Upgraded my media server

[jtvang125]

Picked these up yesterday.
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/jtvang125/DSC03981.JPG

12 2TB Hitachi. Will be doing a RAID 5 setup which should give me 20TB usable. Will also be going from Home Server to 2003 server for better RAID support.

 

[JAG87]

gives my 10TB server low self-esteem.

how much did those cost?

 

[Ronstang]

I have one in a media center I just built last night. Damned thing crunches like crazy. I hope your server is in it's own closet.

 

[Tegeril]

I can't believe you'll trust that much data to RAID-5. You should be running RAID-6 or redundant groups of RAID-5.

 

[manimal]

Nice drive porn there ^^.

I have a home run and noisy drives and lots of fans dont bother me at all.

 

[jtvang125]

I can't believe you'll trust that much data to RAID-5. You should be running RAID-6 or redundant groups of RAID-5.

RAID card doesn't support RAID 6, just 0, 1, 5, 1+0, and 5+0. 5+0 is just way out of my budget though. Yes, it's possible that 2 drives can fail at the same time but it has never happened to me nor anyone I know. We had a few drives go down at work but again never 2 at the same time.

 

[Fallen Kell]

RAID card doesn't support RAID 6, just 0, 1, 5, 1+0, and 5+0. 5+0 is just way out of my budget though. Yes, it's possible that 2 drives can fail at the same time but it has never happened to me nor anyone I know. We had a few drives go down at work but again never 2 at the same time.

Probably because your work drives were not 2TB in size, but more likely 500GB or less. Time to recover is what you need to be worried about as well as chance of failed read/write during that recovery time. I agree with Tegeril, you really need to look at RAID 6.

You just spent around $1600 on disks yet won't spend the $500 for a decent controller card.

 

[Tegeril]

Editing this buggy double post thread to suggest this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-004-_-Product

I'd say the fact that RAID-6 supporting cards in this price range are only handling 8 simultaneous drives is somewhat telling about a 12 consumer drive RAID-5 array.

 

[Tegeril]

It's not even that two drives failing at the same time is the issue. With two parity solutions you can recover from data corruption on one disk.

Also, if there is any sort of read error while rebuilding a RAID-5 array from parity, you will lose that data without fail. With 2TB hard drives, this is a lengthy and cpu intensive task that exposes your entire array to abnormal stress over a long period of unprotected time.

 

[JoeBleed]

Its just a media server, Presumably he could just replace the data. Its not a critical data server right? I would feel fine with just raid 5. if nothing else, if your card supports it, make one a hot spare and run with it.

 

[vshah]

curious why you didn't just stick with WHS file duplication? unless space is really that much of a concern?

 

[Tegeril]

Its just a media server, Presumably he could just replace the data. Its not a critical data server right? I would feel fine with just raid 5. if nothing else, if your card supports it, make one a hot spare and run with it.

I can't imagine the amount of time it would take to replace 20TB of data.

 

[JAG87]

That's why I run without raid and don't concern myself with any of this. If one drive poops itself, hey you lost that data and that data only. I'd rather live with higher a higher chance of losing 10% of my data than a smaller chance of losing everything. With raid you have to worry about this, that and the other. On top of it being expensive.

 

[Tegeril]

That's why I run without raid and don't concern myself with any of this. If one drive poops itself, hey you lost that data and that data only. I'd rather live with higher a higher chance of losing 10% of my data than a smaller chance of losing everything. With raid you have to worry about this, that and the other. On top of it being expensive.

This is why I run unRAID. I have a single parity disk, but in the event of double failure, my data is not spanned between volumes and I can still get the individual data from the remaining functioning drives. Best of both worlds. Still hoping they'll implement the reed solomon parity solution they talked about in 08 to bring dual parity to it.

For reference, I only run 3 data disks in this environment, and wouldn't go over 5-6 without a second parity solution (1TB drives).

 

[JoeBleed]

I can't imagine the amount of time it would take to replace 20TB of data.

eh, for non critical data, i would consider it a forced house cleaning.

But if i wanted to keep that much data, i would probably just build another box the same and use it for backing up once a week or month depending on how often data changed. It would still be cheaper than tape backups. I would suggest compression with the backup but i would guess sense it is for media, it is likely already compressed and you might not get much gain from compression. Plus compression adds another layer of possible corruption.

If supported though, a hot spare would be a good thing to do.