Multi HDD Solutions - Failing RAID

[xBlizzDevious]

Hi all, I've got a RAID card and four 4TB drives that I bought just shy of four years ago now. The other day, one drive decided that it was going to fail. The drive that failed is still alive as I've rebuilt the array with the faulty HDD still installed. No dodgy SMART data. It is making that well-known fatal clicking noise, however.

The array is very near to capacity (like 200GB of 12TB free) so I'm looking at increasing the capacity. My most likely to four 8TB drives in RAID 5 but would think about other solutions.

 

What do you guys think?
Which drives would you suggest?



The other thing I'm thinking is to take the 4TB drives I have and use them in a software RAID 5 or 10 (with a replacement drive) in my main PC as my current storage system on that is two 2TB laptop drives in RAID 0.

Again, what do you guys think of that?


Last question: any idea on the warranty of Seagate drives? I can't find much info online apart from a warranty checker on their website, which goes to a 404 when I put any serial in.
It's this drive in particular: ST4000DM000 which is a 4TB, 5900RPM drive. I doubt the warranty is 4 or more years, but it's always worth checking!

[zMeul]

http://support.seagate.com/customer/en-US/warranty_validation.jsp works

I used it just this morning to check for one of my HDD's warranty

[xBlizzDevious]

4 hours ago, zMeul said:

http://support.seagate.com/customer/en-US/warranty_validation.jsp works

I used it just this morning to check for one of my HDD's warranty

I was using the ST4000 number and not the part number. Just tried it again and it worked! Bad news: it's out of warranty!

So what does everyone think about switching to RAID 5 with four 8TB drives? Which drives would you suggest?
Using three or four of the 4TB drives in a software RAID 5 or 10? Is that worth it or should I use hardware RAID?

[zMeul]

20 minutes ago, xBlizzDevious said:

I was using the ST4000 number and not the part number. Just tried it again and it worked! Bad news: it's out of warranty!

So what does everyone think about switching to RAID 5 with four 8TB drives? Which drives would you suggest?
Using three or four of the 4TB drives in a software RAID 5 or 10? Is that worth it or should I use hardware RAID?

way too big for RAID5, if a drive fails there's a strong chance another will fail while rebuilding the matrix

I'd go RAID10

[xBlizzDevious]

2 hours ago, zMeul said:

way too big for RAID5, if a drive fails there's a strong chance another will fail while rebuilding the matrix

I'd go RAID10

You think it's that likely? What about RAID 6 and buy 5 drives instead?

Just gaining 4TB isn't really enough as I know I'll fill that far too quickly.

[scottyseng]

2 hours ago, xBlizzDevious said:

You think it's that likely? What about RAID 6 and buy 5 drives instead?

Just gaining 4TB isn't really enough as I know I'll fill that far too quickly.

Err, you can do RAID6 with four drives? I don't know why you'd need to buy five (That and I don't like odd numbers in my array. haha.)

 

I used to do RAID10, but changed over to RAID6.

[xBlizzDevious]

1 minute ago, scottyseng said:

Err, you can do RAID6 with four drives? I don't know why you'd need to buy five (That and I don't like odd numbers in my array. haha.)

 

I used to do RAID10, but changed over to RAID6.

I can do RAID 5 with 3 drives.

It's because I have used 12TB in four years and have had to have a diet on the data I have so that I didn't have to buy a new drive or set of drives a couple of times already. Since one has now failed, I may as well increase the capacity as well. I could just buy two 4TB drives, one to replace the faulty one and one extra for some more space but that'll only give me 4TB. That won't take long to fill. If I were to get three 8TB drives in a RAID 5, or four in a RAID 6, that'd only give me the same amount of space, hence the extra.

Since none of the data is critical (mostly media and a couple of backups (of other non-critical-but-useful-to-have data)) I think I'm willing to risk just four 8TB drives and RAID 5. Especially since it'll cost just shy of £1000 just for four drives!

I don't blame you for disliking odd numbers in arrays. I'm the same! But I also prefer to have some money in my bank account so I'd put up with the odd number of drives.

[scottyseng]

1 minute ago, xBlizzDevious said:

-snip-

Ah, I see why you want more drives now. Thanks for clearing that up. Hmm, I think RAID6 shouldn't eat that much space over RAID5, but I haven't calculated.

 

Yeah, I try to push towards RAID6 because of the two drive fault tolerance. I ah, had a bad string of drives that had to get replaced and having my main array with one down drive is enough to scare me, but two went down...and I managed to survive without the entire array dying. haha.

 

I have 10 4TB (WD Re SAS) in RAID6 and 6 4TB (WD Red) in RAID6 (backup array).

 

Oh right, if your array starts throwing errors and you recently played with the NAS's internals, you might check the SAS cable being inserted correctly on both the RAID card and backplane....haha...I had two drives drop out of the WD red array only because one of the two SAS connectors wasn't 100% in the connector since I upgraded the GPU.

[xBlizzDevious]

3 minutes ago, scottyseng said:

Ah, I see why you want more drives now. Thanks for clearing that up. Hmm, I think RAID6 shouldn't eat that much space over RAID5, but I haven't calculated.

 

Yeah, I try to push towards RAID6 because of the two drive fault tolerance. I ah, had a bad string of drives that had to get replaced and having my main array with one down drive is enough to scare me, but two went down...and I managed to survive without the entire array dying. haha.

 

I have 10 4TB (WD Re SAS) in RAID6 and 6 4TB (WD Red) in RAID6 (backup array).

 

Oh right, if your array starts throwing errors and you recently played with the NAS's internals, you might check the SAS cable being inserted correctly on both the RAID card and backplane....haha...I had two drives drop out of the WD red array only because one of the two SAS connectors wasn't 100% in the connector since I upgraded the GPU.

I hadn't touched it when it died. Just gave it a much higher load than usual. I was wanting to virtualise my server so that I can start it fresh but have a) a backup to reinstate if I screw it all up and b) to be able to check what I need to set up, current configs etc.

Unfortunately, writing a couple of hundred GBs to those drives (only virtualising C drive) while at the same time deleting a few hundred GBs (to make some space for the virtual version) caused a drive to fail. Reseating that one drive has allowed it to rebuild the array but the drive is doing the click of death. SMART data all good, surprisingly.

As I said, the data is non-critical and although I'd be rather miffed if I lost it, it wouldn't be the end of the world.