NAS RAID Setup Advice

[AHaskin14]

So this summer I plan to build myself a home NAS to run plex, store photos and movies, and do whatever else I need it for down the line. I have a windows 10 license for the system, so in theory I'd use windows storage spaces to set things up. I'd like to have 8tb of usable space, so my initial plans have been to get 3 4tb drives in a RAID 5, but some sources say good idea, while some say bad. There's obviously plenty other RAID's to use as well, but so I'm looking for some reviews and advice.  What are some community thoughts on how I should set up the storage? Thanks!

[Pyramiden]

I was in the same boat as you are and decided to opt for RAID 1 instead of RAID 5.
RAID 5 will give you more storage than 8TB using those 4 drives, and faster read speeds than RAID 1.
However, RAID 1 has the advantage in terms of redundancy. RAID 5 stores the data striped with the use of parity information. If one of your disks fails, the system will need to rebuild it onto a new disk. This will take a lot of time, and if either of the other drives fail you have lost all of your data.

With two RAID 1 arrays you still have at least half of your data, and a 67% chance that you still have all of your data if two disks fail.

However, I think both are fine choices, it is just what you personally prefer.

I do recommend to get Harddisk Sentinel. It is a great tool for monitoring your SMART data, and it also plays nice with my P420 RAID controller.

[AHaskin14]

14 minutes ago, Pyramiden said:

I was in the same boat as you are and decided to opt for RAID 1 instead of RAID 5.
RAID 5 will give you more storage than 8TB using those 4 drives, and faster read speeds than RAID 1.
However, RAID 1 has the advantage in terms of redundancy. RAID 5 stores the data striped with the use of parity information. If one of your disks fails, the system will need to rebuild it onto a new disk. This will take a lot of time, and if either of the other drives fail you have lost all of your data.

With two RAID 1 arrays you still have at least half of your data, and a 67% chance that you still have all of your data if two disks fail.

However, I think both are fine choices, it is just what you personally prefer.

I do recommend to get Harddisk Sentinel. It is a great tool for monitoring your SMART data, and it also plays nice with my P420 RAID controller.

So in having two RAID 1 arrays, you're suggesting a RAID 10, in that each array would be written to in RAID 0? Is that correct?

[tikker]

27 minutes ago, Pyramiden said:

I was in the same boat as you are and decided to opt for RAID 1 instead of RAID 5.
RAID 5 will give you more storage than 8TB using those 4 drives, and faster read speeds than RAID 1.
However, RAID 1 has the advantage in terms of redundancy. RAID 5 stores the data striped with the use of parity information. If one of your disks fails, the system will need to rebuild it onto a new disk. This will take a lot of time, and if either of the other drives fail you have lost all of your data.

With two RAID 1 arrays you still have at least half of your data, and a 67% chance that you still have all of your data if two disks fail.

However, I think both are fine choices, it is just what you personally prefer.

I do recommend to get Harddisk Sentinel. It is a great tool for monitoring your SMART data, and it also plays nice with my P420 RAID controller.

All RAID setups will need to rebuild when replacing drives, RAID 1 is no exception. It will need to mirror the data to the new drive, but yeah there is the performance hit in RAID 5. But it's not like you're not going to replace a failed drive next year For me I'm planning on doing a RAID 5 5x4TB (so 16TB effective) setup for my NAS, as RAID 1 or 10 sacrifices too much capacity for me (and also cost-wise). You can always go for RAID 6, allowing for 2 drive failures, if possible.

[AHaskin14]

Just now, tikker said:

All RAID setups will need to rebuild when replacing drives, RAID 1 is no exception. It will need to mirror the data to the new drive. For me I'm planning on doing a RAID 5 5x4TB (so 16TB effective) setup for my NAS, as RAID 1 or 10 sacrifices too much capacity for me (and also cost-wise). You can always go for RAID 6, allowing for 2 drive failures, if possible.

It does indeed cost more. The Raid 10 would require 4 drives, whereas the 5 only 3 drives to get 8tb. The majority of the data will be movies and music too, with the personal files and pictures being able to backup to a separate source before rebuilding if needed.

[tikker]

8 minutes ago, AHaskin14 said:

It does indeed cost more. The Raid 10 would require 4 drives, whereas the 5 only 3 drives to get 8tb. The majority of the data will be movies and music too, with the personal files and pictures being able to backup to a separate source before rebuilding if needed.

With RAID it all comes down to how much you value the data being stored there (you should have backups for important data of course, RAID is no excuse for that).

RAID arrays are most vulnerable when rebuilding. The advantage of the RAID 10 setup is that if during rebuilding of the first pair, a drive in the second pair fails the data is still there. If during the rebuild of a RAID 5 array another drive fails, the data on the array is lost. Then again if the rebuilding pair of the RAID10 setup fails everything dies as well.

And with movies/music it's not that big of a deal, since it'll just be a matter of re-downl re-ripping a completely legally obtained library should the array fail.

[AHaskin14]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

With RAID it all comes down to how much you value the data being stored there (you should have backups for important data of course, RAID is no excuse for that).

RAID arrays are most vulnerable when rebuilding. The advantage of the RAID 10 setup is that if during rebuilding of the first pair, a drive in the second pair fails the data is still there. If during the rebuild of a RAID 5 array another drive fails, the data on the array is lost. Then again if the rebuilding pair of the RAID10 setup fails everything dies as well.

Which do you use? Pretend it's explicitly a PLEX media server, with nothing but movies that I could re-rip. What would you recommend then?

[tikker]

3 minutes ago, AHaskin14 said:

Which do you use? Pretend it's explicitly a PLEX media server, with nothing but movies that I could re-rip. What would you recommend then?

Right now I don't have all the required drives, so it's just an amalgation of 1, 2 and 3 TB drives. But once I get all my drives it'll be a RAID 5 setup for me, since losing half the storage capacity is a bit too much for me now.

[AHaskin14]

2 minutes ago, tikker said:

Right now I don't have all the required drives, so it's just an amalgation of 1, 2 and 3 TB drives. But once I get all my drives it'll be a RAID 5 setup for me, since losing half the storage capacity is a bit too much for me now.

Awesome, I may just stick with the RAID 5 then. Building the server in the first place will be a big spend for me, So if I can save money, I'll take it.

[tikker]

1 minute ago, AHaskin14 said:

Awesome, I may just stick with the RAID 5 then. Building the server in the first place will be a big spend for me, So if I can save money, I'll take it.

Yeah drives are expensive... which ones are you getting? I was planning on Reds, but I'm going to give the IronWolf line up a try since it'll save me another 20 per drive.

[AHaskin14]

8 minutes ago, tikker said:

Yeah drives are expensive... which ones are you getting? I was planning on Reds, but I'm going to give the IronWolf line up a try since it'll save me another 20 per drive.

Was planning on the RED's. If there's some major sale on the Ironwolfs maybe, but I've always been happy with my WD products.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, AHaskin14 said:

Was planning on the RED's. If there's some major sale on the Ironwolfs maybe, but I've always been happy with my WD products.

Look at athe wd easy store drives. 8tb reds for about 170 usd.

[Salacious B Crum]

3 hours ago, AHaskin14 said:

So this summer I plan to build myself a home NAS to run plex, store photos and movies, and do whatever else I need it for down the line. I have a windows 10 license for the system, so in theory I'd use windows storage spaces to set things up. I'd like to have 8tb of usable space, so my initial plans have been to get 3 4tb drives in a RAID 5, but some sources say good idea, while some say bad. There's obviously plenty other RAID's to use as well, but so I'm looking for some reviews and advice.  What are some community thoughts on how I should set up the storage? Thanks!

Have you considered FreeNAS or unRAID I have an unRAID box setup with Plex and a few VM's the nice thing about unRAID is you install say a 4 TB parity drive and then you can install the rest of the drives to the array and they don't have to be same size the only limiting factor is if your parity is say 4TB then no disk on the array can be larger it's a very flexible setup the basic license is $59 for a 6 drive system give it a try its free for 30 days with no restrictions you get to try the full implementation to see if you like it

[AHaskin14]

28 minutes ago, mrbilky said:

Have you considered FreeNAS or unRAID I have an unRAID box setup with Plex and a few VM's the nice thing about unRAID is you install say a 4 TB parity drive and then you can install the rest of the drives to the array and they don't have to be same size the only limiting factor is if your parity is say 4TB then no disk on the array can be larger it's a very flexible setup the basic license is $59 for a 6 drive system give it a try its free for 30 days with no restrictions you get to try the full implementation to see if you like it

That's tempting, but I wanted to go with windows because I had the license already, and if I want to use the computer for anything else down the line I still easily can.

[Salacious B Crum]

3 hours ago, AHaskin14 said:

That's tempting, but I wanted to go with windows because I had the license already, and if I want to use the computer for anything else down the line I still easily can.

Yep that's why you can run a windows 10 VM on the same unit as well or any number of other OS's listed not to mention running docker's and other apps it's pretty versatile in that regard