Windows 8 Storage Spaces

[ThatGuy]

So I have a large number of sata hard drives just lying around my house, all different capacities, brands, etc. I want to set up a new central back up for all my computers along with my room mates, so I was thinking of setting up a dedicated computer running windows 8 (since I have a couple extra copies) and setting up a storage spaces running parody. I would then hook this drive up to the network to back everything up to. My questions about this are first will this even work? This seems to me to be the most cost effect method because I always seem to end up with old hard drives, but they only total about 1.5 TB. Would I be better off shelling out the extra cash for a NAS and loading it up with a couple 2 or 3 TB drives and just calling it a day? If that's a better option can you recommend me a good cost effective NAS, something around $350, which is how much building this storage spaces machine would cost. Lastly if the windows 8 option would be the better one, how would you recommend I get enough sata ports to effectively connect all my drives. I was thinking about eventually getting a rack-mount case to get more space, once I get more drives. Right now I have about 6 drives, and an old desktop case that is sufficient for now, but once it grows I know i'll need more space, but most motherboards don't have a crazy amount of SATA ports, so I'm not really sure what the best way to add more ports would be.

 

[h264]

Yeah, windows spaces is a sort of logical volume manager with varying parity that it TRIES to spread evenly over a bunch of drives.  Your problem will be if you stick a couple bigger drives with a bunch of smaller drives, if a bigger drive fails it's much more likely you'll lose some data.  I wouldn't use any sort of software raid unless you just need to store really big files (like video files) on a temporary basis that span more than one of your drives.  Even if you get away with it for a few years, it'll catch up to you eventually when you'd like to make a bigger array or you lose two drives at once.

 

but they only total about 1.5 TB. Would I be better off shelling out the extra cash for a NAS and loading it up with a couple 2 or 3 TB drives and just calling it a day? If that's a better option can you recommend me a good cost effective NAS, something around $350, which is how much building this storage spaces machine would cost.

 

The Hard Drives alone for such a NAS would be more than $350.

 

this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115100

and two of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116100

 

Are a pretty cheap way to get a hardware raid going quick, as a bare minimum, but I'd really reccomend getting one with onboard memory to get the best speeds and take the full stress off your computer.  Like this one:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151039

 

that ethernet port on the back is a special management port, btw

 

Well, I'll admit, it's not pretty, but hard drive storage is always a proposition of calculating the risk of failure.  Unless you don't care if you lose data, in which case, why even bother with software raid?  Just plug the drives in, fill them up, and put them in a shoebox somewhere.

 

shoebox raid

[ThatGuy]

That ceaper option is very attractive in terms of price. I think I'll be able to use that. Now will that card work with something like freenas where you can expand the raid volume dynamically? Thats one of the main reasons I was considering storage spaces, so I could increase the volume as I need more space. Another option could also be to get that card, but get windows home server through my school. You can get it for like $30 at my university. Would that be a viable option? Like I said I want to get this set up as soon as I can, but on the cheap, with just enough data storage for my needs now, and I'll expand it later as I need.

[h264]

That ceaper option is very attractive in terms of price. I think I'll be able to use that. Now will that card work with something like freenas where you can expand the raid volume dynamically? Thats one of the main reasons I was considering storage spaces, so I could increase the volume as I need more space. Another option could also be to get that card, but get windows home server through my school. You can get it for like $30 at my university. Would that be a viable option? Like I said I want to get this set up as soon as I can, but on the cheap, with just enough data storage for my needs now, and I'll expand it later as I need.

 

None of the cards I showed you support Online Raid Expansion (OCE) or Online Raid Migration (ORM).  From my experience, when you decide you want to expand your array, your better off blowing it up and making a new bigger array, since OCE just involves first adding drives to the array cluster, then expanding the raid disk over those drives (it took 28 hours to expand an extra 9TB for me!) and then using something like gparted to expand the partition to the proper new bigger size.  It's really not worth it except in a business environment where you can't accept the downtime.  My advice is to save up and get all the drives you'd like to have at once.

 

If you really don't care about losing the data, the spaces option should work fine, but you'll still need enough slots on your motherboard or a controller card to support all those extra hard drives.  Don't forget about the extra power draw on your PSU!

[dalekphalm]

I would also explore the option of using something such as FlexRAID. FlexRAID is a software pooling and RAID (Realtime or Snapshot, depending on usage) program that sits ontop of the filesystem.

 

Benefits include:

 

- Ability to use mismatched HDD's (size and brand/model wise) with NO capacity loss (Minus parity drive(s))

- Non-destructive process (Meaning you can add HDD's that already contain data, without the drive being formatted or otherwise erased)

- Non-proprietary File System (Runs on ReFS or NTFS - meaning that you can just pop a drive out, throw it in another computer, and access all data on it using Windows)

- Online expansion

 

and some other benefits.

 

How it works is that you add all the HDD's you want to the program, and it pools them all together to one large volume. You also need to designate parity drives (You can use as many parity drives as you want, which means large expansion and lots of HDD's becomes less risky compared to RAID 5/6).

 

You can also combine several smaller HDD's together into a "Unit" for things like the Parity drive. Since the parity drive needs to be as large as your largest HDD, if you don't happen to have a matching drive, you can "combine" several of the smaller HDD's together to form the parity drive (Called PPU - or Parity Protection Unit by the software).

 

I currently use FlexRAID on my media server with the following configuration:

 

2x 3TB

1x 2TB

2x 500GB

 

The 2TB and 500GB drives have been combined into a single 3TB PPU to match the size of my other HDD's.