NAS? Raid setup?

[Moibhin]

OK guys i need help i have recently out grown my storage for movies tv shows ect. i got a 5.25 inch bay drive that can hold up to 5 drives my plan is to have 4 3tb drives in it. now should i get NAS branded hardrives ? or just normal ones i read and write from my current hard drive alot so im not sure. i want to setup up just one massive drive but im worried about hard drive failure i need some confidence and help from some pros at this sort of thing. Im thinking Raid 1 for relaibilty but im still unsure as to what to do. also i want to be able to use it like a NAS as well so just help me and tell me what i need to do in order for this to happen. 

[Mikensan]

If you don't already have something in mind, you can grab an icy dock for your 5.25 bays.

 

Mirror is the safest with the smallest impact on performance but you lose 50% of your possible capacity - something to keep in mind. Take a look at your motherboard, make sure you have enough available SATA ports based on what you want.

 

Depending on your budget you may want to plan for future storage, maybe think of putting a NAS together. Quite a lot of NAS solutions support Plex one way or another. Movies are only getting higher and higher in resolution.

[RedWulf]

NAS/Server drives are preferred if you can budget it such as WD red, if not its no big deal. You could do a raid setup if you want perhaps raid 10 though someone besides myself can help you with a raid flavor. For an nas you don't need anything really special but freenas is the popular OS for nas. Freenas, nas4free, and plex are the common ones, but plex is just for media and streaming but may not offer raid i'm not sure. Raid hardware just as pci cards are preffered to software. 

To make it happen just hook up the computer, install freenas via usb(and most likely run it from that usb), connect the network, login to the web gui, connect and set up the raid drives and hardware, and go.

[Jarsky]

1 hour ago, Mikensan said:

If you don't already have something in mind, you can grab an icy dock for your 5.25 bays.

Just keep in mind that a lot of cases have lips seperating each 5.25" drive bay, which will interfere with these cages - so you may need to do a bit of customisation. Most cases ive found you can just flatten them using a block of wood and a hammer - but tighter cases you might need to start off with bending them with pliers

[Moibhin]

Alright thank you very much guys i have order a icy dock 5.25 dock to fit 5 drives in ill be grabing 4 of either 3tb or 4 tb nas drives and setting up either raid 1 or 5 depending on if i decide to get a raid card. Hahah oh shit i completely forgot about the lips ok that shouldnt be a problem considering i got some nice power tools to cut that shit away hahah ? ill report back in 8 days when i get the box 

Redwulf thanks for the insight to nas external boxes that has also given me some more insight cheers guys 

[Moibhin]

Ok guys i have the cage installed i managed to cut away the lips using a small angle grinder (altho i would try bending them back and forth repeatedly until they weakin and snap) oh and please remove all hardware before you attempt any of that. The box looks very nice and flush up agaisnt my pc without a doubt makes me smile. Now next week or the week after i will be ordering 4 3tb nas drives in from PC CASE GEAR they are the seagate nas drives. (Have you guys had any problems with using nas drives in a enclosure.) Now i will be using up all my sata ports on my motherboard is there any other to insert more hard drives without using a pcie slot card (i got a crossfire setup that doesnt allow me to put in raid cards and sound cards ect) which also means i will be doing raid 1. Alright will report back when i have more for you guys 

[Mikensan]

Very clean looking! Good job. What size is your motherboard? I'm surprised that even with the crossfire cards you can't squeeze another one in there. You could use a pci-express ribbon to relocate the raid card, and just get creative with where you want to mount it. (Use Linus's amazon link if you get this: http://www.amazon.com/PCI-Express-PCI-E-Extension-Flexible-Ribbon/dp/B00MJUCU84)

 

Since you won't need any external ports from that card, shouldn't be an issue.

[Moibhin]

5Excellent work mikensan so this will help me attach a sata port card to a pcie slot without having to try and ran it in there. Could you also fine me a sata port card that would be very help thanks mate ?

[Mikensan]

There's so many out there honestly, you could buy used from ebay or new - So long as it is Sata III / 6GBps you're good. Unless you want to do some fancy hardware raid or use FreeNAS it won't matter a whole lot.

[Moibhin]

Alright thanks mikensan i decided to go raid 1+0 (raid 10) haha now my 12tb gives me 5.8 tb which is fine i want to know if one of my drives fail how do i repair the lost data do i just plug in a new hard drive and it will repair itself or do you need to do something. Im new to raid setups. But im very much liking the redundancy it helps alot incase of hardware failure. 

[Mikensan]

Figure out which drive died, then just pull it and put a new one in. What'll usually happen is the raid controller will consider a drive "degraded" and will detect a new drive and rebuild it. This is by design because otherwise it would defeat the "hot swap" ability. Some cheaper raid controllers will require you to log in to them to rebuild the array - but those are few and far in-between.

 

What are you using to raid the drives? - You will want a way to monitor it / receive alerts.

 

Also raid is not a backup, so make sure you've got some idea of how to backup the data.

[Moibhin]

I dont have a raid controller im using the onboard raid support of my motherboard. will it be an issue if i dont have a raid card ? 

[Yamoto42]

Maybe...maybe not.  On-board raid controllers can be sketchy if you actually put any significant use on them.  They can be temperamental and there are a lot of common, insignificant events that they just don't know how to handle.  One of my last computers before I externalized my mass storage I lost A LOT of data to such minor things.  Takes .001 ms too long to boot?  Array degraded.  I hope you don't mind if I eject a drive mid rebuild...


While it is doable with on-board raid, I wouldn't.  Honestly, since it's a 5 bay dock, I would get a 5th drive and look for a controller that supports Raid 6.  That is a whole drive worth of potential space you aren't using, and will never be able to if you don't initially set it up that way...but I digress.

 

The most important part is that you use NAS oriented drives.  They contain firmware designed to handle...well specifically NOT handle...certian errors.  By not handling the error themself, they allow the controller to handle it in a way that does not degrade the array.

[Dark]

Few things I wanted to touch on in this thread---

 

NAS/Enterprise drives are a waste of many for any home/small business project.  The cost increase for the potentially longer life (which rarely, if ever is validated) isn't worth it versus using desktop class drives.  

 

Never trust on-board controllers or other software based raid solution, recovery can be an impossible effort.

 

Purchase proven raid cards (LSI/Dell Perc/HP P-series/etc).  Get a write cache card and run RAID5.  RAID6 for home use just burns space and money.

[Electronics Wizardy]

32 minutes ago, Dark said:

Never trust on-board controllers or other software based raid solution, recovery can be an impossible effort.

 

ZFS, BTRFS and REFS are exceptions to this and are often better than hardware raid.

[Dark]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

ZFS, BTRFS and REFS are exceptions to this and are often better than hardware raid.

No argument there (in comparison to software based controllers).

I would always take a BBC controller over software though.