Question Windows 11 - RAID 5 16x20tb - NTFS?

[boed]

Hello,

I know you a lot of people like linux and unraid but let's talk Windows 11 24h2 16 x 20TB. I have the drives and I have a controller. I have multiple backups using smaller servers. I'm about to set it up from scratch. I'm thinking it will be about 270tb which as far as I know is over the ntfs limit. I never used REFS before.

Short of using unraid, linux, raid6 within the parameters of Windows 11 what would you do?

 

[Micrornd]

I'm thinking it will be about 270tb which as far as I know is over the ntfs limit.

That's no longer necessarily true, see here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/file-server/ntfs-overview

I personally use an LSI 9361-8i with an Adaptec 82885T expander to run 2 - 180Tb R6 volumes using a i7-11700K on a Z590 motherboard as a Plexserver and it works great.
While you may have an abundance of disks, you don't always need 1 large volume to get the work done.

 

[gea]

A Raid-5 with 16x20TB disks has a high risk for a whole array lost when one drive fails and when a readerror happens during rebuild in the degraded array. Do not!

You should use a Raid-6. With ntfs you should use a hardware raid adapter with BBU or flash protection to be quite safe. With software raid you should prefer a modern filesystem with Copy on Write and checksums on data and metadata like ReFS or ZFS. In the same situation you will propably only loose an affected file, not the whole array.

An upcoming alternative is OpenZFS 2.3.1 on Windows. Still a release candidate (rc8) with major problems already fixed. Current state is quite usable, ready for serious tests.

An alternative to Raid-5 is a Storage Spaces pool. Thie is not diskbased raid but a basket of disks from where you can create Spaces with redundancy (none, mirror, parity, dual parity) or tiering defined per Space that you can format in ntfs or ReFS (dev drive in Windows 11)

 

[blckgrffn]

I'd use Linux and set it up as a near to headless files server is possible, using one of the distros made for this.

I see that is a bridge to far.

As a former infrastructure storage admin, this would be pretty far outside my comfort zone. If you lose a drive, the rest of them will be hammered during the extremely lengthy rebuild and that would stress me out for the day or two (or week? how long will that take?) the rebuild was happening. My sanity is worth more than the cost of a drives worth of storage 😀 or two, frankly.