RAID Question

[zubbs1]

I am considering a RAID setup. I have a large media collection that will continue to grow.

The essence of my question is can a SATA port multiplier work with the motherboard sata ports to then use FREE NAS or something similar to create a RAID 1 array with ZFS?

I would like to get my array to offer approximately 10TB of actual storage space.

Any advice on reaching this goal would be greatly appreciated.

 

[jackd1839]

Build a SAN that provide higher I/O capabilities.

 

[Emulex]

It seems like you do not understand the benefits of ZFS and/or RAID basics. as building a raid-1 array with ZFS is kind of wasteful!

I'd suggest sticking to JBOD and copying your data to spare drives until you fully understand the responsibility of raid.

IE not losing power ever, not crashing, network topology.

 

[CiPHER]

@zubbs1: SATA port multipliers will work fine under FreeNAS and other BSD/Linux operating systems. Not all controllers support port multipliers; but your onboard chipset SATA controller should support it. Note that it is not the best way to connect many disks. But remember you can combine ports from your chipset with an addon controller like IBM M1015 (flashed to IT). This is often done by ZFS users. Why RAID1 and not RAID-Z? Have you read up on ZFS? Could you tell us a little bit about what you're hoping to accomplish?

@jackd1839: why a SAN protocol? You would lose a lot of protection from ZFS and it won't be faster to any degree. Using a NAS protocol like CIFS or AFP means you store your files directly on ZFS instead of using a legacy filesystem in between. For home users, using a SAN-protocol like iSCSI has a lot of disadvantages over a regular NAS setup.

@Emulex: why would building a mirror with ZFS be wasteful? It could be wasteful with many disks; but that depends on the situation. ZFS scales better with RAID1 than any RAID engine i've ever benchmarked; reads are almost as fast as RAID0 for both sequential and random IOps. Writes are decently fast with multiple vdevs.

"understand the responsibility of raid" ... ehm.. technology is meant to relieve you of chores and worries; not add to it. ZFS is a perfect "store and forget" platform, where ZFS will make sure your data is protected while you don't have to do any maintenance. So sit back and let the technology do its work; that is what i like.

 

[zubbs1]

@zubbs1: SATA port multipliers will work fine under FreeNAS and other BSD/Linux operating systems. Not all controllers support port multipliers; but your onboard chipset SATA controller should support it. Note that it is not the best way to connect many disks. But remember you can combine ports from your chipset with an addon controller like IBM M1015 (flashed to IT). This is often done by ZFS users. Why RAID1 and not RAID-Z? Have you read up on ZFS? Could you tell us a little bit about what you're hoping to accomplish?

Basic specs of a nas box I was thinking to build:

Motherboard - ASUS H87I-PLUS LGA 1150 Intel H87

Case - NZXT Source 220 CA-SO220-01 Black Steel

Power Supply - Thermaltake TR2 W0070 430W ATX12V v2.3 Power Supply

CPU -Intel Celeron G1820 Haswell Dual-Core 2.7GHz LGA 1150 54W Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics BX80646G1820

Memory -Mushkin Enhanced 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model 996573

Operating System Drive - Not sure specifically, SSD I presume? Recommendations?

Hard drives - WD red not sure yet on total number or indvidual size per drive.


The motherboard has 6 sata ports leaving 5 for the hard disk pool. I just wanted to make sure that was enough to get my usable storage space up to 10TB. If it can, then I have no need at this time for any port multiplying.



I admit my understanding of raid and ZFS is limited. My basic goal is to get all my media on one disk pool that has some level of redundancy against loss.
My media collection is not a 10/10 on a 'cannot lose' scale, more like a 5 or 6. My most critical data i have saved over several hard drives, flash drives and dvds, so I'm not worried about absolutely no loss. With that in mind, I also don't want to spend a fortune in hard drives for half the actual storage.
Hopefully that gives you a better idea of my needs. I also am not in a hurry to build this, so it can be a work in progress and be piece meal as long as I have a framework to follow.

 

[hasu]

Message deleted because it was irrelevant to OP's question.

Following thread has a lot more information about building a NAS

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2424188

 

[bigi]

Get 3ware 9650 with 8 ports and battery backup (BBU)

Get 8 Hitachi HDDs. Build RAID6. Don't do RAID5. Your system will tollerate 2HDD failures.

Use OS of choice. 3ware cards can work in Linux/Windows very well.

Done.

 

[Emulex]

3ware cards are just LSI megaraid controllers with different firmware on them!

 

[hasu]

3ware cards are just LSI megaraid controllers with different firmware on them!

It is very hard to find a good inexpensive raid card. Can you link one from Newegg?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I am considering a RAID setup. I have a large media collection that will continue to grow.

Okay.

The essence of my question is can a SATA port multiplier work with the motherboard sata ports to then use FREE NAS or something similar to create a RAID 1 array with ZFS?

Last I checked, not all motherboard SATA ports supported port multipliers, so... maybe? I've had bad luck with them, though, and would recommend using a PCI-E add-in card(s) to get the additional SATA ports you need.

I would like to get my array to offer approximately 10TB of actual storage space.

Well, you're not going to want to do that with RAID-1 (Mirroring.) Since you'd need >20 TB of HDs. (Double everything.)

I'd probably put 5 3TB drives in a RAID-Z1 (or 6 drives in a RAID-Z2) which would give you the usable space of 4 drives, and use Crashplan for backups.

 

[smitbret]

Okay.



Last I checked, not all motherboard SATA ports supported port multipliers, so... maybe? I've had bad luck with them, though, and would recommend using a PCI-E add-in card(s) to get the additional SATA ports you need.



Well, you're not going to want to do that with RAID-1 (Mirroring.) Since you'd need >20 TB of HDs. (Double everything.)

I'd probably put 5 3TB drives in a RAID-Z1 (or 6 drives in a RAID-Z2) which would give you the usable space of 4 drives, and use Crashplan for backups.

I would agree.

With parity systems available like RAID 6 and RAID-Z2 I can't figure out why RAID 1 is still as popular as it is. I've got to think that the difference in data protection between RAID 6 and RAID 1 is next to nothing for your average home user.

 

[Emulex]

I would check out lsi megaraid 9260-4i, 9260-8i,9285-8i,9271-8i on ebay . there are a lot of oem versions like the IBM M5014,M5015 that work just as well for megaraid goodness!

Forums like servethehome.com have better deals on serious raid/ssd storage deals!

 

[Essence_of_War]

With parity systems available like RAID 6 and RAID-Z2 I can't figure out why RAID 1 is still as popular as it is. I've got to think that the difference in data protection between RAID 6 and RAID 1 is next to nothing for your average home user.

Mirror rebuilds are MUCH faster. Replacing two drives in a mirror with rebuilds will let you expand capacity MUCH faster than replacing each disk in a raidz2 and doing a parity rebuild after each replacement.

In ZFS, since data is striped across all vdevs, having more mirrored vdev's can offer better performance than fewer raidz2 vdevs.

 

[smitbret]

Mirror rebuilds are MUCH faster. Replacing two drives in a mirror with rebuilds will let you expand capacity MUCH faster than replacing each disk in a raidz2 and doing a parity rebuild after each replacement.

In ZFS, since data is striped across all vdevs, having more mirrored vdev's can offer better performance than fewer raidz2 vdevs.

I suppose, but how often do either of those situations factor into home use and is it really worth the added expense of a mirrored array?

 

[gea]

I would agree.

With parity systems available like RAID 6 and RAID-Z2 I can't figure out why RAID 1 is still as popular as it is. I've got to think that the difference in data protection between RAID 6 and RAID 1 is next to nothing for your average home user.

It depends.
Features of single Raid-Z2/ Raid-6 array
- Allows a double disk failure per vdev/raid
- Sequential read/write performance = n x datadisks
- IO performance = 1 x disk
(does not scale with number of disks but vdevs/raid-arrays)

Features of a single Raid-1/ ZFS mirror
- Allows a single disk failure
- Sequential read performance = 2 x single disk
- Sequential write performance = 1 x single disk
- read iops = 2 x disk
- write iops = 1 x disk
- scale with number of mirrors

Whenever you need high iops: use multiple mirrors (raid-10 alike).
With a given number of disks you can reach best iops values with mirrors.
example: databases, VM datastore, otherwise prefer ZFS Z2 or Z3 or Raid-6

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I suppose, but how often do either of those situations factor into home use and is it really worth the added expense of a mirrored array?

They don't, really, IMO. But ultimately, that's subjective.

Some tiered storage systems use RAID10 as a write buffer for a larger RAID5/6 array.

 

[Essence_of_War]

I suppose, but how often do either of those situations factor into home use and is it really worth the added expense of a mirrored array?

I don't know, it's really totally dependent on the home user. Conditioned on being the kind of person who needs a home server for storage, and caring enough to roll their own, I think it's certainly worth considering.

 

[Rowland]

- Do you need just to backup these 10TB of data or you need access to it from time to time (something as data you work with daily or something)?
- Have you considered moving that data to a cloud?
- Do you need performance or reliability (or mix of both)?
- What would happen if you loose some (or all) of your data?
- What's your budget for this?

 

[hasu]

- Have you considered moving that data to a cloud?

How would you move 10TB of data to cloud?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

How would you move 10TB of data to cloud?

The same way you move 10MB of data to the cloud. It just takes about a million times longer.

 

[Rowland]

Well, there are several options:

1. Send your drives to Amazon S3 for data import
(Amazon allows you to send them drives and they will import the data for you)
http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/
http://www.online-tech-tips.com/com...to-amazon-s3-quickly-using-aws-import-export/

2. Get a cheap colocation box (with 1GBPS port) attach your drives and upload from it. You could also access this computer via remote desktop so you would be able to work on it like that you're sitting at that computer in the meantime...

3. Upload using your ISP (can be really slow depending on your connection speed)

 

[bigi]

3ware cards are just LSI megaraid controllers with different firmware on them!

Wrong. 3ware as company did very well before LSI acquired them.

The 9650 8 port model is a very good card. It's been running constantly in my rigs for over 5 years.

Currently those can be purchased for less than $100.

I paid $420 for my card when new.

3ware 9650 are not LSI but pure good 3ware models.

 

[Emulex]

The current generation 3ware 9750 is just an LSI megaraid controller however. Current as in for-sale new today!