What form of Raid or similar is best for me?

[Jae Tee]

 What  form of Raid or other method is right for my needs? I plan on using Four (4) WD red 8TB drives for media storage. The plan is to have 3 of them in use and have the 4th one as live drive failure backup. Ideally the 3 would be able to aggregate there speed to improve performance, but as long as I'm not losing performance that's ok too.

[Electronics Wizardy]

FIrst of all, raid is not a backup, you really want anouther set of drives as a backup in case something happens that causing all the drives to lose data?

 

Are you using software raid? Id suggest it as its normally better these days.

 

Something simmilar to raid 5 is my pick here, and the risk of data loss isn't that high(and you have backups right)

[RONOTHAN##]

You need RAID 5. Write speeds will not improve in this config, but it may improve read speeds (depends on what you are using to run the RAID). That being said, unless this is going to be where your backup is, you want to have another location to have your data if you care about not losing data, as drives tend to fail at a similar time.

[Jae Tee]

4 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

You need RAID 5. Write speeds will not improve in this config, but it may improve read speeds (depends on what you are using to run the RAID). That being said, unless this is going to be where your backup is, you want to have another location to have your data if you care about not losing data, as drives tend to fail at a similar time.

Thanks. That does help my decision making. My problem is whether I should control with hardware or software. I don't think I want a RAID card, I'll probably use a pcie to SATA adapter, but I'm not sure what way I should use to control it. I don't feel like using unraid, as I'd rather go open source. If you have anything, let me know.

[Dutch_Master]

If you go Open Source, there's little else then S/W RAID. Linux has the mdadm tool, which is perfect for the job. As you're using an HBA, make sure it's in IT mode so any onboard RAID capabilities are shut off. Install the Linux distro of your choice and make sure you include the mdadm tool. The exhaustive man-page for mdadm can be found online here.

 

As the man page gives you a ton of options, you're advised to install Webmin on your machine. This includes RAID configuration and runs in a webbrowser.

[Jae Tee]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

FIrst of all, raid is not a backup, you really want anouther set of drives as a backup in case something happens that causing all the drives to lose data?

 

Are you using software raid? Id suggest it as its normally better these days.

 

Something simmilar to raid 5 is my pick here, and the risk of data loss isn't that high(and you have backups right)

Yes. I know RAID is not a backup. I'm using it so my data doesn't go offline in a drive failure. I'd probably use software RAID but I'm not sure what to use. Preferably something that works within, or with Windows. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 hours ago, Jae Tee said:

Yes. I know RAID is not a backup. I'm using it so my data doesn't go offline in a drive failure. I'd probably use software RAID but I'm not sure what to use. Preferably something that works within, or with Windows. 

Id use storage spaces then its included in windows, set it to parity, with a column size of 4

[Electronics Wizardy]

14 hours ago, Jae Tee said:

Thanks. That does help my decision making. My problem is whether I should control with hardware or software. I don't think I want a RAID card, I'll probably use a pcie to SATA adapter, but I'm not sure what way I should use to control it. I don't feel like using unraid, as I'd rather go open source. If you have anything, let me know.

unraid is mostly open source, and windows isn't so do you wnt opensource or not?