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affordable home storage - 5TB< - pick apart my setup

ViviTheMage

ViviTheMage

Lifer
My current set up :

SERVER (MAIN DATA-PRODUCTION) :
Windows 7 PRO 64bit
E8400
8GB DDR2
2x320GB (RE3 disks) - OS
6x1TB (desktop quality drives)raid5 - DATA
3ware 9650SE-8LPML

EXTERNAL BACKUPS :
2TBx2 USB 2.0 drives (attached to server via USB2.0)

BACKUP SOLUTION :
robocopy running a mirror script every night ...been working perfectly...tested out files, works great.


What I am looking to do, is consolidate HDD's, so I purchased 3x2TB Samsung drives @ $90 a pop. My theory was raid5, but after reading a few threads, I see there are some major holes in my production data, as well as my backup plans.

So what I am asking is, pick apart my setup, let me know what you think I should do with my production data, or my back up solution. I CAN store them in a data center (I have rack space/power/bandwidth), but that would require a bigger $$ investment then I want to do right now...and I don't want to use madgenius production hardware either, haha.

Few things that need to stay..

Windows 7 (HTPC with my 4 tuner card).

I want to attach my production data to my raid card..spent the money, I SHOULD use it

I have a main PC, but I do not want to rely on it for making/starting backups, or putting drives in it for back ups .. that PC goes up/down frequently.

NOTICE : I do not want people to think I skimp on data integrity for madgenius.com, our data/isci solution at madgenius.com is much, MUCH more robust then my personal, home solution.
 
I am assuming you want to backup the server with the below. The big questions are:

1. Do you want to go rackmount?
2. Do you want a dumb DAS (sounds like no) or a NAS?
3. Do you want to do anything else with it?

My thought is that you can build a very inexpensive NAS box getting an old Atom N330/ION (lower power than the 945 sans ION and based setup and no 2 SATA port NM10 to deal with) and use that for NAS. Going fancy would be something like a D510 X7SPA-HF in this area (I will probably be getting one soon myself as including 4GB of RAM this can be done for $250). From there add FreeNAS or NexentaCore + napp-it or Nexenta Community Edition and use ZFS to handle all of the data scrubbing for you. Low power consumption and you are technical enough that setting up a network share that you can map for robocopy would be easy. Support onboard for six disks and a USB stick. Personally, I like using NAS for these applications as it makes life really simple when it comes to accessing data from other machines.

If you want to do more, you basically start looking at LGA 1156 platforms. If you want to do less, then you start getting into the world of SATA port multipliers and USB enclosures.
 
no rackmount, I want to use the server with windows 7, that I am now. I don't want to let that raid card go to waste.

The only thing I want to do is be more reliable...my concerns are raid5 can have issues. I know i'll have backups, but if the server gets a jolt, then there goes my USB 2.0 backups too.

I would not mind a NAS, but that pretty much adds extra cost. I do not need high performance backups. I just want reliable backups .. which is why I had the 2 USB 2.0 drives....I never access them, outside of copying files to them.

I really want to stay inside that server, with windows 7, I would hate to waste it, it's my multi purpose box. I can terminal service into it from anywhere.
 
USB 2.0 is all I have, and I am actually A-OK with it taking a while, it's just a backup, it'll never be production. I am not too worried about the speed.

Plus, I already have two of em, haha. I guess I could try selling em, or just pulling the drives out and into enclosures.

I am more curious about what I should do with the 3x2TB drives in my server.
 
ViviTheMage said:
Because I am using windows, is my only safe bet raid 10, with these desktop hard drives?
Click to expand...

define safe? the ONLY way to avoid silent data corruption (from various causes) today is to use the highly secret google file system or the publically available ZFS file system... with redundancy to allow it to recover said data corruption.
a defective CPU, RAM, PSU, MOBO, HDD or even cable can cause silent data corruption on your HDD, and to a much lesser degree, so could cosmic rays bit flipping and just random mis writes (1bit per TB written for enterprise drives & 1 bit per 300GB per home drives are simply written wrong IIRC).

Also, what are the data drives you intend to use, specifically? beware the WD GP if you use any raid... and what type of controller will you use? only windows home server (or enterprise) gives you OS based raid, mobo based raid doesn't even offer raid10 and even if it did mobo based RAID is the blight and should be avoided... cheap expansion cards are potentially worse or just no better than mobo based raid... and 300+$ RAID cards... well they are actually excellent, they are just expensive.
 
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I plan on using 3 of these in a raid 5:

Samsung Spinpoint F4EG HD204UI 2TB SATA2 5400rpm 32MB Hard Drive

read the OP for the rest of my specs.

I have a "$300+ RAID card"
 
I have lots of experience with large RAID 5 and 6 arrays on good "$300+ RAID cards." It's great...unless your using desktop (non TLER) drives. I cannot stress enough the risk you may be taking with a large RAID 5 array and desktop drives. Not because the drives will actually fail...but because inevitably at some time they will be trying to correct some errors and start getting dropped out of the array. This is a recipe for pain and data loss. I have seen it happen multiple times! Now you may get away with with only 3 drives...but you you only have single disk parity with RAID 5...so you'd better be super careful. I know it sucks to spend so much more for "RAID edition" drives...but consider the cost of losing data, or the worry about a raid array which may be far less stable than you might think...even with a good raid card.

I have recently been experimenting and testing setups with Nexenta Community edition myself and I'd definitely second the recommendation for it that taltamir gave. You can still use your good raid card for controlling the drives...just don't actually setup a raid array! Just use the card as an HBA for the SATA drive and let ZFS do a raidz1 on your 3 drives. It will have no problem accomodating the desktop drives and it's really not hard to do and setup some network shares on. You can build and inexpensive NAS box which will almost certainly be way more stable then RAID 5 on a Windows install. Granted it will be for storage only and not really be able to run anything else like you could on a Windows box.

Please at least consider it. If it's primary function is just network attached central storage for other machines you can't beat ZFS for a robust and self error correcting solution.

Alternately....how about this:
1) Build your planned Windows and RAID 5 on the 3ware setup as primary storage server, and HTPC ect.
2) instead of your planned USB backup of the above....build a SECOND simple, cheap (perhaps atom based) BACKUP server than runs Nexenta and put the two 2TB drive in THAT (mirrored). Share this to the the storage/HTPC server and use as a backup location over the network. You can still use your robocopy plan but just point it to this network location instead of ext USB drive. You will have a much more robust, stable, error correcting backup location. Possibly grab a 3rd ext 2TB drive as a secondary backup location that you can take offsite.
 
If I was going NAS, i'd for sure look at ZFS, or something similiar, but I am trying to keep my current set up...with windows 7.

I already have windows 7 running, with the 6x1TB drives, but I am moving off those 1TB drives, an on to the 3x2TB drives.


Sounds like I should build a NAS for my back up..and raid 5 3x2TB drives in my storage server.

I'd have faster restores, would get my backups away from my server (if there was to be a power jolt).

plan :
move data off raid 5, onto 2TB disks
setup raid 5 2TBx3 in server
move data from 2TB extenrals, back on to RAID 5
sell external hdd's to fund NAS
build NAS box for backups


I currently only NEED 1.6TB for backups, could I use something that will grow on the fly for my NAS? Where I can take it down, plug in another 2TB drive, and just let it grow?

I was looking at this :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817576001

realized it did not have network support on it, so I might have to build a NAS. I've always liked openfiler, the gui kicks ass. Could I just use that, or does ZFS have something similiar?

Can you think of a micro case that can fit 3-4+ drives? I can buy an atom board + memory, and use the onboard controller for the drives, as my backup.

As a side note, is there a nice way to monitor when my raid5 will have issues? I've had the 6x1 setup for about 7 months, with zero issues.

I had a scare recently, where I ALMOST lost my entire lifes data, so if I have to spend 200~ to set up a nas box, I will.
 
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if you wish to save money you can use tape drives for backups of your storage (store data on RAID, backup to tape), they are the cheapest way to create backups.
As far as your actualy storage goes, I don't really have anything more to add.
 
tape drives use removable media (tapes)... so you can backup as much data as you want.
blu ray is faster and allows you to seek specific files more conveniently. but is more expensive.

i don't understand what you mean for the price, tape is the best price per GB out of anything, price for storage is HDD > Bluray & tape (exact pricing differs).
I certainly understand the desire to have the convenience of a second NAS as backup, it just costs more.

PS. consider looking at this guide: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=218081&highlight=data
 
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ViviTheMage said:
I would have to have a lot of 160GB tape drives ... and backing up would take a while.
Click to expand...

most certainly, it will be very inconvenient, that is why I personally don't use it. It will just be the cheapest method. it is all a matter of budget. If you are willing to, spending the extra money on a dedicated backup NAS is much more convenient and less time consuming to do.

I am not trying to tell you what to do or what I think is best, I am just suggesting alternatives that you might or might not have considered.
 
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ViviTheMage said:
I don't think so either.
Click to expand...

The only WD with TLER are the RE series (Raid Edition, RE3, RE4, or RE4-GP) series of drives. Probably the S25 SAS too though I don't see it stated specifically. They do charge quite a premium for all of them unfortunately. 2TB RE4-GP on newegg is $249.
 
Silenus said:
The only WD with TLER are the RE series (Raid Edition, RE3, RE4, or RE4-GP) series of drives. Probably the S25 SAS too though I don't see it stated specifically. They do charge quite a premium for all of them unfortunately. 2TB RE4-GP on newegg is $249.
Click to expand...

quite a premium is quite an understatement 😛. the 2TB GP is mere 100$ vs the 250$ the RE costs.
 
on older WD drives you could turn it on and off freely, nowadays it can be turned off and on on RE drives (where it is on by default), but cannot be turned on in any drive that has it off by default... AFAIK that is, if there is an exception I would like to hear... well, not that I personally need it, since I use ZFS and ZFS is smart enough to not need TLER.
 
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