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Raid for home file server

M

macrymble

Junior Member


I'm in the process of converting a 6 year old desktop into a home file server for music, movies, etc. I just bought 4 1TB drives to use (newegg link), but I'm not sure about the next step to take.

My first question is about what flavor of raid to use. I had planned on using raid 5, but I've heard that there was a pretty decent chance of running into a read error when restoring a failed drive. Would 1+0 be a better choice for my application?

Next, I can't decide on what to do for a raid controller. If there's a decent 4 port, PCI-based, raid controller for under $75 I would get it but I can't seem to find one. The other option would be getting a completely new motherboard that has 4 sata ports and the raid support that I need.


Is it even worth trying to find a raid controller or should I just suck it up and spend the money for an upgrade that would work for me?

I'm sorry I don't have a more concrete question to ask, but any help or guidance would be really helpful!
 
I think a JBOD span would be better than RAID 0 for what you're trying to do. Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you only configure a RAID when it's first built? If your 4 drive array runs out of space and you need more, you need another array and this spreads your data across more locations and it gets harder and harder to find things. (gaming computer I'm using right now had 5 hard drives of varying sizes, 4 of them are spanned together)

Here's how my server works, and I think it's a pretty good system.
-The server has 2 normal drives with their own letters, C and E
-Another 2 drives are spanned together (not RAID), drive F
-All 3 logical drives (C,E,F) are shared, but span drive F is mounted as a network drive (Z on every other computer in the house)
-Using a free tool called SyncToy, data is copied from drives C and E to drive F. This means the span is effectively a read-only backup to view all data across all drives; data written to the network must be written to drives C or E.

The idea behind this is very simple. A span is nice because drives of varying sizes can be tied together whereas a RAID can only use drives of the same size. If each of us buy another 1.5TB hard drive tomorrow, I can tie mine into the span right away whereas you can't tie yours into a RAID. Individual drives that are not spanned and not part of RAID should hold the master copies of files because this allows you to configure backup software to always copy from small drive to large span (or to a raid).


Someone will probably post saying you should either do 0+1 or 1+0 but I think that's silly because it's such a rigid system. If you see a 500gb on sale for $30, how do you add that to your RAID made from 1TB drives? In my server, I can add it to the system by buying two of the drives, one is kept as a standalone while the other is added to span. Easy as pie.
 
Another idea:
1x1TB for OS install/data storage
1x1TB for data storage that's not so important (ie, immediate movie rips, pics, so on..)
2x1TB in RAID1, for more important data storage. You lose a disk's worth of storage space, but IMHO the redundancy you gain makes up for it.

This is how I would approach your need for a simple media server, it's also how I approach mine 🙂
 
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