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To Raid or Not to Raid

L

lone wolf

Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2003
Messages
705
I have been moving my DVD's and TV Series to hard drive. I currently have 3 - 1tb, 2 - 2tb and 1 - 1.5 tb hard drives. After I had to order a couple of raid cards for work, I just purchased 2 of these for myself. Also I just purchased 3 ED 2tb Green drives.

Now the dumb question. I have the 1tb drives empty now as i have moved my movies and music to the 2tb drives. Would it be a good idea to just put together a RAID 5 array for the drives or just keep them seperate?

Tomorrow I'm ordering a Norco 4220 case for all of these hard drives as I plan to expand even more.
 
You probably should have checked first whether or not any of your drives will work with that Areca card. Last I checked, Areca cards were not that supportive of consumer grade drives, even in a non-RAID setup.
 
I actually did, I stand corrected. I ordered the Seagate 2tb ST320005N4A1AS-RK, not the WD drives, and all drives are supported by Areca. I chose this card because at work I have built two ESXi boxes, one with a Areca 1222 and now one with with a 1210.

As I want to move all of my movies and music to this new server, I just am curious if I should just go with JBOD or actually use the raid capabilities of the cards.
 
Do you need increased uptime of that data in the event of a hard drive loss? Or do you need high performance? If so, then go with a RAID 5 array. If you don't need that high of an uptime, you should be fine with a JBOD setup.
 
I live by raid now, any mass storage system I use raid. I personally prefer software raid such as Linux MD raid, as I don't have to worry about card specific limitations or losing the entire array if the card has something go wrong with it, I just put in any card that has lot of individual sata ports and configure the raid from the OS. If anything craps out I can move those drives to a whole other system and reassemble the raid.

The reason I do raid all the time is with the high failure rates of today's drives, at least I don't have to restore backups all the time. I just pop in another drive and let it rebuild. It's also nice to have TB's of storage in a single pool vs a bunch of separate drives. Once you hit 4+ drives there is also a certain performance boost, even with raid 5.

Given you have a decent hardware raid card, I'd do a raid 5 with that, though you could still set them up as non raid drives and do the raid in the OS. Read up on the pros and cons of both hardware and software and decide from there.
 
lone wolf said:
As I want to move all of my movies and music to this new server, I just am curious if I should just go with JBOD or actually use the raid capabilities of the cards.
Click to expand...

For a media server, I think snapshot RAID is usually better than distributed-parity striped RAID. With snapshot RAID, if you lose more drives than you have redundancy to regenerate, you do not lose the entire volume -- you just lose the data on the failed drives. With distributed-parity striped RAID, the entire volume is gone. And with 2TB or 3TB drives, a rebuild can take many hours, so if you have a RAID 5, during the rebuild time you are down to a single point of failure taking out your entire volume of data.

For snapshot RAID, I like the open-source SnapRAID:

http://snapraid.sourceforge.net/

which is a new product, but has been performing well in my testing. It is a streamlined tool, just trying to do one thing well, and has a text-based interface. But there is a separate GUI front-end being developed for it independently.

For a more comprehensive product that is not open-source, there is FlexRAID.

Finally, for an integrated approach (basically a fileserver OS) that cannot be layered on top of your current system, there is UnRAID. It is not free (except for a limited capacity version).
 
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