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2tb F4 and ex8350

Don't know your controller; is it SuperTrack (hardware RAID) or FastTrak (fakeRAID) ?

If your volume exceeds 2TiB, then you would want to know if it has 64-bit LBA support and GPT booting support. If you don't require booting, you would require 64-bit LBA, and an OS that supports GPT properly; Windows has very limited support for GPT.
 
Should be ok, but be sure to align partition; this should happen automatically if you use Windows 7 to partition the Hardware RAID volume.

But consumer disks lack TLER, and hardware RAID needs TLER-disks, or bad sectors would cause disks to become failed altogether; dropped from the RAID array.

To use hardware RAID safely, your disks should have TLER capability, so that on bad sectors the disks would give up immediately, and let the Hardware RAID controller fix the damage instead.

I wouldn't consider a RAID5 in this kind of situation too reliable; you should have a full backup of your data; relying on RAID5 alone might be too dangerous, because the RAID5 can break easily due to you using consumer drives. If you have one full drive failure and you are rebuilding, bit-error-rate or BER may cause the rebuild to fail and basically you're in trouble at that stage.

More reliable would be advanced software RAID, but you can also consider using two arrays where one is a real full backup of the first. Preferably this should be in another system on another controller using another filesystem.

Normally, you should only use TLER-capable RAID edition harddrives for Hardware RAID. Software RAID under Linux/BSD (basically all non-Windows OS) support RAID on non-TLER-capable disks just fine, however. So you only need TLER for Windows onboard RAID and ALL hardware RAID.
 
sub.mesa said:
Should be ok, but be sure to align partition; this should happen automatically if you use Windows 7 to partition the Hardware RAID volume.

But consumer disks lack TLER, and hardware RAID needs TLER-disks, or bad sectors would cause disks to become failed altogether; dropped from the RAID array.

To use hardware RAID safely, your disks should have TLER capability, so that on bad sectors the disks would give up immediately, and let the Hardware RAID controller fix the damage instead.

I wouldn't consider a RAID5 in this kind of situation too reliable; you should have a full backup of your data; relying on RAID5 alone might be too dangerous, because the RAID5 can break easily due to you using consumer drives. If you have one full drive failure and you are rebuilding, bit-error-rate or BER may cause the rebuild to fail and basically you're in trouble at that stage.

More reliable would be advanced software RAID, but you can also consider using two arrays where one is a real full backup of the first. Preferably this should be in another system on another controller using another filesystem.

Normally, you should only use TLER-capable RAID edition harddrives for Hardware RAID. Software RAID under Linux/BSD (basically all non-Windows OS) support RAID on non-TLER-capable disks just fine, however. So you only need TLER for Windows onboard RAID and ALL hardware RAID.
Click to expand...


Great points. So if I am using ZFS for my primary datastore, what other filesystem would you suggest for the backup? I am willing to have a dedicated machine/controller etc.
 
I would advise ZFS to use for the backup. Why? Well one simple reason: cheap, easy and convenient snapshots, which are incredibly powerful for a backup server.

Without it, consider your primary NAS has been infected with virusses or you deleted a file/dir without knowing, or for other reason the data on the primary NAS becomes corrupt or absent. Now if you set your backup NAS to backup your primary NAS every night, this would overwrite the existing backup. Hence, if your primary NAS is corrupted, you will corrupt your backup as well.

To cope with this, snapshots are the answer. You can snapshot each day, even every second. It will store each change you make. So initially, snapshots are created instantly (<1 sec) and cost no additional storage space. As soon as you're about to make adjustments, the data on the filesystem will differ from the snapshot; only that difference will cost you a bit of extra storage space. So snapshots are fast, efficient and incredibly powerful if properly utilized.

A common practice for a backup server is to perform a 'cronjob' every night, like:
1. create a snapshot on all filesystems
2. sync all filesystems with the main NAS
3. shutdown the system

The BIOS can be configured to power the system on at 2AM; while at 3AM the backup is done and it shuts down. That also means the power costs and noise/wear/dust is very low.

The primary NAS can also use ZFS, but if you have desktops with storage of their own, then keep the local filesystem (NTFS on Windows, Ext4 on Linux) and use ZFS for backup only. If you want a real NAS, then think about building two of them and let them both run ZFS. Keep at least the backup on a STABLE zfs version; thus no de-duplication and other fancy features that are deemed less stable at this moment.

Another option is to use ZFS as main storage, but use external HDDs on your Windows (a DAS; or direct-attached storage) pc to act as backup.

So the three options i discussed, are:
1) use both ZFS primary and ZFS backup NAS system (best solution)
2) use local storage on your desktop PCs and ZFS as backup solution
3) use ZFS as primary NAS and external HDDs as backup solution

You can vary these flavors, like only having a backup of your most important stuff (docs/work); like one big 2TB external HDD and 6x2TB total storage in RAIDZ2 on primary NAS. All these options are extremely reliable, relative to what protections consumers usually employ, this is gold!

But you may want to think about specific setup and write stuff on paper to calculate the costs etc. Each person's situation is different and requires a specific solution.
 
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