Alternative to RAID for Home Media Server

[healthyboy]

I'm looking for alternative to RAID for my home Media Server because I'm beginning to utilize drives bigger than 4TB which doesn't work very well for RAID5, I need a solution which addresses the reliability issue of RAID5 with Large drives.

 

it should also keep the data handy all the time, so cloud storage is not really an option, Would be nice if it offers expansion options in the future in case I want to add more drives, and it should work on Windows.

 

I'm currently using Windows storage spaces in Parity mode (is it on the same reliability level as RAID5 ?)

[Salacious B Crum]

unRAID

[brwainer]

1 hour ago, healthyboy said:

I'm currently using Windows storage spaces in Parity mode (is it on the same reliability level as RAID5 ?)

Storage Spaces Parity with one disk tolerance is similar to RAID5, with two disk tolerance is similar to RAID6, and it also offers three disk tolerance.

 

as @mrbilky succinctly stated, take a look at UnRAID.

[healthyboy]

1 minute ago, brwainer said:

Storage Spaces Parity with one disk tolerance is similar to RAID5, with two disk tolerance is similar to RAID6, and it also offers three disk tolerance.

 

as @mrbilky suscictly stated, take a look at UnRAID.

 

Storage spaces doesn't support double parity unfortunately, the 2-way mirror is RAID 1 not RAID 6

[brwainer]

Just now, healthyboy said:

 

Storage spaces doesn't support double parity unfortunately, the 2-way mirror is RAID 1 not RAID 6

Yes it does, but you have to have at least 7 disks for double disk parity to be offered.

[healthyboy]

1 minute ago, brwainer said:

Yes it does, but you have to have at least 7 disks for double disk parity to be offered.

Didn't know that, thanks for the info, but why would it need 7 disks when the typical RAID 6 requires 5 disks ?

[brwainer]

3 minutes ago, healthyboy said:

Didn't know that, thanks for the info, but why would it need 7 disks when the typical RAID 6 requires 5 disks ?

I don’t have any knowledge of the reason. But other systems e.g. ZFS allow double disk parity with only 4 disks. The reason you might want that versus RAID10 is that RAID6 with 4 disks allows you to lose any two disks, instead of 1 disk per pair.

 

Edit: Unraid also has an option for a second parity disk, but it operates very unlike RAID, as the name implies.

[healthyboy]

I did some research, and it seems that dual parity in storage spaces is only available in server versions of Windows, so I guess i'm back to square one.

[brwainer]

39 minutes ago, healthyboy said:

I did some research, and it seems that dual parity in storage spaces is only available in server versions of Windows, so I guess i'm back to square one.

Ah yes, that is true also.

[healthyboy]

so what are other options to reliably combine multiple drives in a Windows environment ?

[Salacious B Crum]

Why not setup the 30 day free trial of unRAID and give it a go the trial is of the full software so you can objectively test it out with no strings attached that's how I got hooked on it and if you decide to buy it it will most likely be the cheapest part of the build

[Mr.Humble]

15 hours ago, healthyboy said:

so what are other options to reliably combine multiple drives in a Windows environment ?

Powershell. Setting up Storage spaces in Powershell gives you a lot of the functionality "lock away" for server only. 

 

@leadeater

[leadeater]

23 hours ago, healthyboy said:

I'm currently using Windows storage spaces in Parity mode (is it on the same reliability level as RAID5 ?)

That depends on how you configured it. If you made the Virtual Disk Single Parity then it is roughly RAID 5, if you made it Dual Parity then it is roughly RAID 6. There is also Two-Way Mirror (RAID 10) and Three-Way Mirror which is 3 copies of data with striping if you have enough disks in the pool. Storage Spaces doesn't work on the disk level, it uses data chunks and placement rules hence Two-Way Mirror means every chunk is mirrored across two disks in the pool, you can have as many disks as you like but 50% of the raw capacity will be used for redundancy.

 

Dual Parity is really all you need, if you care about performance then Two-Way Mirror.

 

16 hours ago, healthyboy said:

I did some research, and it seems that dual parity in storage spaces is only available in server versions of Windows, so I guess i'm back to square one.

All configuration possibilities can be used in desktop Windows but you have to use PowerShell to do it, the GUI doesn't offer you all the options unless you are running the Server OS, underneath it's the same.