RAID 5 my best option?

[mazeroth]

I have two external 2TB WD Element drives I got at Target for $70 each. Inside are WD Black drives, which I plan to remove and use internally. I'm going to build a media server and would like redundancy in case of a crash. This will house all my music, ripped movies and television shows I record on my OTA card.

What I'm thinking of doing is getting two more drives (possibly not identical, unless the black drives go on sale cheap) and putting them in a RAID 5. This should give me 6 TB of total storage with parity. Sound good?

Also, should I look for a NAS with RAID capabilities or just to build a small server? If so, which OS to use? And if I do build the computer will the onboard software RAID do the trick? Any to look for?

Thanks in advance.

 

[nanaki333]

you should just build a small server and put freeNAS on it.

 

[Emulex]

raid is not redundant for a crash. a crash is the worst possible situation for a raid box. They should have 100% uptime with proper shutdown with battery backup that will give it enough time. Remember the battery back write cache is only good for 0-36 hours as the batteries age which is why people have moved to super capacitor flash back write cache.

you are better off just doing jbod on two systems with rsync to mirror files imo. preferably in different parts of the house

 

[mazeroth]

raid is not redundant for a crash. a crash is the worst possible situation for a raid box. They should have 100% uptime with proper shutdown with battery backup that will give it enough time. Remember the battery back write cache is only good for 0-36 hours as the batteries age which is why people have moved to super capacitor flash back write cache.

you are better off just doing jbod on two systems with rsync to mirror files imo. preferably in different parts of the house

By crash I mean one of the drives fail. At that point don't I just replace the drive and let the RAID repair itself? I will be using a dual battery APC 1500 battery backup tower.

 

[sgrinavi]

... At that point don't I just replace the drive and let the RAID repair itself? ......

Ya, and it even works most of the time. BUT the funny thing about RAID in general - the increase in complexity seems to cause more failures.. I seriously can not recall replacing a non RAID 5 or 10 drive, but have replaced several 5's and 10's drives -

Sure, it rebuilds them, but it's not fast and the rebuilding seems to happen more often than it should (with or without drive replacements)

If you are looking for better read speeds that you can get off a 5 then you are probably better off setting up a 4 TB RAID 0 (will go that large?) just running nightly back-ups.

 

[mazeroth]

I don't really care about speed. I just want to have a large storage capacity and redundancy in case something goes amiss. RAID 1 would yield 4GB so the 5 option seemed good in that I would gain 2 more TB of space. Right now I have 2.5 TB occupied. I guess I could just do a RAID 1 for 4TB total and then in 2 years or so, when it's full, larger drives will be available for a lot less money.

Ya, and it even works most of the time. BUT the funny thing about RAID in general - the increase in complexity seems to cause more failures.. I seriously can not recall replacing a non RAID 5 or 10 drive, but have replaced several 5's and 10's drives -

Sure, it rebuilds them, but it's not fast and the rebuilding seems to happen more often than it should (with or without drive replacements)

If you are looking for better read speeds that you can get off a 5 then you are probably better off setting up a 4 TB RAID 0 (will go that large?) just running nightly back-ups.