Storage redundancy advice

[Jarand]

Hi,

 

I'm wondering if I can get some opinions/recommendations for redundancy for my home server.

I have a silverstone 8 bay case with 4x 3TB Seagate Enterprise value drives (st3000nc000).

I was planning to buy 4 more and use HW raid on an LSI 9260-8i, but my drive has been discontinued and I am not hearing good thing about HW raid at the moment.

I am running WHS 2011 with a xeon e3-1230 v3 on a mini itx board. I use an intel SSD for boot/OS

 

Any recommendations?
I store mostly movies/TV for a plex server and use google photos/drive for anything really important, just don't want to need to re-download anything if a drive fails.

I am willing to re-buy drives if I need matching and if higher capacity would help, otherwise I could try to source more of my current drive, just not very practical in price/GB now, especially with newer drives.

 

I was initially aiming for 15-20TB, which is still my goal.

 

Thanks for any feedback

[Electronics Wizardy]

You stuck with that os or willing to change?

 

If you willing to change, id suggest using storage spaces in 2012r2 or 2016. Or use zfs in linux of freebsd.

 

Otherwise, hardware raid is you best option. Id probably save a few bucks and get a used dell h700, basically the dell rebrand of the lsi card. Then run raid 5/6.

[Jarand]

I'd be willing to change, but I have already spent $ on WHS so I suppose it would have to be linux I'd consider, not planning on shelling out more on windows. For ZFS would I need ECC ram? and presumably more than the 8GB I have?

Overall, HW raid might be less effort

[leadeater]

11 hours ago, Jarand said:

I was planning to buy 4 more and use HW raid on an LSI 9260-8i, but my drive has been discontinued and I am not hearing good thing about HW raid at the moment.

Most of the talk about hw raid is just scare mongering and people that have never actually used it or very little. It is better to try and go for a more modern approach if you can but in smaller configurations hw raid often performs better with equal or better resiliency, if you have a hot standby card.

 

A lot of people list the card itself as a single point of failure which is true, but these cards are 24/7 server rated and proven for many years as reliable, but then turn around and recommend a bargain build FreeNAS system which is still a single pint of failure and much more likely to fail. Basically just use common sense and have a really good think about stuff .

 

Go with what @Electronics Wizardy suggested, also Storage Spaces allows you to use mixed size disks. Seriously consider upgrading to Windows Server 2016 standard if you do want to use Storage Spaces. Simplest option of course is just go with hardware raid.

[AshleyAshes]

I know I'm pimping my own build again, but FlexRAID which uses a snapshot parity system and allows you to add more drives on demand or swap drives is great for protecting just media from a single drive failure.  You can also mix-and-match drive sizes at well, so long as no drive is larger than your parity drive.

 

 

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

I know I'm pimping my own build again, but FlexRAID which uses a snapshot parity system and allows you to add more drives on demand or swap drives is great for protecting just media from a single drive failure.  You can also mix-and-match drive sizes at well, so long as no drive is larger than your parity drive.

We should really make a sticky thread "So you want to make a storage server" and list out all the community accepted solutions and describe them in detail along with the Pro's and Con's of each one. Would likely save a lot of typing out the same thing many many times . Plus everything in one place is nice.

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

We should really make a sticky thread "So you want to make a storage server" and list out all the community accepted solutions and describe them in detail along with the Pro's and Con's of each one. Would likely save a lot of typing out the same thing many many times . Plus everything in one place is nice.

Probably.  That said, my usage of FlexRAID is not something I've read about much outside of HTPC focused forums.  I think with LTT being a tech forum, the angle skews towards 'adapting enterprise grade redundancy to the consumer' so you see a lot of talk on RAID1, RAID5, RAID6 or RAID-Z and such.  While those can be great options and I'd never use FlexRAID even in a SOHO situation, it's pretty ideal in terms of cost vs. benefit for a hoard of media files.  So I'm like of the few FlexRAID us cases on the forum and I can't even tell you how well it really works when an HDD failure happens, I've been yet to experience a drive failure since my migration.

[Jarand]

Thanks for the feedback all. If I can get a cheap copy of windows server standard 2016 I might go for that. Certainly not paying $1000+ though  Otherwise I might go for the hardware RAID with the 9260 or Dell equivalent.

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, Jarand said:

Thanks for the feedback all. If I can get a cheap copy of windows server standard 2016 I might go for that. Certainly not paying $1000+ though  Otherwise I might go for the hardware RAID with the 9260 or Dell equivalent.

IBM M5110 is also the same thing. Don't forget to make sure you get one with a battery/super cap or get one separately else RAID 5/6 performance is going to suck.