Home NAS / Backup Server

[smitbret]

Yeah, I don't understand why it's a headache, either. Install and leave on. It e-mails me whenever it does an update, validation and data verification. It's supposed to e-mail me when something goes wrong, too, but nothing's ever gone wrong so..... The hardest thing was scheduling the external backups and that would be done whether RAID or not. My family loves that when they turn on the WDTV, all of the movies and shows are there, every time. My wife loves that she has easy access to any photos, home videos, vital documents and music files from any computer in the house. She doesn't even know there's a box full of hard drives in the basement. I think she believes it just floats around in the air. All she knows is that it's safe, secure and always available.

Everyone's happy and it just sits there like any appliance. I'll probably need to add a new HDD to it in the next 6 months, but I'll just pop it in, import the HDD into the array and set the parity rebuild to run when I go to bed that night. Total extra work, maybe 8 minutes in the RAID interface.

One of the best investments of $800 I ever made.

 

[ControlD]

Yeah, I don't understand why it's a headache, either. Install and leave on.

I think the point was that actual RAID is a headache (and I sort of agree with that). You are running unRAID which is a totally different type of animal and pretty much removes the "headache" from the equation.

 

[smitbret]

I think the point was that actual RAID is a headache (and I sort of agree with that). You are running unRAID which is a totally different type of animal and pretty much removes the "headache" from the equation.

FlexRAID actually, but I have used unRAID and highly recommend it if you have older components.

Yeah, that's a big reason I went with an add-on software RAID solution. Ability to expand at will and not having to worry about add'l hardware failures is a huge plus.

 

[ControlD]

FlexRAID actually, but I have used unRAID and highly recommend it if you have older components.

Yeah, that's a big reason I went with an add-on software RAID solution. Ability to expand at will and not having to worry about add'l hardware failures is a huge plus.

I just checked out FlexRAID and that looks like a very, very nice solution. Am I correct that the parity is stored across the entire drive pool? That looks like a more robust solution than I have with unRAID right now where the parity is stored on a dedicated drive.

I might have to give FR a shot. I also like that it is installed within another OS which removes the need for a complicated plugin system.

 

[nk215]

I would never store my data on anything but a RAID (at least RAID5). I lost one vacation pictures due to a HD failure once and that's one time too many. I do backup every day but it does not protect me from losing the pictures that I just put there in the morning.

hardware RAID is simple in my case, connect 5 HDs to a card, plug the card into the computer. That's it. Data backup to external HDs every day using cobian backup.

I also have a bunch of files (around 100 Gig worth of files) checksum-ed. I check the checksum files every week or so to make sure there's no error.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I'd never go without raid either. I can't imagine losing my data either permanently, or temporary (waiting for a replacement drive to come in so I can restore backups). Right now if I get a disk failure I can keep working and RMA the dead one and put a new one in and let it rebuild. For my main array I also have a hot spare.

 

[sourceninja]

Yeah I'd never go without raid either. I can't imagine losing my data either permanently, or temporary (waiting for a replacement drive to come in so I can restore backups). Right now if I get a disk failure I can keep working and RMA the dead one and put a new one in and let it rebuild. For my main array I also have a hot spare.

It's all about how many failures you want to tolerate. Most home raids are only going to tolerate a single disk failure. So if you have two disks fail in a short time (before the rebuild) you are hosed.

 

[smitbret]

I just checked out FlexRAID and that looks like a very, very nice solution. Am I correct that the parity is stored across the entire drive pool? That looks like a more robust solution than I have with unRAID right now where the parity is stored on a dedicated drive.

I might have to give FR a shot. I also like that it is installed within another OS which removes the need for a complicated plugin system.

Yeah, the primary reason I jumped from unRAID to FlexRAID is because my DLNA server software was only supported in Windows. I also figured since I was gonna give it a CPU with enough juice to transcode on the fly then I might as well use it as my main encoding PC with Handbrake and Ripbot. So I run it on WHS 2011 with Handbrake, Mezzmo and VLC installed. I just hit the Remote Desktop from wherever I'm at.

2nd nice thing about FlexRAID is that it's really just driver software and it works off of the normal NTSC file system. I was able to just import all my HDDs that already had data. If I ever need to break the array I can just read them as separate drives in Windows, each with their own data. If I wanna add a drive from somewhere that already has something on it, I just add and run a parity recalculation. The data is automatically in my array with no copying/restoring.

3rd, FlexRAID uses the same concept as unRAID for parity but it's not limited to just one parity drive. Personally I like this system of parity over redundant striping because if I do get catastrophic failure I won't lose all of the data in the array (see above paragraph). It uses the TxRAID engine and allows you to use 2 parity drives (RAID 6) or more depending on your level of paranoia. Every parity drive you add is another drive failure it can sustain.

4th you can run it in a realtime or snapshot RAID. I end up using Snapshot rather than real-time to save the drain on resources for parity calculation as well as wear and tear. Data gets saved to the drives throughout the day and then it does a parity update at 11:45 every night that takes between 4 and 20 minutes depending on how much writing has been done. It's a little riskier, but once again, see reasons 2 & 3 why I'm comfy with this write hole.

5th you can set it to do periodic validate and verifications of your data to check for things like data rot. I run the validations that check the parity data to the storage data once a week and it takes about 8 hours. I run the verify which is a bit for bit check of the entire array once a month and takes slightly longer than that. FlexRAID e-mails me every time it does an Update, Validation or Verification. The first time I ever ran a verification it e-mailed me that it failed. I checked my data, cleared the parity drive and rebuilt the array. Haven't had a single problem with the entire setup since then.

The interface is a little wierd and isn't always completely intuitive but you won't really use it once you've set everything up unless something goes wrong or you need to add or remove something to the array.

If I just wanted a storage space, had a bunch of parts lying around, and didn't need the Windows environment I'd just use unRAID with an extra HDD for the write cache. In fact, this summer, if I get bored and want to pony up for a couple of smaller, refurbished HDDs off NewEgg I may build an unRAID box out of my old PC parts in the garage and just use it for backing up my network. Unless memory prices drop something fierce, then I may just add my backup drives to my FlexRAID array and add a ZFS box with FreeNAS.

Just an FYI, SnapRAID is really similar to FlexRAID without the drive pooling. If you are comfortable with something that isn't necessarily all GUI, it may be worth checking out.

 

[nk215]

It's all about how many failures you want to tolerate. Most home raids are only going to tolerate a single disk failure. So if you have two disks fail in a short time (before the rebuild) you are hosed.

Everything semi-important on my RAID5 is backed up (some data backed up daily, some 4x/week). The situation that I try to avoid is this:

After a long vacation, I came home with about 100GB of video and pictures of the kids/wife. I dumped the files onto the RAID5 for screening/sorting and general editing. If a single HD went bad between the time I dumped files and the scheduled backup time, I do not re-buid right away. I would backup the new files manually before rebuild. That way if another HD went sound during the process, I would still be fine with my data.

Another advantage of RAID5 is speed under parallel IO operation. Adobe Bridge can build thumbnail cache very fast while something else accessing the HD in the background.

I actually thinking about building a Freenas out of an old dell T110 (Xeon processor - basically, it's a i5 equivalent) with ECC memory and use that as a backup server instead of external HDs. The only thing that holds be back is power usage. My 24/7 computer already uses ~150 watts at idle (i7-950), another Xeon computer would be too much.

I also has UPS providing 30 mins of running time on the main 24/7 computer for better chance of keeping data intact.

 

[MPearl]

Interesting thread. I wanted some basic redundancy for my data and Audio / Video files. Nothing super fancy or ultra safe, just duplication for redundancy and a reasonable level of guaranteed up-time for my data. After a bit of research I ended up going with Drive Bender.

I bought a used PC, amped it up a bit and turned it into a file server. It has 11 drives. 2 Internal, 4 in a Mediasonic Drive Bay, and 5 externals (20+TBs) running DriveBender software. With DB I can set individual files, folders or whole drives to be duplicated. The duplication is instantaneous similar to RAID, and can be spread across multiple drives, or as in my situation I set them up as pools of two "mirrored" drives. Setup without duplication, it works as J.A.B.O.D. that can be added to as you need more space. In theory you could have 20+ disks in one big pool with just a few file that mattered to you duplicated, but I digress from the OPs question.

The reason I chose the software route and DB specifically is that the drives are kept in standard NFTS format. In a failure situation, the machine will use the duplicate until I add another drive. The beauty of the file format though, is that I can pull a drive, attach it to another computer and read it without issue. Especially easy with the external drives.

I like true hardware RAID in business situations, but for home use, I love the fact that I can take one drive out, attach it to a different machine and still have access to the data. No proprietary file format, no RAID config requiring hardware to decode. Very simple and very useful.

DB has a lot of advanced features such as S.M.A.R.T.integration, email alerts, drive merging, pool expansion, make physical, or logical drive letters, network shares etc. Need more space, add drives on the fly and expand the pool size. They can be different sizes and attachment types (internal, external, (E)SATA USB etc). You can even detach all the drives, attach them to a new machine, install the DB software and be up and running in under 30 minutes on a new server. Took a bit of time to fully understand, but works great. I have separate pools for Movies, TV Series, Audio and Data. The file server gives data access to my Laptops and other PCs, and the Audio and Video is served to my Media Devices (WD HUB, Live Plus, XBMC, Nexus Pad etc).

A very nice product for $18 on sale

Drive Bender Web Site/

Drive Bender Features


Of course true data backup would also have copies offsite or at least on a different machine, hopefully a good distance from the primary. For that, I use a timed script to copy important data across my network to a secondary computer in another room. Yes a total disaster would destroy all three copies, so the most import files are burnt to disc and left at a second location, but my movies and my audio don't need that kind of redundancy. As long as I have those duplicated so I don't have spend a month of weekends re-ripping all of them due to a drive failure, I feel pretty comfortable.

Good luck and get that data backed up. You will sleep better at night :thumbsup:

-Mpearl

 

[radhak]

Very timely thread and discussion for me - I've been thinking of ways to use my old desktop, and also ways of keeping backup/duplicates of my important data.

After reading all the above posts, the road taken by MPearl seems best suited for me - I'm only looking for an easy way of networking a bunch of disks to make a file server of sorts which can be the central repository for my data; and Drive Bender might be the answer! FlexRAID might have worked, but now I may not need to go that route.

As for hardware, would a Dell 8300 Pentium 4 that's running with 3GB of RAM and Win 7 (32bit) be enough for Drive Bender? How about for FlexRAID? It has enough bays to add a bunch of drives.

Also, will this be a wired network, or will the server work on my wireless network?

 

[smitbret]

I have never tried Drive Bender but it looks like a very similar product to FlexRAID. The biggest difference I can see is that Drive Bender uses Redundancy (think RAID 1) and FlexRAID uses TxRAID (think RAID 5 or 6). Either way, the system requirments will be determined by the overlying OS, so if the current configuration is good enough for your OS, it will be good enougeh for FlexRAID or Drive Bender.

 

[radhak]

I have never tried Drive Bender but it looks like a very similar product. The biggest difference I can see is that Drive Bender uses Redundancy (think RAID 1) and FlexRAID uses TxRAID (think RAID 5 or 6). Either way, the system requirments will be determined by the overlying OS, so if the current configuration is good enough for your OS, it will be good enough for FlexRAID or Drive Bender.

Excellent point, thanks!

 

[smitbret]

As far as wired vs. wireless, I always hardwire my NAS. Gigabit is cheap now so if you have a router that supports it and can run a wire, that would be 10x better than any wireless N connection. The new AC standard looks promising but getting into it cheaply will probably pre empt that as a possibility. You just won't want to do any large file transfers over it wireless N.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Definitly wire it. Wireless network should be on a restricted vlan anyway. WPA2 is safe, but so was WEP at one time and look how easy it is to hack now. Odds are no one will try to hack you but it's not a chance you want to take with your data.

 

[tehach]

I use FreeNAS in a small case, OS on a flash drive. PicoPSU pulls about 20-25 watts at idle. Been in service nearly 3 years, moved twice, no issues. Supports dynamic DNS, webserver, FTP...