Plan for cheap home server using mixed drives

[dochesterton]

Hi guys, looking for some opinions on how best to build some sort of home server with the following drives.

 

1 1tb Samsung Spinpoint f3

1 WD green 1tb

1 WD green 500gb

1 Seagate 640gb 

 

I'm thinking raid 5? Want some redundancy, but want to spend as little as possible as already have all these drives all over the place.

 

I'm not entirely sure how to proceed, all I want is for it to be able to stream content through my wifi to any of my computers. Preferably I would like to be able to download straight to it through the computers as I will only have SSDs left in my desktop and laptop. What's the best plan off attack? Wait for the haswell refresh, as i'm planning to upgrade so re-use my current hardware somehow? (sandy bridge, i5 2400, p67 pro etc) any other suggestions welcome thanks.

[Vitalius]

Your setting yourself up for failure in so many ways it's sad. 

RAID 5, with mixed, used, consumer grade drives? Do that, and you may as well use them RAW (i.e. no RAID) because your chances of the RAID failing irreparably is somewhat high (relative to normal RAID 5 conditions). 

Really, I just suggest this: Mirror the 1TB drives. Mirror the 500gb and the 640gb. Don't do anything else and run it like that. You lose more space, but that's the only way you would actually get trustable redundancy out of this setup.

[wpirobotbuilder]

^ This guy.

 

Two mirrors is your best bet for safety. You'll lose just as much space running a RAID 5, but you won't have as much risk of total data loss.

[dochesterton]

Right ok thanks for the help guys i'll plan with this in mind.

[dalekphalm]

Hi guys, looking for some opinions on how best to build some sort of home server with the following drives.

 

1 1tb Samsung Spinpoint f3

1 WD green 1tb

1 WD green 500gb

1 Seagate 640gb 

 

I'm thinking raid 5? Want some redundancy, but want to spend as little as possible as already have all these drives all over the place.

 

I'm not entirely sure how to proceed, all I want is for it to be able to stream content through my wifi to any of my computers. Preferably I would like to be able to download straight to it through the computers as I will only have SSDs left in my desktop and laptop. What's the best plan off attack? Wait for the haswell refresh, as i'm planning to upgrade so re-use my current hardware somehow? (sandy bridge, i5 2400, p67 pro etc) any other suggestions welcome thanks.

I would recommend checking out FlexRAID. It's a software based solution that allows you to have arrays with mixed drive sizes. In your case, you could do a "raid 5" equivalent with the 1TB drives each as a separate "disk", with the 500GB and 640GB merged together to make a "1TB" virtual drive. Then all 3 1TB "drives" are put into a RAID 3 array where one of the disks is the parity drive. You only lose 1TB out of 3TB. Also all the data is stored in a standard NTFS filesystem. The benefit of this is that if you take one of the drives out of the array, you can read whatever data, folder, and files is on it. And if one of your disks die, you lose no data, and if 2 disks die, then you only lose the data on the failed disk.

[tycheleto]

+1 on the FlexRAID recommendation.

 

With FlexRAID you have a lot of freedom with regards to how you setup your drives, and you can merge them to be a single unit if you prefer, or you can leave them individually, and organize your files yourself based on the drives. Depending on the version of FlexRAID you buy, you could also just pool everything into one entire pool, where it emulates a RAID 5 array in the sense that you see them as a single disk, and you are protected from a single drive failure, but you are less likely to have software errors and the restrictions placed on Hardware RAID.

 

One thing to note is that FlexRAID performance is not that great, the reads should be similar in speed to the source drive, but the writes are nowhere near as fast due to the calculations required, and this could be a problem if you're writing very heavily.

 

Also, there is now a new variant of FlexRAID called Transparent RAID, which does the parity calculations in real time similar to RAID 5, and seems a lot more user friendly than the original FlexRAID. The software might be around $100, but compared to the cost of a RAID Controller and new drives, it's a pretty good deal if it suits your needs

[dalekphalm]

+1 on the FlexRAID recommendation.

 

With FlexRAID you have a lot of freedom with regards to how you setup your drives, and you can merge them to be a single unit if you prefer, or you can leave them individually, and organize your files yourself based on the drives. Depending on the version of FlexRAID you buy, you could also just pool everything into one entire pool, where it emulates a RAID 5 array in the sense that you see them as a single disk, and you are protected from a single drive failure, but you are less likely to have software errors and the restrictions placed on Hardware RAID.

 

One thing to note is that FlexRAID performance is not that great, the reads should be similar in speed to the source drive, but the writes are nowhere near as fast due to the calculations required, and this could be a problem if you're writing very heavily.

 

Also, there is now a new variant of FlexRAID called Transparent RAID, which does the parity calculations in real time similar to RAID 5, and seems a lot more user friendly than the original FlexRAID. The software might be around $100, but compared to the cost of a RAID Controller and new drives, it's a pretty good deal if it suits your needs

I just need to make a clarification here:

 

The write performance hit is ONLY in real-time RAID (Available in both Transparent RAID and RAID-F). The Snapshot RAID mode (Available only in RAID-F) does the parity calculations on a schedule. I have mine set to calculate once a day, but you can set the schedule as often or as little as you'd like.

 

Since I'm using it on a file/media server, the content doesn't change very quickly. There is no need to calculate RAID in real time, as yes, there is a performance hit. HOWEVER, using a scheduled parity calculation, your read/write performance is (basically) 100% the same as with a stand alone drive. Only when the scheduled calculation happens will you receive performance issues, and all you need to do is schedule it during a time you won't be using the array (Like 4 am or something).

 

Transparent RAID is a new mode that I'm not all that familiar with (It didn't exist yet when I bought FlexRAID).