Raid setup question for 8tb drives

[igbeserk]

Hey All,

 

I am looking for some guidance if possible.  I wanted to update my media pc what i wanted to do was add 4 new 8tb drives and set them up in a raid where all 4 drives are seen as one so roughly ~32TB.  At least from the information I've found on line to be able to do that I'd have to do a Raid 5 setup correct?  Which at least from what I'm seeing online seems to be a no no?  I was going to built a new ryzen build for the setup but my amd mobo doesn't have raid 5 as an option so I'll use my 7700kw/mobo.  To have all 4 drives seen as one and if one of them fails I can easily swap with another 8tb drive and not lose my data the Raid 5 option would be best correct?  Appreciate the time and help you guys provide :)

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 hours ago, igbeserk said:

where all 4 drives are seen as one so roughly ~32TB. 

if you want all the capacity you can't have redundancy. Raid 5 would let one drive fail and give you 24tb usable

 

4 hours ago, igbeserk said:

Which at least from what I'm seeing online seems to be a no no? 

rid 5 is fine, some people say don' tuse raild 5 due to rebuild failures, but its not as bad as they make it seem

 

In widnows you want to use storage spaces, dont use the raid on your motherboard

[igbeserk]

28 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

if you want all the capacity you can't have redundancy. Raid 5 would let one drive fail and give you 24tb usable

 

 

Yea, the reason i wanted to do raid was if one drive fails i can swap it out with a new drive and not lose essentially (hopefully) any data.  Because as it stands i have roughly 16tb or so of data and one of my hard drives started to fail roughly a year and a half ago i couldn't access it for a time and it took about a month of me trying here and there to get essentially all the data off of it.  So, i was looking for a way to have all the storage or as close to it and when one fails it just gets swapped out no fuss no muss. 

 

"In widnows you want to use storage spaces, don't use the raid on your motherboard" 

This will be windows so i shouldn't do a raid setup then? in a sense of i don't do one i'm already in that position.  if one of my drives fail then at least data wise i'm screwed.

 

Also thanks for responding

[Blue4130]

5 hours ago, igbeserk said:

. 

 

"In widnows you want to use storage spaces, don't use the raid on your motherboard" 

This will be windows so i shouldn't do a raid setup then? in a sense of i don't do one i'm already in that position.  if one of my drives fail then at least data wise i'm screwed.

 

Also thanks for responding

As in, use the windows built-in software raid. Not the motherboard raid. Windows storage spaces has its version of raid 5,so you are covered for drive failure. 

[Nick7]

Do *not* use Windows RAID5 (in Storage Spaces).

Performance for writes is abysmal.

In this case, it's even better to use MOBO RAID5.

But, given price of 8TB drives, it would be better to get proper RAID card from e-bay.

Performance-wise, and any other way, it's best solution for you.

[igbeserk]

3 hours ago, Nick7 said:

Do *not* use Windows RAID5 (in Storage Spaces).

Performance for writes is abysmal.

In this case, it's even better to use MOBO RAID5.

But, given price of 8TB drives, it would be better to get proper RAID card from e-bay.

Performance-wise, and any other way, it's best solution for you.

Thanks, this is helping me understand the whole thing better.  I also have smr drives and not cmr which from what i'm reading isn't as good.  I'll look for some pci e sata raid controller cards.  I honestly forgot those were options. 

[Nick7]

2 minutes ago, igbeserk said:

Thanks, this is helping me understand the whole thing better.  I also have smr drives and not cmr which from what i'm reading isn't as good.  I'll look for some pci e sata raid controller cards.  I honestly forgot those were options. 

I was thinking more in line with LSI SAS RAID cards, and then you get SATA breakout cable.

[igbeserk]

23 hours ago, Nick7 said:

I was thinking more in line with LSI SAS RAID cards, and then you get SATA breakout cable.

Thanks for the insight.  I didn't know that LSI SAS Raid cards were had to google and also found an LTT Techquickie video on them.  I snagged this one from amazon and also ordered the connectors.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IT4YG2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

Lets see how this goes

[Nick7]

Well.. that's one I currently actually use

Although they are on e-bay for approx 40US$.

One thing to note - you want to use writeback on them with RAID5.

Without battery you can still use it (you need to force writeback since no battery present), but in case of power failure data in cache will be lost.

 

[igbeserk]

Just now, Nick7 said:

Well.. that's one I currently actually use

Although they are on e-bay for approx 40US$.

One thing to note - you want to use writeback on them with RAID5.

Without battery you can still use it (you need to force writeback since no battery present), but in case of power failure data in cache will be lost.

 

Cool, thanks for that piece of info because yea i want to try to avoid data failure.  Also i used the amazon gift card i had so worked out.  I'm guessing i could probably get a battery for this?  or just worry about forcing the writeback and should be ok.

[Nick7]

2 minutes ago, igbeserk said:

Cool, thanks for that piece of info because yea i want to try to avoid data failure.  Also i used the amazon gift card i had so worked out.  I'm guessing i could probably get a battery for this?  or just worry about forcing the writeback and should be ok.

Well, writeback cache is quite fast dumped to HDD's.

Only time you 'can' have data loss is power loss while doing some writes, but that still shouldn't be much issue for home use.

Battery is always better solution, if you are willing to pay for one.

 

Oh, yeah.. one more not about this card - I've put small fan to blow on it's cooler, as otherwise it does get quite hot.

[Guest willies leg]

I'd go for more smaller drives in a raid-5. Problem with doing a raid-5 that big is if one drive fails, it's going to take a long time (maybe a day or longer) to rebuild. Raid-5 is particularly slow on rebuild. And if you have another drive failure during that time you're toast.

 

Raid-10 or Raid-1 (mirror/stripe or just mirror) might be a better option for large drives. And a bonus with either of those is your writes are quick, and your reads are even quicker.

[igbeserk]

43 minutes ago, willies leg said:

I'd go for more smaller drives in a raid-5. Problem with doing a raid-5 that big is if one drive fails, it's going to take a long time (maybe a day or longer) to rebuild. Raid-5 is particularly slow on rebuild. And if you have another drive failure during that time you're toast.

 

Raid-10 or Raid-1 (mirror/stripe or just mirror) might be a better option for large drives. And a bonus with either of those is your writes are quick, and your reads are even quicker.

Yea i mean overall that seems to be the better option from what i could tell but it would also require more drives to get the same outcome.  Granted 32TB is a stretch right now for me but if i were to raid 10 or raid 1 then then it would be half that amount of storage correct? meaning essentially i'd need 4 additional drives to just get to the same amount of data space. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 hours ago, igbeserk said:

Thanks for the insight.  I didn't know that LSI SAS Raid cards were had to google and also found an LTT Techquickie video on them.  I snagged this one from amazon and also ordered the connectors.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IT4YG2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

Lets see how this goes

If you get those cards make sure to get the batter, otherwise performance in parity raid will be bad.

 

 

Id give storage spaces a shot though, should be good enough performance here, easier to move between system, cheaper, and better at keeping data safe.

[Guest willies leg]

1 hour ago, igbeserk said:

Yea i mean overall that seems to be the better option from what i could tell but it would also require more drives to get the same outcome.  Granted 32TB is a stretch right now for me but if i were to raid 10 or raid 1 then then it would be half that amount of storage correct? meaning essentially i'd need 4 additional drives to just get to the same amount of data space. 

 

Yeah, raid 1 is mirroring, so you'd get half

raid 10 is striping + mirroring, same thing, you'd get half

 

My media server (a raspberry pi 4) has 2 8TB external usb drives in a raid 1 mirror, I like it if either drive fails I can just use the other as-is or resilver it to a new drive. So my setup is the 2 online 8TB drives, and an additional 2 4TB drives that I use as a concat, that's what I rsync to for backup. Around once a month I power on those 2 drives and run an rsync, then power them off.

 

 

[igbeserk]

Well that was something, finally got it to work.  right now a raid 0 setup showing 29.1tb.  when i first plugged it into the pci e port it was recognized in the MSI bios and i was enabling fiddling with options and all to see if i could get it going.  Didn't seem to work and then for some reason it stopped showing in the MSI Bios.  trying different combos with no luck.  I removed it from the mobo, went back into the bios booted into windows etc.  turned off the computer plugged it back in, couldn't get it to show up in the MSI Bios but now i was able to get the LSI Megaraid boot up screen and from there i was able to get the web bios to come up and set it up that way.  so far so good still deciding on how i want to set this up.  maybe i should just do redundancy.  also gotta read more about it.  since if i leave it at auto it either does raid 0 or 6.  if i try manual i can't get it to continue so yea weird.  also will try to get a battery for it.   Thanks for the help so far guys.  I really appreciate it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 hours ago, igbeserk said:

Well that was something, finally got it to work.  right now a raid 0 setup showing 29.1tb.  when i first plugged it into the pci e port it was recognized in the MSI bios and i was enabling fiddling with options and all to see if i could get it going.  Didn't seem to work and then for some reason it stopped showing in the MSI Bios.  trying different combos with no luck.  I removed it from the mobo, went back into the bios booted into windows etc.  turned off the computer plugged it back in, couldn't get it to show up in the MSI Bios but now i was able to get the LSI Megaraid boot up screen and from there i was able to get the web bios to come up and set it up that way.  so far so good still deciding on how i want to set this up.  maybe i should just do redundancy.  also gotta read more about it.  since if i leave it at auto it either does raid 0 or 6.  if i try manual i can't get it to continue so yea weird.  also will try to get a battery for it.   Thanks for the help so far guys.  I really appreciate it.

Id turn off raid inthe bios, and do it in widnows instead, and motherboard raid sucks.

 

Then you can do lots of nice things with storage spaces, like multiple raid levels on the set of drives if you want.

[Nick7]

18 hours ago, igbeserk said:

Well that was something, finally got it to work.  right now a raid 0 setup showing 29.1tb.  when i first plugged it into the pci e port it was recognized in the MSI bios and i was enabling fiddling with options and all to see if i could get it going.  Didn't seem to work and then for some reason it stopped showing in the MSI Bios.  trying different combos with no luck.  I removed it from the mobo, went back into the bios booted into windows etc.  turned off the computer plugged it back in, couldn't get it to show up in the MSI Bios but now i was able to get the LSI Megaraid boot up screen and from there i was able to get the web bios to come up and set it up that way.  so far so good still deciding on how i want to set this up.  maybe i should just do redundancy.  also gotta read more about it.  since if i leave it at auto it either does raid 0 or 6.  if i try manual i can't get it to continue so yea weird.  also will try to get a battery for it.   Thanks for the help so far guys.  I really appreciate it.

For Windows, get LSI MegaRAID Storage Manager - it's Windows GUI to setup LSI RAID.

[igbeserk]

7 hours ago, Nick7 said:

For Windows, get LSI MegaRAID Storage Manager - it's Windows GUI to setup LSI RAID.

Thanks! Actually does make things so much easier.  Learning a lot here thanks so much.  

[igbeserk]

Alrighty, went with a raid 6 setup and snagged another drive so 5x 8tb with only 3 being usable.  I guess that's good enough. i bought a battery but think this one is DOA gotta find someone else with a working one.