really necessarily the best place to get help. Setting up and maintaining the RAID array on my Areca card is probably even simpler that that thing too.
Click to expand...

Only *possible* observation I can make is that maybe with WHS if the s**t really does hit the fan you can recover *portions* of your data more readily. I get kind of scared when you write in the Areca owners thread that any corruptions were your fault... kind of wonder how that is possible :)
 
john4200 said:
Such a situation would be a lot more serious if you had important, non-movie data on your FlexRAID. But I do not recommend using FlexRAID for that sort of data. Keep it separate and use some other protection and backup method for non-movie data.
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This was my reasoning for seriously considering FlexRAID. As 95% of my data is media, FlexRAID looked to be a good candidate for me. I was (and partly still am) considering a software RAID6 solution in Linux, however FlexRAID allows you to replace drives with bigger ones and reap the benefits immediately (provided that your parity disks are as big as your biggest disk). With a software RAID6, I would need to replace 12-15 2TB drives with 3TB drives and then expand the array. That will cost an arm and a leg!
 
haileris said:
Only *possible* observation I can make is that maybe with WHS if the s**t really does hit the fan you can recover *portions* of your data more readily. I get kind of scared when you write in the Areca owners thread that any corruptions were your fault... kind of wonder how that is possible :)
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Human error. Won't deny it. Not the RAID card's fault at all. I was trying to image a dying drive onto another so that I wouldn't have to rebuild the array (as it was currently migrating from RAID 5 to 6), but it didn't go very well. I then swapped drives, but forgot to format the replacement. Apparently some data had been written (including the RAID metadata) and it was in the array for a little bit while rebuilding before I realized what had happened. I had MD5 hashes for most of my files and only had about 4-64kb of corruption in larger files (being video), so I was able to either fix it or ignored it since it only appeared as a minor glitch for a couple frames.
 
john4200 said:
As a result of these characteristics, FlexRAID looks like a good choice despite the fact that it does not have commercial support.
.
Click to expand...

Technically, Flex RAID sounds great but the release schedule kind of scared me. There seemed to be a lot of changes and certainly at the time you were instructed to go straight to beta versions if you wanted something fixing and they were time limited. Maybe that is changed now or maybe I didn't read it right but I've invested a lot of time and money getting my media collection together and it just seemed too much of a risk. I hate RAID but at least its a known entity.
 
Blue Fox said:
Human error. Won't deny it. Not the RAID card's fault ....
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks for the info, put my mind at rest a little since I have just bought an Areca! Glad to hear it wasnt too bad an experience :) Out of interest, did/do you use md5deep or something else to generate the hashes?
 
haileris said:
Technically, Flex RAID sounds great but the release schedule kind of scared me. There seemed to be a lot of changes and certainly at the time you were instructed to go straight to beta versions if you wanted something fixing and they were time limited. Maybe that is changed now or maybe I didn't read it right but I've invested a lot of time and money getting my media collection together and it just seemed too much of a risk. I hate RAID but at least its a known entity.
Click to expand...

It comes down to chances of any data loss and severity of data loss. The chances of data loss may be higher with FlexRAID, but the severity is usually lower -- most things that could go wrong would result only in the loss of data on a single HDD. With traditional RAID, the chances of data loss may be lower (although not always, often there is more chance for user error with traditional RAID), but many of the things that can go wrong will result in loss of all the data on all HDDs.

That is oversimplified, of course, since one can list situations where traditional RAID would not lose all the data, or where FlexRAID could lose it all. But I think those situations are rare for most people, so the description in the previous paragraph is useful.

In my opinion, movie files are better handled with FlexRAID than traditional RAID. There are several other factors that figure in my opinion than data loss -- FlexRAID utilizes different sized disks better than traditional RAID, and FlexRAID handles capacity expansion better than traditional RAID. And FlexRAID can stream a movie from one HDD while all the other HDDs are spun down, while traditional (distributed parity) RAID requires all HDDs to be accessed to stream a single movie.
 
john4200 said:
It comes down to.....
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Don't disagree with anything you said, as I said technically it sounded great but I wasn't convinced by the release philosophy nor the support philosophy. I'll probably take a look again at it at some stage, probably when I do something stupid to screw up my RAID movie setup!
 
We could debate all day what the best filesystem/raid/OS would be, but don't forget to ask yourself this: how do I intend to backup the data on the server? I think the choice of how you build might depend quite a lot on the answer to that question.
 
TheWanted_ said:
I'm always curious as to why there aren't more pro-FlexRAID suggestions in threads like these. I'm not running a FlexRAID setup at the moment but I am waiting for my components to arrive.
Click to expand...

because its alpha/beta software, the UI is whack because the programmer has focused 95% of his time on the engine, and there's a learning curve. it's a great piece of software developed by a guy in his spare time but its still very buggy. and its not a drop-in replacement for hardware raid6. its a replacement for people that like the idea of soring their data to individual disks, and want the added benefits of parity protection, and don't mind investing some time tinkering to set it up and maintain it.

as soon as the Flexraid-View product matures a little more I'll probably start transitioning some of my storage to Flexraid, but as it stands now I don't want to deal with managing files among individual disks - I like one big pool. I've also had my eye on Liquesce which Smurf-IV has been developing, which like Flexraid-View attempts to pool a bunch of individual disks into a single virtual view. Each one has strengths and weaknesses, neither is ready for primetime. For starters they both have issues with the way they distribute data among member disks when writing to the pool.
 
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Thanks for the discussion on FlexRAID vs standard RAID. Got some options to consider which will factor in to whether I buy a RAID or HBA card.

I still have a couple unanswered questions yet if I may:

1) Anyone have any information on the new LSI 2208 series? Should I be waiting for it as I heard it's supposed to be out soon?

2) What kind of hard drives should I buy? I need mass storage so obviously SATA over SAS, but which drive brands / models are good? I noticed that the Samsung F4 and Hitachi 2TB drives are commonly used...
 
@unclerunkle: instead of an LSI 9211-8i, consider getting the Supermicro X8SI6 motherboard, since it has the exact same SAS2008 chip integrated onboard, and for a price difference of an extra $30-$40 you're getting $200 worth of motherboard, relative to what the same featureset goes for on the Supermicro SKU's without the SAS2008. I consider it a steal. Short of that wait for the 9211-8i to come up on ebay -- sometimes you can grab them for $150.

The motherboard gives you 6 x SATA ports, the LSI gives you 8 more ports, and if you need to grow past that get an HP SAS Expander for a total port potential of 42 (6 sata + 4 LSI SAS + 32 expander). Personally I wouldn't use the onboard SATA for anything but a boot volume, then connect all your storage drives to the LSI SAS chip. Onboard SATA is often cranky with hot-plugging even though AHCI is supposed to support it.

With that kind of setup you're all ready for Vail, or Flexraid on Windows Server 2008 R2. If the learning curve of Flexraid is too much and you want to buy time waiting for Vail, just store your data on individual disks, and buy enough extra harddisks to keep a duplicate copy of the files. You can get free software to sync files between disks on a scheduled basis.

I'd consider "just storing media" your first priority and then after the fact if you want to set up some VM's in Hyper-V and tinker with the *nix's and ZFS you can do so, but for now stick with what you know and keep it simple. Last thing you want is your data to be hostage to an O/S and filesystem you aren't familiar or comfortable with in the event of problems.
 
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By the way, forget about the LSI 2208 - it's overkill for your needs and will cost more than an Areca 1880i (which you already said was too expensive) or LSI 926x which use the predecessor chip. Not to mention it's "been coming" since january, so no one's holding their breath anymore.
 
odditory said:
For starters they both have issues with the way they distribute data among member disks when writing to the pool.
Click to expand...

Just to carry on the FlexRAID discussion a little further, would you say FlexRAID is quite good if you don't intend on using FlexRAID-View? I was planning on just using the FlexRAID engine + WebUI and writing data to individual disks as I always have.

Meh, I really thought I had made my mind up about this. Might have to go down the mdadm + LVM route if FlexRAID (T2+ engine) isn't stable yet.
 
Stability isn't the issue. Stability is just fine with Flexraid T2+ engine - solid. It's the UI that throws a lot of people. Test it for yourself, I've given all the disclaimers, so what you discover might surprise you with expectations so low now :) If you run into any problems then Brahim is pretty responsive on his Flexraid forum.
 
odditory said:
Stability isn't the issue. Stability is just fine with Flexraid T2+ engine - solid. It's the UI that throws a lot of people. Test it for yourself, I've given all the disclaimers and what you discover might surprise you with expectations so low now :)
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Haha, I like that :p Yeah, I'll give it a bash. I'm far more comfortable with Windows 2008 anyhow so FlexRAID does seem like the most plausible solution.

I'll have lots of time to play with the WebUI while I wait for the God-forsaken Drobo v2 to copy 4.5TB off of it.
 
I haven't done any testing with the 9260 myself. It may well be compatible with the HP expander if the 9260 is updated to the latest LSI firmware, but if hardware raid is a requirement for you then I'd put the money toward an Areca 1880i instead. Granted I'm biased since over the last 10 years I've dealt with pretty much every brand out there - Adaptec, LSI, 3Ware, HP, Promise, ATTO, and what have you, and Areca is what I've kept coming back to when weighing one against the other, or at least everything else managed to annoy me in some regard. Adaptec was the latest casualty there, there was a time I really liked the 5 series, but its almost 2011 and Adaptec hasn't really done anything new since 2008. It's the management interface of most other cards that really drive you nuts, LSI's MSM being no exception.

Not to mention the 1880i outperforms the 926x series in a lot of aspects, even though they use the same IOP, so there's something to be said about the efficiency of Areca's firmware and implementation.

As for harddisks for RAID, Hitachi 2TB has become pretty standard around here due to their raid friendliness, and I have quite a few myself, but the sale prices that the Samsung F4's have been dipping down to is pretty irresistible. I finally caved and bought 4 of them to put through some rigorous RAID6 thrashing. A few others have reported no issues with Samsung F4 and Areca 1880i, but I don't know how much testing they did other than creating an array.

Of course forgetting hardware RAID altogether is always an option, and if all you're interested in doing is storing media, then simply storing files on individual NTFS formatted disks as a temporary solution while waiting for WHS v2 to hit RTM is worth considering.
 
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