Storage noob help

[Winther]

Hey guys!

Ok, I dont think im a noob but when it comes to hardware raid, software raid, server solutions and home servers im ot excactly a pro.

Im planing on getting 2-6 x 3tb WD Red drives for a home server/media pc, and im really confused as to if I should go with a dedicated raid card, also what OS I should use?

Windows Home Server r2 (dont remember the year)

Windows Home Server 2011

Windows Server 2012

Windows 8 (the storage spaces feature sounds quite good to me, just dont know what to expect in terms of non-local access in Win8)

Some Linux solution

FreeNas

Nas4Free

anyway, if anyone could tell/teach me a little about all this on a pretty basic level or maybe just link me to some other sites that explain this that would be greatly apriciated!

[wpirobotbuilder]

You will be able to access volumes from Win8 from other locations on the network, as long as you have the username/password combo to an account on the PC. Volumes can be storage space based (I believe). If you're not looking to do parity volumes then storage spaces will work just fine. You really should have a backup though, regardless of whether you have a RAID setup or not.

[Winther]

and what is the difference between parity and mirror? is that if you fx have 3 drives and one of them is backup, is that parity?

I will mostly be storing movies and series wich doesnt require backup, but I might do a 2 x 2tb WD enterprise drives in raid 1 for the files that I dont want to lose.. :)

and what about Win8's storage spaces if I have to reinstall the OS or the motherboard/cpu dies ?

[Mosphoran]

If you have three data drives and one parity drive, the RAID will be able to recover any one of the data drives in the event of failure.

Longer explanation of parity: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5265959/Parity.txt

Personally I don't see the point of hardware RAID in a home server just to store movies, it'll just be more expensive and annoying to fix if the hardware fails, and you just don't need the extra hardware performance.

See also this thread where I weigh up various software RAID solutions: http://linustechtips.com/main/forum/storage-solutions/19628-software-raid-for-home-server

[Winther]

(for some reason I just post this if I have something from your txt copied in here, but the example im using is from Mosphoran's txt file)

I understand that odd + even = odd.. but then does odd+odd = odd then?

and what if the third drive fails instead of the second drive? then from what I can see we run in to trouble?

and then the reason for parity being slower than raid 0 or a raid with a simple mirror is that the computer has to figure out where to put the data (the 1s and 0s) to make all this fit for a parity drive that might be much smaller in size than the total aray size?

[VictorB]

With nas4free you save money on a raid controller and on a windows license! If you put 6x WD red in Raidz2 you get 12 tb of storage and 2 disks can fail.

[Winther]

what kind of media center capabilities does nas4free have?

I dont think I will run anything other than raid 0 to be honest, but havent decided yet..

[VictorB]

What kind of media center capabilities do you look for?

[Mosphoran]

To be honest the actual details of how parity works aren't that important, just remember that RAID 5's parity protection means you can recover any drive if it fails, as long as all the others are working. RAID 6 has extra parity to recover two drives.

FreeNAS and NAS4Free are definitely very good choices.

Alternatively if you'd rather not worry about anything like this and want something that will "just work", you might want to try a Drobo. They can be quite expensive, though. Linus video here:

[lutzee]

Initially I was going to lean towards a linux server distribution personally when i saw your post, but then i took a look at Nas4Free, which is basically a BSD based NAS solution. BSD like linux are both unix like operating systems, open source and well written. I'd strongly recommend Nas4free, it would save you the gritty process of setting up a linux distro and then setting up samba etc. As for a Raid setup, if you go all out and get 6 drives then raid 6 will give you best failure protection, with 2 drives that can fail, Raid5 would give you an extra 3TB of storage but if one drive fails you want to replace it asap, as if another fails the files are gone. Alternitively you could use Raid 10 with striping (in either 1+0 or 0+1) to increase the performance if that is what you need, and your data will still be protected if a drive on one half of the array fails. I hope this helps in your decision :)

[Winther]

I dont really need much security as I can get most files again, I think for personal photos and whatever, I would have an internal drive and just back it up with an external drive or a thumb drive..

might even just have 4-6 seperate drives without any raid, have actually been considering that.

This server/media-pc will be sitting next to my TV connected to it through my surround reciever. So some of the reason I want a PC instead of just a simple NAS box is so that I use the internet, use my favorite media-player.. so I might actually have to use a windows based system, dang ill have to look in to that..