Software RAID for home server

Mosphoran · January 6, 2013

For the purposes of discussion let's include anything you might describe as "pseudo-RAID" just so there aren't any pedantic arguments about what is and isn't technically RAID.

Mainly looking at RAID-Z or UnRAID at the moment. UnRAID is more flexible, easier to upgrade drives, and loses less data in a catastrophic failure (i.e. more drives failing than it can recover from parity) because each drive retains its own filesystem and data isn't striped. But it also costs money to use larger numbers of drives and then you have to mess about with licence keys (which are tied to one USB stick), and performance isn't always fantastic because of the lack of striping.

RAID-Z is less flexible in comparison but has the improved performance of a RAID (and without the write hole), with built-in checksumming to maintain integrity.

I haven't really decided between the two yet. Are there any pros/cons I've forgotten? Or some other awesome solution I might not know of?

wpirobotbuilder · January 6, 2013

FlexRAID? It looks like a pretty good option.

looney · January 6, 2013

i have personally just build a flexraid system, before i build it i just spend a lot of time with vm's to make up my mind.

in the end i chose flexraid because it was windows based and i had no need for linux or esxi on that particular server.

Jarsky · January 7, 2013

Personally I have a Software RAID5....I wouldn't recommend it - though have had a small play with the new Storage Spaces in my Windows 2012 environment (thanks to Linus' video on Storage Spaces) and have been fairly impressed.

As far as RAID-Z/Z2, its an awesome system if you want to run ZFS. Its really simple to setup as well under Fedora.

An optimal setup a lot of friends use, is a server virtualised with ESXi (or whatever hypervisor you want), then running a Fedora VM to manage the raid-z data sets, then mount the share to a VM running a windows environment