Looking for a Raid solutions for multiple size drives

[Face2Face]

Looking for something kind of like a Drobo solution. I know of Unraid, but I need to have windows installed so this will not work. I looked into another program called FlexRaid, but I am a little confused by it.

I am building a Media server for mainly using PLEX - This server will also be used as a general PC and for torrents. I will be using a bunch of random sized drives and wanted to know if there was a program out that could pool them together and provide a backup if one or maybe two drives fail.

 

[greenhawk]

Flex raid sounds the closest to what you want from my understanding. but you have to pay for the full licence to get what you want (protection and drive joining).

But the torrenting part will be the killer as any form of drive protection hates having to do parity calulations as often as torrents get adjusted (when downloading). once downloaded it does not matter as much.

Not 100% sure if Flexraid supports 2 drives dieing but then the higher the protection, the more processing time spent updateing file changes.

Some other non-raid drive protection exists (free), but it is what is called a snap shot system where protection from failed drives only works at the last snap shot. snapraid is an option for that http://snapraid.sourceforge.net/

 

[poofyhairguy]

Unraid system

+

Windows 7 HTPC to do the Windows stuff you need

 

[Face2Face]

It turns out some of my older drives are too noisy to install. I will stick with one 2TB for now. I do like UnRaid- is there anyway I can have windows installed and setup a VM for unraid. The windows install would be on a seperate HDD , not part of the UnRaid pool?

Flexraid - sounds cool too - It can be pricey for the full version which is the one I will need

This SnapRaid looks nice as well. I will have to check that out.

 

[kmmatney]

Would drive bender work?

http://www.drivebender.com/

 

[Face2Face]

Would drive bender work?

http://www.drivebender.com/

Drive Bender looks great - And it's only $20. Thanks!

 

[heymrdj]

I use the WHS 2011 version of Drivebender on my server and it works amazingly. All the benefits of the old WHS 2007 software without the kinks. Failover and backup tests have worked as well. All the drives are on a RAID card (LSI MegaRAID 8308ELP) that just passes the drives through. With the card providing caching and the Drive Bender software distributing information acrossed all the drives I'm hitting aboug 860mb/s acrossed 7 drives.

And you can't beat that 20$ pricetag. That and they let you install it for free for 30 days, 100% fully functioning. Their support has been awesome as well and the forum group are very knowledgable. The latest version (called Tomcat if I remember right) is a serious upgrade from the previous, with a beautiful dashboard that gives tons of info right up front in a stylish manner.

If I had to complain of anything about it it would be processor usage. When you actually load down the array (transferring things to it) it uses as much as 80% of my Athlon X2 4800+ processor. But that's to be expected, it's an old processor that can barely do WHS's media tasks in the first place. I'm sure it'll be much better when I move up to an i3-2120.

 

[Face2Face]

I use the WHS 2011 version of Drivebender on my server and it works amazingly. All the benefits of the old WHS 2007 software without the kinks. Failover and backup tests have worked as well. All the drives are on a RAID card (LSI MegaRAID 8308ELP) that just passes the drives through. With the card providing caching and the Drive Bender software distributing information acrossed all the drives I'm hitting aboug 860mb/s acrossed 7 drives.

And you can't beat that 20$ pricetag. That and they let you install it for free for 30 days, 100% fully functioning. Their support has been awesome as well and the forum group are very knowledgable. The latest version (called Tomcat if I remember right) is a serious upgrade from the previous, with a beautiful dashboard that gives tons of info right up front in a stylish manner.

If I had to complain of anything about it it would be processor usage. When you actually load down the array (transferring things to it) it uses as much as 80% of my Athlon X2 4800+ processor. But that's to be expected, it's an old processor that can barely do WHS's media tasks in the first place. I'm sure it'll be much better when I move up to an i3-2120.

Thank you very much for the info. I just put together the server over the weekend.

Athlon X2 5000+
Gigabyte 785G motheboard
4GB DDR2
WHS 2011

I have a 2.5" Laptop drive running the main OS. And for now, I have one 2TB HDD. I plan on installing two more 2TB drives and a faster OS drive. I won't need to be transferring many files to it since it's used primary as a media server and I can torrent and DVD rip right from the server. I torrent with the OS drive not the 2TB and run it headless and connect to it via remote desktop. This is why I opted for WHS 2011, because I can use it as a workstation as well. I will tell you I use PLEX, and stream my movies to my Roku's - the X2 5000+ cannot handle multiple HD streams because it transcodes all of the movies on the fly. A 6 core in my near future

I haven't configured raid on any of my PC's in the last 10 years, so I am a little behind in that area. So you say you are passing the info through your raid card and not using the raid function of the card, just caching? You are using Driverbender as a software raid for all seven of your drives?

If I had three 2TB drives, how much useable space would I have of the 6TB's?

Thank you in advance!

 

[heymrdj]

Thank you very much for the info. I just put together the server over the weekend.

Athlon X2 5000+
Gigabyte 785G motheboard
4GB DDR2
WHS 2011

I have a 2.5" Laptop drive running the main OS. And for now, I have one 2TB HDD. I plan on installing two more 2TB drives and a faster OS drive. I won't need to be transferring many files to it since it's used primary as a media server and I can torrent and DVD rip right from the server. I torrent with the OS drive not the 2TB and run it headless and connect to it via remote desktop. This is why I opted for WHS 2011, because I can use it as a workstation as well. I will tell you I use PLEX, and stream my movies to my Roku's - the X2 5000+ cannot handle multiple HD streams because it transcodes all of the movies on the fly. A 6 core in my near future

I haven't configured raid on any of my PC's in the last 10 years, so I am a little behind in that area. So you say you are passing the info through your raid card and not using the raid function of the card, just caching? You are using Driverbender as a software raid for all seven of your drives?

If I had three 2TB drives, how much useable space would I have of the 6TB's?

Thank you in advance!

Yeah I have Drive Bender set up on a by folder duplication deal. And the dashboard shows you that files are fully duplicated across the drives. It's not as efficient as raid obviously (100% file size x2) but my data is important enough that I want full NTFS readability on multiple drives. This way if the server dies I'm not tied to hardware or OS. I'm using the RAID card because I had it around, otherwise I'd use one of the cheap Highpoint non-raid SATA cards. I just like cards compared to onboard because I can simply take the card and move it to another machine with no worries of drivers ect.

As for the RAID size question that would depend on RAID type. RAID 0 would just make all of them one volume so you've have 6TB minus formatting and the bit vs byte thing so probably like 5.5TB usable. RAID 1 mirrors drives so that wouldn't work unless you did like 1+1+hotspare. RAID 5 would turn one drive into a parity drive so you'd have 3.7TB or so (4Tb) plus a 2tb providing parity for the other drives. I think if using all same drives a single drive can parity between 5-8 others, so your RAID 5 array would continue to increase in size as you added more 2TB drives until you were at like 5 2TB drives (10TB) plus one 2TB drive for parity. RAID 6 takes 4 drives, and if you had 4, it would be the same as RAID 5 except you would have 2 parity drives, so in the end all sizes would be the same except you'd have a second 2TB parity drive. That way the array could sustain a double failure.

 

[Face2Face]

Yeah I have Drive Bender set up on a by folder duplication deal. And the dashboard shows you that files are fully duplicated across the drives. It's not as efficient as raid obviously (100% file size x2) but my data is important enough that I want full NTFS readability on multiple drives. This way if the server dies I'm not tied to hardware or OS. I'm using the RAID card because I had it around, otherwise I'd use one of the cheap Highpoint non-raid SATA cards. I just like cards compared to onboard because I can simply take the card and move it to another machine with no worries of drivers ect.

As for the RAID size question that would depend on RAID type. RAID 0 would just make all of them one volume so you've have 6TB minus formatting and the bit vs byte thing so probably like 5.5TB usable. RAID 1 mirrors drives so that wouldn't work unless you did like 1+1+hotspare. RAID 5 would turn one drive into a parity drive so you'd have 3.7TB or so (4Tb) plus a 2tb providing parity for the other drives. I think if using all same drives a single drive can parity between 5-8 others, so your RAID 5 array would continue to increase in size as you added more 2TB drives until you were at like 5 2TB drives (10TB) plus one 2TB drive for parity. RAID 6 takes 4 drives, and if you had 4, it would be the same as RAID 5 except you would have 2 parity drives, so in the end all sizes would be the same except you'd have a second 2TB parity drive. That way the array could sustain a double failure.

It sounds like Raid-5 would be what I would like to have. Making one parity drive and the others for storage. I would only plan on installing 4 -5 drives max for this setup. Like you said 1 parity drive to 4 storage drives should work. What would be the benefit of going with the software raid vs the hardware?

Pooling the drives and having the ability to add 500GB or 1TB instead of having all of the same drive sizes?