12 Drive PLEX Server

[Jake72]

Hi All, what is the best way to control 12 drives in raid?    

[dalekphalm]

16 minutes ago, Jake72 said:

Hi All, what is the best way to control 12 drives in raid?    

What size of drives are we talking about here?

[Jake72]

Well starting at 4TB HDD, in future when price comes down 10TB

[dalekphalm]

Just now, Jake72 said:

Well starting at 4TB HDD, in future when price comes down 10TB

Okay - so your plan is to purchase 12x 4TB HDD's? That's 48TB of raw capacity.

 

That's quite a lot for a Plex Server. Have you ballparked your storage requirements?

 

You can estimate this by totaling up the number of DVD's and/or Blu-Ray movies + TV Shows you're wanting to store on the system, and multiplying by the average filesize of each.

 

How much storage do you actually need? That'll determine what RAID combinations will be useful.

 

Note: RAID0 is a non-starter - don't even consider it.

[Jake72]

right now I use 4 4tb drives but want to be able to expand as i acquire movies, music and tv shows I also will store important files on the server.

[Jake72]

Plan to use this from Rosewill

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, Jake72 said:

right now I use 4 4tb drives but want to be able to expand as i acquire movies, music and tv shows I also will store important files on the server.

Okay - I'm with you so far.

So with that in mind, you've got several options.

 

To maximize storage capacity, you could do one large RAID5 array. RAID5 is single parity fault tolerance. This means your array would be 12 x 4TB - 4TB = 44TB usable capacity.

 

The downside to a RAID5 array that large is you risk a catastrophic array failure if you ever need to rebuild from a single drive failure. How big is the risk? Not huge, but it's there.

 

Whether that's a problem, ultimately comes down to two factors:

1. Are you backing up anything important?

2. Are you willing to re-import all the movies, TV shows, etc that are lost?

 

If the answer to both is yes, then a RAID5 array should be "fine" for this.

 

The next step up would be RAID6 - exact same as a RAID5, but you lose 2 disks worth of capacity instead of one disk, so you'd be left with 40TB of raw storage. The good news is that you now have 2 disk fault tolerance, meaning 2 HDD's can die and you can still recover from it.

 

Lastly the only other major option is RAID10. This is basically two RAID0 stripes (two 6-disk arrays that combine every single drive into one big one) that are mirrored to each other. RAID10 offers a lot of redundant flexibility, but you only get half your total capacity - in this case, 24TB.

 

I'd suggest RAID6 for an array that large, personally.

 

Or you could create two totally independent arrays that are just different drives. In that case, I'd create two RAID5 arrays. You'd have to figure out some method of organizing your files between the two (eg: Array #1 is Movies, Array #2 is TV Series).

 

Last but of course never least: RAID is not a backup. If you've got important stuff you can't afford to lose, make sure it's backed up to a completely entirely separate HDD or RAID array.

 

Now, how are you gonna RAID it? Options include Hardware RAID, which is pretty reliable (assuming you get a decent RAID Card w/ RAM Cache and Battery Backup).

 

Also options include software RAID, such as ZFS or Windows Storage Spaces or unRAID.

 

Then there's undesirable options, like "Motherboard" RAID (often called FakeRAID) - don't use this, even if it can support the number of drives you're intending on using.

[Jake72]

What I want to use is a LSI x16 or x8 Raid Controller  But need a mobo that will accept ryzan 5 1600 and a 8p controller and a 4p controller

[dalekphalm]

Just now, Jake72 said:

What I want to use is a LSI x16 or x8 Raid Controller 

Because of the fact that you have 12 drives, you've got two choices:

 

Use a single 16-channel RAID card (Ideal, but more expensive), or use a Single 8-channel RAID card along with a SAS Expander card (potentially slightly slower performance, less expensive).

 

What Operating System are you intending on using?

[Jake72]

Good Idea

 

[leadeater]

On 2/5/2019 at 1:37 PM, Jake72 said:

What I want to use is a LSI x16 or x8 Raid Controller  But need a mobo that will accept ryzan 5 1600 and a 8p controller and a 4p controller

 

On 2/5/2019 at 1:38 PM, dalekphalm said:

Because of the fact that you have 12 drives, you've got two choices:

 

I'd say because the system is not starting off with 12 drives and systems don't tend to get expanded as far as intended I would start with a dual port SAS RAID card then add in an expander if that ever becomes a requirement. Because data growth is rarely as much as anticipated and the fact you can just use larger disks and a new array I'd just do that.

 

Start off with the 4 4TB disk array then create a new one with also 4 disks but using 8TB or larger disks. If you need more space than those 2 arrays I would retire the original 4TB disks, they are probably at the age to do that by then and either expand the larger array or create another new one with the larger disks of that time period.

 

Basically don't up front buy more than you need, every day you don't utilize is another day you're effectively losing money on it as it devalues.