Bought a 5 Bay HDD enclosure, what are my options for software raid? Storage Space?

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

• I bought a 5 bay HDD enclosure from [Orico] https://www.orico.me/product/orico-five-bay-magnetic-type-3-5-inch-hard-drive-enclosure-ds500u3/ , as of now I have 48 TB of data requirement, should I just buy a cheap 10TB X5 HDD or 12 TB X5 or does it matter that I HAVE to buy a NAS drive like WD reds or Ironwolf? my main purpose is for storing media and files, nothing heavy, once written I wouldn't be moving off of them that much.
   
• 2nd should I do parity or 2 Way Mirror in Storage Space? remember I have 50TB of data already, mirror will ask for more drives, I can buy 5 for one enclosure.
• what are my options if not for Storage space? mind you this is just for storing media files 
• Also about storage spaces -  if i am not using them at all, they are powered on but would they be mindlessly spinning?
   

 

 

[LIGISTX]

6 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

• I bought a 5 bay HDD enclosure from [Orico] https://www.orico.me/product/orico-five-bay-magnetic-type-3-5-inch-hard-drive-enclosure-ds500u3/ , as of now I have 48 TB of data requirement, should I just buy a cheap 10TB X5 HDD or 12 TB X5 or does it matter that I HAVE to buy a NAS drive like WD reds or Ironwolf? my main purpose is for storing media and files, nothing heavy, once written I wouldn't be moving off of them that much.
   
• 2nd should I do parity or 2 Way Mirror in Storage Space? remember I have 50TB of data already, mirror will ask for more drives, I can buy 5 for one enclosure.
• what are my options if not for Storage space? mind you this is just for storing media files 
• Also about storage spaces -  if i am not using them at all, they are powered on but would they be mindlessly spinning?
   

 

 

Why not go with a NAS? Either build or buy one.

 

How does this work, is it USB? Does it manage the drives itself and present them to your PC as a single volume? I am just not familiar with how this device works, hopefully someone else will have more knowledge of it.

 

But, yes, if your data is at all critical, I would go with at least 2 discs of parity (which would likely make your plans of usable space not possible since you would lose 2 drives to parity), but if the data if lost is not that big of a deal, a single drive for parity or no parity at all would work. Also remember, RAID (or storage spaces) IS NOT A BACKUP. The first 3 rules of RAID are:

1) RAID is not a backup

2) RAID is not a backup

3) Reference 1) and 2) and remember, RAID IS NOT A BACKUP

 

I say this because if the data is actually mission critical, don't rely on RAID as its not a backup solution, its a high availability solution.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

5 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

But, yes, if your data is at all critical, I would go with at least 2 discs of parity (which would likely make your plans of usable space not possible since you would lose 2 drives to parity), but if the data if lost is not that big of a deal, a single drive for parity or no parity at all would work. Also remember, RAID (or storage spaces) IS NOT A BACKUP.

i have iike 40 TB of data spread across 10 different 4TB WD my books and passports, i just want to combine them

 

 

[LIGISTX]

3 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

i have iike 40 TB of data spread across 10 different 4TB WD my books and passports, i just want to combine them

 

 

You really need to build a NAS.... or buy a NAS.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

2 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

You really need to build a NAS.... or buy a NAS.

Nas in India is like 1000$ just for 2 Bay nas without drives, out of the question 

[LIGISTX]

Just now, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

Nas in India is like 1000$ just for 2 Bay nas without drives, out of the question 

Can you get your hands on an old PC and turn it into a NAS? Really any PC from the lats 10 years would be fine, just throw harddrives in it and use something like unraid.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

Just now, LIGISTX said:

Can you get your hands on an old PC and turn it into a NAS? Really any PC from the lats 10 years would be fine, just throw harddrives in it and use something like unraid.

i already invested in this 5 bay enclosure, is there nothing i could do with it as of now ?

[LIGISTX]

9 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

i already invested in this 5 bay enclosure, is there nothing i could do with it as of now ?

I am sure it can work, I just am not sure how it will work with storage spaces etc. If you were to start with a NAS now, and this is why sooner the better... if you can get your hands on an old PC and use unraid, you can put drives in it, copy ALL of the data from all your assorted USB drives to it, then pull the USB drives apart and plug them via SATA directly into the NAS, format them, and add them to the overall pool.

 

I am not sure how that 5 bay enclosure presents itself to windows. If it presents each drive individually to windows, you can use storage spaces, yes.

[dalekphalm]

2 hours ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

i already invested in this 5 bay enclosure, is there nothing i could do with it as of now ?

Have you tested the enclosure at all?

 

Most likely it just acts as a USB repeater and you'll see the enclosure as 5 separate USB HDD's.

 

At that point you can use whatever software RAID system you want. On Windows, that's pretty much either StorageSpaces, or you need to use third party software (such as SnapRAID or FlexRAID),

 

Alternatively, you could use an OS like TrueNAS or unRAID or even regular Linux.

 

In terms of user friendliness, unRAID would likely be the easiest to use, with software like Snap/FlexRAID being also easy to use.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

16 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Have you tested the enclosure at all?

 

Most likely it just acts as a USB repeater and you'll see the enclosure as 5 separate USB HDD's.

 

At that point you can use whatever software RAID system you want. On Windows, that's pretty much either StorageSpaces, or you need to use third party software (such as SnapRAID or FlexRAID),

 

Alternatively, you could use an OS like TrueNAS or unRAID or even regular Linux.

 

In terms of user friendliness, unRAID would likely be the easiest to use, with software like Snap/FlexRAID being also easy to use.

yes, its basically a glorified USB Hub, that's the reason i wanted to create a storage space with a single drive parity, my questions are is there anything better i can do or create  2 way mirror in storage space. i would be plugging this ti my main PC so not looking for unraid or linux as that would mean i need another PC to set them up. 

a lot of mixed responses of people saying SS is good and there are ppl saying SS is bad, i just want a stoage solution that i can replace if 1 drive fails, how does 2 way mirror work in 5 Bay in storage space? do i need 10 drives for it ? 

and few people also suggested  https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Screenshots

[dalekphalm]

10 hours ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

yes, its basically a glorified USB Hub, that's the reason i wanted to create a storage space with a single drive parity, my questions are is there anything better i can do or create  2 way mirror in storage space. i would be plugging this ti my main PC so not looking for unraid or linux as that would mean i need another PC to set them up. 

a lot of mixed responses of people saying SS is good and there are ppl saying SS is bad, i just want a stoage solution that i can replace if 1 drive fails, how does 2 way mirror work in 5 Bay in storage space? do i need 10 drives for it ? 

and few people also suggested  https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Screenshots

StorageSpaces can be good but not in every situation. It used to have performance issues with parity based setups that weren’t SSD accelerated. I have no idea if that’s still an issue, but if you’re just using it as a dump for movies and tv and documents, I wouldn’t be concerned about the performance issues. 
 

You basically have to either go for RAID5 or RAID6, since you have five drives. You can’t go RAID10 because that requires an equal number of drives divisible by 2 (eg 4 or 6 but not 5). 
 

RAID5 is best for 5 drives. 
 

If you get a second enclosure and do 10 drives I’d either go RAID6 or RAID10. 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

9 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

You basically have to either go for RAID5 or RAID6, since you have five drives. You can’t go RAID10 because that requires an equal number of drives divisible by 2 (eg 4 or 6 but not 5). 
 

RAID5 is best for 5 drives. 
 

If you get a second enclosure and do 10 drives I’d either go RAID6 or RAID10. 

Raid 6 is basically 2 way mirror in Storage Space right? if so, how can i do 2 way with 5 drives? or am i missing something 

[evilcloud]

to be honest I wouldn't really trust a raid solution that's being run over usb, but that's just me.  I've seen usb > Hd devices trash drives before if there's an issue with the USB or the controller.

[Blue4130]

On 9/6/2021 at 4:33 PM, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

Raid 6 is basically 2 way mirror in Storage Space right? if so, how can i do 2 way with 5 drives? or am i missing something 

Hmmm, I swear I replied to this, guess it didn't post...

 

Raid 6 is NOT a 2 way mirror. It's just like raid 5 but with 2 parity checks/drives.

[dalekphalm]

On 9/6/2021 at 4:33 AM, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

Raid 6 is basically 2 way mirror in Storage Space right? if so, how can i do 2 way with 5 drives? or am i missing something 

RAID6 is not 2-way mirror in anything.

 

I'll do a very basic RAID breakdown (assumes all drives are same capacity size):

 

RAID0: Striped drives - all drives are combined to form one giant drive. You gain the capacity of all drives combined. A single drive failure loses all data.

 

RAID1: Mirror - two drives (or more, but many systems will only let you add two) are mirrored together and any data stored on one drive is copied to the other. They both contain exact copies of the same data. Drive capacity is the same as a single drive. You can withstand a single drive failure (more if you add additional drives to the mirror).

 

RAID5: Single Parity - an array of 3 or more (typically 4 or more) drives. One drives worth of capacity is lost to store Parity (though the parity is actually stored across all drives typically). Total capacity is all drives minus one. You can sustain one drive failure.

 

RAID6: Double Parity - an array of 4 or more drives (typically 5 or more). Works exactly the same as RAID5 but there's double parity. Two drives worth of capacity is lost to store Parity. Total capacity is all drives minus two. You can sustain two drive failures.

 

RAID10: This combines RAID1 and 0 - two groups of drives are striped together to create two larger striped arrays, then they are mirrored to each other (all data from one striped array is copied to the other). Drive capacity is half your drives. You can sustain failure on up to half your drives, but you cannot sustain failure if two mirrors of each other are both lost. Requires an even number of drives.

 

RAID 50/60: Similar to RAID10, this allows you to combine multiple RAID5 or RAID6 arrays together to form larger arrays - niche - typically only used for enterprise environments or situations where expansion is a must but data constraints don't allow a proper new array.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

On 9/7/2021 at 7:36 PM, dalekphalm said:

RAID5: Single Parity - an array of 3 or more (typically 4 or more) drives. One drives worth of capacity is lost to store Parity (though the parity is actually stored across all drives typically). Total capacity is all drives minus one. You can sustain one drive failure.

then i'm just gonna do RAID 5 with 5 drives, 12TB would be fantastic but would have to sell my kidney, i'm gonna start to buy a 10TB drive everyone 2 months. the more i look the more i lean towards just using window storage space considering you can always expand it if you need, i was just curious if there's another 3rd party app that was better that i can pay a 1 time fee to use for software Raid5

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

On 9/7/2021 at 6:58 PM, Blue4130 said:

Hmmm, I swear I replied to this, guess it didn't post...

 

Raid 6 is NOT a 2 way mirror. It's just like raid 5 but with 2 parity checks/drives.

then what the devil is 2 way Mirror in storage space? 

[Blue4130]

5 hours ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

then what the devil is 2 way Mirror in storage space? 

 

On 9/7/2021 at 10:06 PM, dalekphalm said:

RAID10: This combines RAID1 and 0 - two groups of drives are striped together to create two larger striped arrays, then they are mirrored to each other (all data from one striped array is copied to the other). Drive capacity is half your drives. You can sustain failure on up to half your drives, but you cannot sustain failure if two mirrors of each other are both lost. Requires an even number of drives.

It's this...

[dalekphalm]

5 hours ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

then what the devil is 2 way Mirror in storage space? 

Keep in mind that StorageSpaces isn't truly RAID, because it's a software level extrapolation of the data on the drives.

 

2-way mirror is kind of like RAID10. StorageSpaces will copy every file to two drives, giving you a 50% storage efficiency (meaning you'll effectively lose half the total drive space).

 

You can read more about the variations here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-spaces/storage-spaces-fault-tolerance

 

You're going to want to use "Single Parity", which is basically (but not technically) RAID5.

[Guest willies leg]

On 9/7/2021 at 9:28 AM, Blue4130 said:

Hmmm, I swear I replied to this, guess it didn't post...

 

Raid 6 is NOT a 2 way mirror. It's just like raid 5 but with 2 parity checks/drives.

 

The reason for raid 6 is that it takes so long to rebuild with big drives, there is a chance if you lost one drive you'd lose another during the rebuild.

[dalekphalm]

28 minutes ago, willies leg said:

 

The reason for raid 6 is that it takes so long to rebuild with big drives, there is a chance if you lost one drive you'd lose another during the rebuild.

That's a problem with literally any Parity based RAID solution, and is much worse in RAID5 - rebuild times are still slow, but there's no redundancy for a second failure during rebuild. RAID6 actually helps to improve this by allowing a second failure to not total your data.

 

Unless that's what your point was - apologies if that's the case, as it wasn't exactly clear.

[RayLeech]

On 9/4/2021 at 1:29 PM, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

• remember I have 50TB of data already

Doing raid5 with 12tb drives barely covers your current volume, let alone leaving room for growth. I might rethink the storage plan. Would it make more sense to first figure out what you need to have online/realtime? You have a lot of video there, but I cannot tell what's on your other drives (from the picture of drive volumes). If you could get by with two 6tb (or 8tb) in a raid1, it would sure rebuild a lot faster than a five drive raid5 of 16tb drives over USB. If you can separate your online from your archive, you might use the first two slots for your online catalog (raid1), and buy a couple pairs of 10/12/16/18TB drives for your archive. If you make two copies (and pull them out when done), then you'd actually have a redundant backup if something goes wrong. You'd need to maintain it every few years, but its something you can kick off and forget.

 

Might not be an option for your needs, just thought I would suggest it.