Raid advice

Kuga

Kuga

New member
Sup dudes. Want some advice.

6 x 2TB drives in RAID 5 = 1 drive parity. Gives me 10 TB of usable storage but the raid can't sustain more than 1 failure.

or

RAID 5 with 2 parity drives.. Gives me 8 TB of usable storage but can sustain 2 drive failures.

I'll be storing all my erm.. warez :rolleyes:

Comments or thoughts?
 
1st option. The chance of more than one drive failing on you at once is very very small but it can happen. I have had it that 2 drives failed on me in one week. Both WD drives. Does that say anything?
 
Will you be using a hardware RAID card, or software based?

Hardware RAID cards can be full of crap if you use them with desktop class harddrives, and enterprise drives cost big bucks.
I once lost an entire array once because of Seagate and their crappy firmware on the 7200.10 drives. Lost one drive, and then during the recovery process another drive timed out, which caused my raid controller to mark the whole array as down and it refused to restore anymore. Lesson learnt.

Also the bigger the individual drives, the longer the restore time. On my 1.5TB drives the restore took about 12 hours from what
I can remember, so 2TB should be quite a bit longer, especially if it's low power drives. So I'd recommend the 2 parity setup, its just too risky with 1 parity drive if you lose a drive and then have to run a restore for 12+hours during which you won't have any redundancy.

I eventually moved away from realtime RAID, and now use a snapshot RAID system called FlexRAID which is a bit better suited to data that doesn't change on a regular basis, like movies/tv series.
 
WingNut said:
Will you be using a hardware RAID card, or software based?

Hardware RAID cards can be full of crap if you use them with desktop class harddrives, and enterprise drives cost big bucks.
I once lost an entire array once because of Seagate and their crappy firmware on the 7200.10 drives. Lost one drive, and then during the recovery process another drive timed out, which caused my raid controller to mark the whole array as down and it refused to restore anymore. Lesson learnt.

Also the bigger the individual drives, the longer the restore time. On my 1.5TB drives the restore took about 12 hours from what
I can remember, so 2TB should be quite a bit longer, especially if it's low power drives. So I'd recommend the 2 parity setup, its just too risky with 1 parity drive if you lose a drive and then have to run a restore for 12+hours during which you won't have any redundancy.

I eventually moved away from realtime RAID, and now use a snapshot RAID system called FlexRAID which is a bit better suited to data that doesn't change on a regular basis, like movies/tv series.
Click to expand...

I am running a P45 motherboard with Intel Raid controller. I installed FreeNAS onto a flashdrive and it boots from there. They are Seagate drives as well. I just think 2 parity will be more of a safe option. I've read horror stories of drives will while the array is being rebuilt.
 
I would suggest for Home or Personal usage that you alwasy maintain 2 Parity drives
Yes, the chances of failures is slim and in all likelyhood will never happen unless we all get hit by a Tsunami, but, for a home user losing the only file system he/she has can result in a unrecoverable data loss.
The saying better safe than sorry was founded on principles such as these :)
 
Kuga said:
I am running a P45 motherboard with Intel Raid controller. I installed FreeNAS onto a flashdrive and it boots from there. They are Seagate drives as well. I just think 2 parity will be more of a safe option. I've read horror stories of drives will while the array is being rebuilt.
Click to expand...

Hehe, yeah that's exactly what happened to me. Luckily I share a lot of my stuff, so I could pull in some favours from all the moochers and get the majority of it back without having to redownload. :p
 
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