Raid 6 - Question

[Edgecybe231]

hi, my dad is worried that if you have a raid card and a raid 6 config. that if thing goes to the worse and the motherboard dies then the data would be stagerred across 6 or so drives. and how would you re-setup that? this is all pre-plan so don't know if we're going to run home server or windows 7

[Eric1024]

If the motherboard dies you should be fine by just replacing it and you won't loose data. If the raid controller dies, same thing, just replace it. However, if for some reason you can't replace it, you most likely will not be able to get your data off of the drives. Raid 0, 5, and 6 all involve striping, and recovering data from stripes by just plugging it into another computer isn't going to work, especially when you're using raid 6 since no (consumer) onboard controller knows how to handle it. Personally I would highly advise against raid 6 (and this is coming from a guy who has a raid 6 array off of an lsi 9260 raid card). Hardware raid is very inflexible, and I would go with something like flexRAID. FlexRAID is software raid (which, on modern hardware and for home use, will NOT be slower than hardware raid) and it allows for double parity configurations meaning you can loose two drives (just like raid 6, but much less of a hassle). It's also a lot easier to recover from.

Here's the flexRAID website http://www.flexraid.com/

Quote from the site: "Unlike traditional RAID systems, where losing one drive past the tolerance level result in total data loss, the data on surviving drives in FlexRAID remain fully readable and accessible."

Hope this helps, cheers :)

[azeotrope]

You can also do raid6 on software with raidz2 or mdraid. If you do want to go with motherboard raid, it's unlikely that a new motherboard from future chipsets won't support or can't read you're array's metadata. There's pretty much no reason for them to break compatibility.

FlexRAID is software raid (which' date=' on modern hardware and for home use, will NOT be slower than hardware raid)[/quote']flexraid sits ontop of the filesystem and only reads/writes one drive at a time as well as the dedicated parity drives so yes, it will be slower than a full raid6 setup. On a gigabit network however, it won't matter very much.

[Eric1024]

You can also do raid6 on software with raidz2 or mdraid. If you do want to go with motherboard raid, it's unlikely that a new motherboard from future chipsets won't support or can't read you're array's metadata. There's pretty much no reason for them to break compatibility.

FlexRAID is software raid (which' date=' on modern hardware and for home use, will NOT be slower than hardware raid)[/quote']flexraid sits ontop of the filesystem and only reads/writes one drive at a time as well as the dedicated parity drives so yes, it will be slower than a full raid6 setup. On a gigabit network however, it won't matter very much.

Are you sure flexRAID only reads and writes to one drive at a time? There's no reason that I wouldn't be able to process multiple IO's to different drives at the same time...

Also, from what I've heard, ZFS is rather difficult to deal with and a bit much for a home server.

[azeotrope]

You can also do raid6 on software with raidz2 or mdraid. If you do want to go with motherboard raid, it's unlikely that a new motherboard from future chipsets won't support or can't read you're array's metadata. There's pretty much no reason for them to break compatibility.

FlexRAID is software raid (which' date=' on modern hardware and for home use, will NOT be slower than hardware raid)[/quote']flexraid sits ontop of the filesystem and only reads/writes one drive at a time as well as the dedicated parity drives so yes, it will be slower than a full raid6 setup. On a gigabit network however, it won't matter very much.

For sequential reads and writes of one file it will, because it does not stripe data like conventional raid. you can obviously read/write different files on different drives in which case performance will be higher, but you're probably not going to be using all the drives in your array. flexraid is a good solution for media storage and streaming but other software raid solutions are faster. whether ZFS is dufficult or not is rather subjective. ZFS gives you more control over your array and your data than flexraid and yes, is mainly meant for enterprise and most of the advanced config is done over the shell. Personally I prefer the shell over gui interfaces for setup since its faster and more powerful.