NAS Ideas!

[whatthe_fuzz]

Hey guess!

Looking at building my own NAS system with around 12-15TB of storage in RAID 1. My budget is $1000 if its do-able but absolute maximum of $1500. This will be a strict storage system and not be used other than storage needs.

What do you guys think of having it function has a media PC? I have around 6TB of movies. Would it cost more to have a media PC plus NAS hybrid?

Thanks for the input!

[defunkt]

Don't you mean RAID 10? I'd use RAID 5 anyways.

[whatthe_fuzz]

Don't you mean RAID 10? I'd use RAID 5 anyways.

In all honesty, im a RAID noob. I will be storing important legal documents that I can not afford to lose to a drive failure so my mind immediately went to redundancy of RAID 1.

[defunkt]

In all honesty, im a RAID noob. I will be storing important legal documents that I can not afford to lose to a drive failure so my mind immediately went to redundancy of RAID 1.

RAID 1 is for two drives. RAID 5 is the most secure.

[coen113]

RAID 1 is for two drives. RAID 5 is the most secure.

raid 1 is pretty damn secure, just as 10

[tristan1035]

Look at the zeus build log by Alepenwasser.

[whatthe_fuzz]

RAID 1 is for two drives. RAID 5 is the most secure.

Does it utilize all drives?

  

raid 1 is pretty damn secure, just as 10

  

So RAID 1, 5, or 10?

Look at the zeus build log by Alepenwasser.

I'll go look

[grizli123]

Visualize how RAID works: http://www.acnc.com/raid

More about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID look at comparison section.

[whatthe_fuzz]

Visualize how RAID works: http://www.acnc.com/raid

More about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID look at comparison section.

Wow that first link cleared up a bunch

I think RAID 1 will be best suited. It has security and its not as pricey as RAID 10.

[coen113]

Does it utilize all drives?

  

  

So RAID 1, 5, or 10?

I'll go look

i would go  raid 5 or 10, but 10 requiers more drives

[whatthe_fuzz]

i would go  raid 5 or 10, but 10 requiers more drives

 

doesnt RAID 5 have a risk of drive failure?

 

and RAID 10 seems a tad too complex

[StitchMonkey]

doesnt RAID 5 have a risk of drive failure?

 

and RAID 10 seems a tad too complex

 

 

Unless you need speed on top of safety RAID 10 may not really be a need for you.  Even for streaming. . .  you may not need the speed.    Think of RAID 10 as the "why not both?" meme of RAID 1 and RAID 0.  You can have two drives fail, but they have to be the "right" drives, one drive you are good, two drives it depends on the combination, you are either ok, or you are screwed.

 

RAID 5 frankly feels like gambling from what I have read about it.  In short it takes three drives minimum, two have data on them and the other is for "parity" or in layman, it is your insurance that if a drive dies you don't loose everything, the third drive is for duplication so no data is lost.  So in theory you can have one drive die, replace it, and be back to square one. The issue as best I understand it is that when you have a drive fail in practice, you replace it and then have to access each and every sector of data on the remaining drives to rebuild the array.  Sometimes drives fail at similar times. . . . so you can see why it feels like gambling.  If one of those other drives fail during the rebuild. . . you will have a problem, and since you are accessing every part of it, the larger the array the more chance for an issue.  RAID 6 is sorta an alternative to this.  It works the same as RAID 5, but with a fourth disk that is another one for "parity" i.e. back up.  The theory being that if during the rebuild another drive dies, you still have the back up needed to rebuild the array, you can have one more drive fail in RAID 6 and be ok.    With both RAID 5 and 6 you can have more than the minimum drives so that is also an advantage over RAID 10. 

[whatthe_fuzz]

Unless you need speed on top of safety RAID 10 may not really be a need for you.  Even for streaming. . .  you may not need the speed.    Think of RAID 10 as the "why not both?" meme of RAID 1 and RAID 0.  You can have two drives fail, but they have to be the "right" drives, one drive you are good, two drives it depends on the combination, you are either ok, or you are screwed.

 

RAID 5 frankly feels like gambling from what I have read about it.  In short it takes three drives minimum, two have data on them and the other is for "parity" or in layman, it is your insurance that if a drive dies you don't loose everything, the third drive is for duplication so no data is lost.  So in theory you can have one drive die, replace it, and be back to square one. The issue as best I understand it is that when you have a drive fail in practice, you replace it and then have to access each and every sector of data on the remaining drives to rebuild the array.  Sometimes drives fail at similar times. . . . so you can see why it feels like gambling.  If one of those other drives fail during the rebuild. . . you will have a problem, and since you are accessing every part of it, the larger the array the more chance for an issue.  RAID 6 is sorta an alternative to this.  It works the same as RAID 5, but with a fourth disk that is another one for "parity" i.e. back up.  The theory being that if during the rebuild another drive dies, you still have the back up needed to rebuild the array, you can have one more drive fail in RAID 6 and be ok.    With both RAID 5 and 6 you can have more than the minimum drives so that is also an advantage over RAID 10. 

 

Geez...RAIDs are complicated  

 

i think i'll stick to RAID 1. 

[stevv]

​What do you plan to spend on hardware besides hard drives?

• RAID 10 you will need 24 - 30TB of physical hard drive. @4TB/drive, you will need 6-8 drives.  Something like the WD RED will run you already $1200 - $1500 just for the drives. Depends on the Software/hardware, you might not be able to add more to that pool of storage.
• RAID 5 you will need 4-5 drives (resulting in 12TB-16TB) and cost around $756 - $945.  Most hardware/software implementations can "expand" by adding drive or even "migrate" to RAID 6 for more protection)
• RAID 6 : 5-6 drives + raid card (if running win server): 
• Alternatively, you can mix it: RAID 1 for critical data (docs, pictures, memories, etc).. and RAID 5 for reproducible data (music, movies.. etc).

other notes:

- RAID 1 stores files in plain format, RAID 10 files are still split like RAID 0

- I use RAID5 with  5 x 2TB WD Greens with a RAID card.  I plan to stick with RAID 5 for one more drive expansion, then I'll migrate to RAID 6 (without moving data).

 

 

edit: fixed raid5/6 drive/cost calculation

[whatthe_fuzz]

snip

I want to spend around $1000 but absolute maximum of $1500 and hope to have 12-16TB of usable storage.

Would it be practical to have 4TB in RAID 1 and then 12TB in RAID 5?

[stevv]

I want to spend around $1000 but absolute maximum of $1500 and hope to have 12-16TB of usable storage.

Would it be practical to have 4TB in RAID 1 and then 12TB in RAID 5?

 

That would be 6 drives => ~$1200.  Note that it's a tad bit more work keeping track of mixed RAID and multiple data volumes.  Do you know what type of system you plan to run your RAID?  Linux software? Intel RAID + windows? Hardware RAID?

 

Also, if you plan on a single RAID 5/6, I recommend using a separate drive (non RAID  and directly attached to the motherboard SATA) for the OS (be it linux, windows, etc...).  a drive ~160GB+ will do or even less for linux, like a cheap ssd.  Have the drive set to auto full backup to RAID array. (You should do that regardless of hardware setup in consideration of software problems).  Not a requirement, but would save a lot of trouble should the OS have issues and your running on software RAID.

 

Personally, I find RAID 5 to be fine for this low drive counts (my original plan was RAID 6, but I ran short of space... and drives were $$$ a year back).  If you where going for 6 drives, I would recommend a single RAID 6.  I use my RAID 5 along with online backup service with unlimited space + user encryption (backblaze, crashplan... ~$5/mo), but only backup my non-reproducible files.  That give me peace of mind if anything out of the ordinary happens.  

 

I hope I'm not confusing you more, but it took me awhile of trial and testing to come to the setup I have.. from off the shelf NAS, to external RAID and FreeNAS... and finally settled on a hardware card.... so I guess I have much to throw out.

[Blackterror25]

If you are going for a big RAID array consider raid 6, it allows for 2 drive failures.

If 1 drive fails and you swap out a new one and rebuild the array it puts a lot of stress on your hdd's witch could cause a 2 hdd that was on the edge to also fail, if i'd have a raid 5 you would lose all your data.

[tycheleto]

If you're going custom with dedicated hardware and don't need the highest end performance but want reliability, also should consider software RAID, such as Flexraid. You can get it to run something similar to RAID 6(allows for two drive failures) but without the high cost of a RAID 6 controller, limited upgrade paths and potential of hardware failure losing all your data. It also doesn't use striping so less likely to have a corrupt array costing you all your data. Instead, failures will lose you the data on the failed drives.

It's a good compromise between the potential risks of RAID 5 and the high amount of wasted drive space in RAID 1(for big arrays anyway), so do look into it

[skywake]

Just to clear things up even further:

RAID 0: Everything spread over all disks. Full speed, full capacity but if one drive fails its all over

RAID 1: Everything copied over all disks. Speed of one disk, capacity of one disk, works as long as one disk is still working

RAID 10: Data copied over multiple spreads or spread over multiple copies. Works as long as 1 drive in each section of the RAID 0 lives

RAID 5/6: Everything spread over multiple disks but with an extra disks holding a calculated "parity" bit. Works as long as less drives fail than the number of parity drives

 

You don't want RAID 1 because you'd only get the capacity of one drive and if you're after 12-15TB you probably don't want RAID 10 either. If you're going to build your own from scratch with a desktop CPU and decent controller, and not the usual consumer NAS lowly Atom, then stick with RAID 5/6. Go with RAID 5 if you want the extra storage and go with 6 if you think the extra bit of data security is more important.

 

Also if you're really worried about important documents and that's why you're interested in the extra security then backup. Make a somewhat software version of RAID 1 ontop of your physical RAID for just the most important files. Setup a backup routine for the files you can't lose on second and third drives other than the NAS. The good thing about the most important data like photos and documents is that they tend to be in the 10s of GBs rather than the 100s or 1000s of GBs like movies and TV.

[StitchMonkey]

Geez...RAIDs are complicated

 

i think i'll stick to RAID 1. 

 

As best I understand it, RAID 1 is limited by the size of the largest drive in the array.  So you are limited to 4TB.  (unless it is possible to set up multiple drives in JBOD mode and then set two of them up as a RAID, I have no idea if that is possible - i.e. probably not something you want to try on a first RAID)

I guess you could do more than one RAID 1 array,  the thought has occurred to me.

 

If you want RAID 1 functionality with more drives/space you are looking at RAID 10.  With four 4TB drives RAID 10 would give you 8TB useful space, six 4TB drives would give you 12TB useful space in RAID 10.  Both would give you the safety of RAID 1, but would also have the speed boost of RAID 0 if that makes sense.

 

For reference the same drives in RAID 5 with 4 or 6 drives (like I talked about for RAID 10) would be 12TB/20TB useable and RAID 6 with 4/6 drives would be 8TB/16TB.  So RAID 5 & 6 scale a bit better for storage.  Also, RAID 10 must be even numbers,  RAID 5 and RAID 6 could use five drives is that worked best for you.  

 

RAID 10 is not really bad or complicated.  Most mobos support it it seems, it just needs even numbers of drives and you only ever get half the space.  If you are only doing four drives RAID 10 might be the best and easiest, if you want more space/flexibility, RAID 5 starts looking better.  And frankly the main advantage of RAID 5 I see over RAID 6 is that it is supported by more mobos and more raid cards more easily.  RAID 6 seems less often supported, but there are "software" RAID solutions that let you do RAID 6.  The drives are the same, but essentially a software program is running the calculations to divide up the data on the RAID.  A good RAID card (some would argue real RAID card) will have its own power to do the work, and thus be quicker/less work for the system itself than using the existing infrastructure to do it.  If you want speed, this can be an issue, but if you are just backing things up and speed is not an issue, and the machine is not likely to do much else,  it becomes less an issue. So you have some give and take.  I don't know if an HTPC would need more speed than "software" RAID would provide.  I know "OpenZFS" has a RAID 6 option.  Others might as well.

 

One small tip to keep in mind.  Right now generally 3TB drives are more cost efficient than 4TB drives.  So if you can get a set up that can take more drives (i.e. larger case, more SATA ports) you may be able to save money/get more space with 3TB drives than 4TB. 

 

 

 

 

[stevv]

...

 

One small tip to keep in mind.  Right now generally 3TB drives are more cost efficient than 4TB drives.  So if you can get a set up that can take more drives (i.e. larger case, more SATA ports) you may be able to save money/get more space with 3TB drives than 4TB. 

 

let's see,

 

RAID 5 with WD RED 3TB ($147) vs WD RED 4TB ($210... The price went up $20 from yesterday's $189! )

 

@4TB | 4-5 drives (resulting in 12TB-16TB) ==> @$189/drive:$756 - $945 ==> $63/TB - $59/TB ,  @$210/drive: $840 - $1050 ==> $70/TB - $66/TB , 

@3TB | 5-6 drives (resulting in 12TB-15TB) ==> $735 - $882 ==> $61/TB - $58.8/TB

 

The 4TB drives have dropped even more since Seagate started introducing their NAS drives.  I normally would have gone with the green drives, but looks like WD is seriously slashing prices... so low that one can even afford the enterprise SE models with more performance and warranty.