Storage Configuation

[Josiah92]

Expanding/redoing my storage, but decided to buy before researching. I have 4 3TB HDDs and 2 6TB HDDs and I'm looking for better then HDD performance with fault tolerance. I had RAID 5 setup, but read in many places that with drives larger then 2TB one of my other drives would most likely die before a rebuild would complete. If this is so then RAID 5 and really 6 are both out (even with 6 I'd rebuild, probably have another die during the rebuild and then have to rebuild again after it was finished...repeat until all drives are replaced or get lucky). So, I figured RAID 10 (with three groups of RAID 1 [3+3]+[3+3]+[6+6]) would work...until I remembered RAID 0 requires the same size volumes, so I'd lose out on half my 6TB drive storage. This brings me to two options that I can think of RAID 10 (with two groups of RAID 1 [3+3+6]+[3+3+6]) or RAID (5E or 6)/1 + 0 (With my 3TB drives RAID 5E or 6; my 6TB RAID 1; then those under RAID 0) or setup the 3TB in RAID 0 for performance and 6TB spanned for backup. I again don't like the idea of RAID 5/6 if i'll have that rebuild loop, but the two group RAID 10 doesn't feel good (very little knowledge, so if its fine tell me and I can through it out of my mind) and the backup means if something happens I have to transfer everything one-way or the other. Other ideas are always welcome.

 

This is for a plex media server on Windows Server 2012 R2, where I have 6TB of content which I planned to grow and I really don't want to have to rip my movies again. It took weeks. That's why I want the redundancy. The performance is just so I can watch a movie while the kids each watch something, have all of use stream at original quality and have no buffer hiccups for anyone. I have spent many hours (15+ that I can remember), trying to get a RAID 10 like setup that could expand seemlessly...it doesn't appear to exist .

 

Help, please.

[Electronics Wizardy]

20 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

2TB one of my other drives would most likely die before a rebuild would complete

This is definatly not true. I have done testing on this and many others have, and the real error rates are muh lower.

 

21 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

Windows Server 2012 R2,

Just use storage spaces on windows, not normal raid, make a volume with mirrors, and its basically a raid 10, and will work with a mixed drive sertup.

 

Also why 2012r2, id upgrade to 2019 if you can.

 

And do you really need the performance, movies need very little bandwidth.

[Josiah92]

43 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

1 hour ago, Josiah92 said:

2TB one of my other drives would most likely die before a rebuild would complete

This is definatly not true. I have done testing on this and many others have, and the real error rates are muh lower.

Do you know or know where I can find out how likely it is that a 3 or 6 TB drives makes it through a RAID 5 or 6 rebuild after a year or two of usage?

 

I was using storage spaces, but I thought I read that [simple] is like RAID 0 though can act like JBOD when filling up drives of different sizes, [mirror] is like RAID 1 that "slabs" of data are striped across "other drives" in the virtual disk and [parity] is like RAID 5 that the "slabs" are striped data with a parity "slab" created as well. Does mirror really work close to RAID 10?

 

I have a license for Windows Server 2012 R2, so I thought this would be the perfect system to use it on. I don't have any other servers.

 

I do need the performance IF we ever do have several streams. I'm not compressing my videos as multiple attempts still yield visible effects (maybe me and my wife have amazing attention to detail. A single stream can eat up 34 Mbps...and I just realized that's Mbps not MBps. Well, I thought I needed it, but having 24 streams going smoothly would be something to boast about. 

 

In case you were wondering I was compressing using Handbrake 1.2.2 or 1.2.1, with super hq 1080p30 preset and changed rf of 18, 20, 23 and have tried the decomb and interlace (which I was later told those are meant for DVDs not Blu-rays).

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

Do you know or know where I can find out how likely it is that a 3 or 6 TB drives makes it through a RAID 5 or 6 rebuild after a year or two of usage?

There isn't great data on this, but from what ive seen probably less than 5%. Run scrubs and that will remove much of the risk of a rebuild finding bad blcoks

 

 

8 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

was using storage spaces, but I thought I read that [simple] is like RAID 0 though can act like JBOD when filling up drives of different sizes, [mirror] is like RAID 1 that "slabs" of data are striped across "other drives" in the virtual disk and [parity] is like RAID 5 that the "slabs" are striped data with a parity "slab" created as well. Does mirror really work close to RAID 10?

storage spaces will spread data across drives, so its basically like raid 10.

 

8 minutes ago, Josiah92 said:

do need the performance IF we ever do have several streams. I'm not compressing my videos as multiple attempts still yield visible effects (maybe me and my wife have amazing attention to detail. A single stream can eat up 34 Mbps...and I just realized that's Mbps not MBps. Well, I thought I needed it, but having 24 streams going smoothly would be something to boast about. 

Even with 24 streams at 34 mbit, that would still be about 102mB/s, and a single drive should be fine there, would probably struggle, but the raid should be fine. Really, not that much data.

 

 

 

Storage spaces has a lot of advanced featurs in powershell, so give it a shot.

[Josiah92]

I spent a few more hours working on this and I've decided to solely use storage pool/spaces and do a parity configuration with 3 columns. This will give me the boost in performance I wanted (though I know I don't really need it now), give me the most storage space, only requires 3 disks for optimal upgrades in the future and still has fault tolerance. Since its a media server and I shouldn't need to write often at all, I'm fine with leaving that as reduced throughput.

 

Thank you Electronics Wizardy

 

NOTE: storage pool/spaces will let you add any disks you want but increasing the virtual disk is where the specific number of drives being added matters as this is where your column count is set. ASSUMING that if the drives are not a multiple of the column number that you drop down to the performance of the last multiple.