RAID 10 or RAID 50?

[Kevin Liu]

Hi everyone,

 

I am new to the forum, but have watched Linus' video for a long time. So the thing is that right now I am using a QNAP home NAS, and the read/write speed is way lower than I needed. So I want to build an 8 hard drives NAS with FreeNas, and thinking about either use RAID10 or RAID50. The NAS will have 4 ethernet ports connect to my switch with link aggregation, which will be 4GbE, and on the other end of the switch will be my main computer with 4 port link aggregation as well. (Linus proved this work in one of his videos) I am not really worry about other devices since I won't be coping large files on those devices anyway..... 

Parts that I will be using: 

Supermicro X11SSL-F

Intel Xeon E3-1230 V5

IMB ServerRaid M1015 crossflash to IT mode

16GB ECC Ram DDR4 

 

I will be using 1TB hard drives, so RAID 10 will give me 4TB space while RAID 50 will give me 6TB of space. For me, 4TB is more than enough for backup my files as well as streaming movies.

 

So the question is 

 

1. What read/write speed can I get from RAID 10 and RAID 50 (in a 8 hard drive NAS)? Can either of them take full advantage of the 4GbE ethernet connection I have? 

2. Which RAID is safer just in case of a hard drive failure? I've heard RAID 50 is safer since any hard drive can fail, but if I loose two of the mirrored drives in RAID10, I will loose everything. But how slower RAID 50 will be? 

 

Thank you all!

 

[LinusTech]

A few things

 

1. That kind of link aggregation I showed only works on Windows 8+ right now. No support on FreeNAS, unRAID, or any of the other NAS OSes I've demo'ed before. Sorry

 

2. Can't think of a reason to use RAID50 for a magnetic NAS. If you're using gigabit (which you are unless you're using Windows or buying 10G equipment) a single drive can more than saturate your link anyway. No need to throw striping into the mix.

 

3. I'm really impressed with unRAID - it's $90 for the license you need but the way it does data protection enables simpler recovery of files in the event of even a full array failure, and the virtualization and docker stuff makes the NAS much more capable (more easily) than other systems if you want the machine to do more than just serve files.

 

Full disclosure though - and you heard it here first I guess - we are in talks with Lime Tech about potentially investing in them because of what I've seen in their current product and their roadmap.

[Si3Rra_7]

8HDDs might saturate 4gbps ( or 500mBps ) if they are performance ones , which would be inadvisable on a storage NAS . And if you're not using the NAS for work like editing RAID 1 would be enough .

 

also hi linus ^ 

[Kevin Liu]

5 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

A few things

 

1. That kind of link aggregation I showed only works on Windows 8+ right now. No support on FreeNAS, unRAID, or any of the other NAS OSes I've demo'ed before. Sorry

 

2. Can't think of a reason to use RAID50 for a magnetic NAS. If you're using gigabit (which you are unless you're using Windows or buying 10G equipment) a single drive can more than saturate your link anyway. No need to throw striping into the mix.

 

3. I'm really impressed with unRAID - it's $90 for the license you need but the way it does data protection enables simpler recovery of files in the event of even a full array failure, and the virtualization and docker stuff makes the NAS much more capable (more easily) than other systems if you want the machine to do more than just serve files.

 

Full disclosure though - and you heard it here first I guess - we are in talks with Lime Tech about potentially investing in them because of what I've seen in their current product and their roadmap.

Thanks For the reply! So even if I plug 4 ports from FreeNas to my switch, I will still only have 1 gigabit correct? If that's the case, the best way to do it might just be RAID 5 or RAID 6? 

[Kevin Liu]

8 minutes ago, Si3Rra_7 said:

8HDDs might saturate 4gbps ( or 500mBps ) if they are performance ones , which would be inadvisable on a storage NAS . 

 

also hi linus ^ 

That's only if I strip them together right? If like what Linus said I can't get 4 GbE connection from the NAS, then I won't strip them together.....

[sirtoby]

16 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

Full disclosure though - and you heard it here first I guess - we are in talks with Lime Tech about potentially investing in them because of what I've seen in their current product and their roadmap.

This makes me very excited. It would be a great step to be less reliant on Youtube.

[LinusTech]

1 hour ago, Kevin Liu said:

Thanks For the reply! So even if I plug 4 ports from FreeNas to my switch, I will still only have 1 gigabit correct? If that's the case, the best way to do it might just be RAID 5 or RAID 6? 

Yes you would only have a gigabit connection. And make sure you're using the right terminology for clarity.

You're talking about RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 - and the optimal configuration will actually depend on the number of drives you want in your vdevs.

 

Quote

You talk about a RAID-Z2 of 5 drives, but that is not optimal. You should limit yourself to these configurations which are 4K optimal:

RAID-Z1: 3,5,9,17 disks
RAID-Z2: 4,6,10,18 disks
RAID-Z3: 5,7,11,19 disks

The most common are:
RAID-Z: 3 disks
RAID-Z2: 6 or 10 disks
RAID-Z3: 19 disks

 

Here's the original post: http://zfsguru.com/forum/buildingyourownzfsserver/900

 

With that said, I really really like what unRAID is doing and I think it's worth the cashola as a longer term investment.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, Kevin Liu said:

That's only if I strip them together right? If like what Linus said I can't get 4 GbE connection from the NAS, then I won't strip them together.....

You will have to wait for SAMBA 4.4 to be released in March which will support SMB multichannel, once this is out in general release you will then also have to wait for software developers from the likes of unRAID to release an update which includes this.

 

I wouldn't want to guess on any timing for such things as I have no idea what unRAID or even FreeNAS plans are for supporting SAMBA 4.4.

 

Also to use SMB multichannel you do not, and should not, configure any kind of link aggregation. Just give each interface an IP address and Windows will take care of the rest.

[Mikensan]

If you use freenas the main goal would be data integrity for a premium. A "properly" setup freenas box is going to cost you. unRAID has btfrs which also has similar or argued by some better data integrity, but I cannot speak on hardware requirements.

 

Raid 10 will have better performance, Raid 50 will still have good performance and better fault tolerance.

 

FreeNAS supports LACP but your switch would need to support this as well. Switches that support LACP are going to be a touch expensive. (~$150us+)

 

What type of speeds are you looking for?. I'm running a Raidz2 acroiss 4 drives (WD reds, non-pro) and getting about 90mbytes/720mbits per second. My Raidz1 of 5 drives (seagate "nas" drives) is getting 400mbytes per second. The Raidz2 is probably being limited by my shitty cpu (celeron g1610).

[Kevin Liu]

Thanks for all of your suggestion. I would probably go with RAIDZ2 with 6 drives or RAIDZ3 with 7 drives if I want more protection. So Linus what does unraid can give me that freenas can't? I don't think you have a video talk about the benefits of unraid yet.... I don't want to throw in 80 bucks to get unraid but only use the same feature that freenas can give me. 

thank you all again. 

[JWMutant]

1 hour ago, Kevin Liu said:

 So Linus what does unraid can give me that freenas can't?

A few things I can say on this is, last time I used freenas I found it to be alot more resource hungry and hardware limiting than Unraid is.

[Kevin Liu]

I am aware of that since freenas requires at least 8GB ram to function well....