JBOD or RAID?

[MrSaw]

Hi,

 

So, looking at setting up a lightweight home media server cross workstation and I'm investigating storage options. 

I want to have everything appear as one drive while still using multiple physical drives for increased storage (starting off with about 6TBs).

At first I thought about using a RAID 5 array for the storage and having 4 SSDs in raid 10 for the boot drive (where I would also run a few games and other programs)

However, the idea of everything appearing as one drive would save me a lot of hassle with moving archived files around form SSDs to HDDs and the like,

also, there's the slight issue of read/write speed running RAID 5 off the motherboard.

That's where the idea of JBOD appealed to me. The only issue I can see with it is having the SSD performance for boot and games. 

Is there a way to set up an SSD cache for the array or something similar to improve access speeds for regularly accessed data?

Alternatively, do the benefits of using SSHDs over HDDs still apply in JBOD?

 

Cheers

[JerkyMcDilerino]

What is JBOD? 

[Vitalius]

What is JBOD?

Just a Bunch Of Disks

It doesn't do anything fancy like a RAID does. Just blindly and dumbly adds storage from a bunch of drives into one large volume.

[The Official Czex]

Just a Bunch Of Disks

It doesn't do anything fancy like a RAID does. Just blindly and dumbly adds storage from a bunch of drives into one large volume.

 

lol.

[scottyseng]

-snip-

 

I'm confused, what do you mean by having everything appear as one drive? If you had everything appear as one drive, you wouldn't be backing up anything. Unless you mean One array for the SSDs and one array for the hard drives?

 

I would just keep the SSDs in RAID 10 and the hard drives in RAID 6. Move the archived / not used as much stuff to the hard drive array. JBOD would be kind of odd to me with that many disks.

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Hey there MrSaw,

 

JBOD Span is a very easy way to manage all your storage drives as one big volume. What you can do is simply keep the RAID plan for the SSDs so you have both a speed increase and some redundancy and leave all the other storage drives in a JBOD Span volume, thus avoiding performance or storage space loss. RAID would limit the speed of all the drives in the array to the one of the slowest and the capacity of all the drives to the one with the smallest. For example if you have one 2TB drive that works at 180MB/s and one 4TB drive that works at 150MB/s, both drives would be limited to 2TB in terms of storage and 150MB/s in terms of speed. 

I would, however, consider a solution that involves either some level of redundancy for your data or backups of it.

 

Regarding the SSHDs, they should still have their abilities and store the most commonly used things from the drive on the SSD portion.

 

Captain_WD.

[MrSaw]

Cheers guys. 

 

After thinking about it, I've decided to go with a 2TB SSHD for my boot drive where I will work/game from

and then have a 2x3TB JBOD array for file archiving and movie storage. That way I can expand the JBOD

(and possibly make the boot drive a JBOD too) in the future when I need more storage.

 

For those who were concerned, I recognise that JBOD doesn't offer any sort of redundancy or backup;

the idea was to have all my storage appear as one (now two) drives so I didn't have to worry about manually

managing space across multiple disks. I will be performing backups to an external drive instead.

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Your plan seems good. Do have in mind that if you add the OS drive to the JBOD pool you would most probably need to reinstall the OS and all the games and applications. I would keep the OS drive apart from the large JBOD volume.

 

Captain_WD.

[powersofpain999]

Just a Bunch Of Disks

It doesn't do anything fancy like a RAID does. Just blindly and dumbly adds storage from a bunch of drives into one large volume.

Have you taken into consideration Zoning?