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[Hilton]

Hi All

By all, I mean the usual suspects that love to talk about storage and RAID and you know who you are!  

I just read most of the recent threads here about RAID, Storage Pools, ReFS, btrfs etc.

I spent 10 years in enterprise storage earlier in my IT career from about 95 to 2005, and have always had a leaning towards hardware RAID.
Things have changed....

I really like what I've read about FlexRaid RAID-F for HTPC use, it sounds almost perfect and has now stabilised but I wanted to throw a few questions in the pot.

The only down-side I see is the limit of single drive speed, but a 1Gbit network maxes out at about the 1 drive speed anyway so I guess the loss of stripped performance means nothing for HTPC media files.

I looked into Windows Managed Storage Spaces which has come a long way, but still feel like FlexRaid will allow me to expand more easily, only worry about rebuilding single drives, and simplify my backup.

I'd like to use ReFS FileSystem for the media drives to have better filesystem resilience.
I'd like to use RAID-F with a 4:1 ratio of data drives to parity.
I'd like to pool the drives but I'm not sure If I should have multiple pools or just a single pool for performance.
I'd like to use RAID-F for my backup drives in a 8:1 data/parity ratio backup  pool and also formatted with ReFS Filesystem.
Acronis Backup 11.5 supports ReFS so I'll still be using file based backup to the RAID-F Backup Pool.
I have multiple hardware RAID 10 boxes currently and the backups are on 4TB drives so I can reset the Hardware RAID to JBOD and re-lay the data from backups.

The motivation for this is my Hardware RAID is almost full, it's made up of WD Greens which are nice and quiet, however they are getting on at 2-3 years old and I'm getting paranoid.

I'll still use hardware raid 0 for my ripping workstation in my office because I love fast reads and writes.
(4x 120GB SSD RAID 0 and another external e-sata scratch disk box with 4 x 1TB WD Blacks in RAID 0)
I often rip in batches so I rip to the SSDs and have a script that then copies over to the estata box as each rip finishes. When Im finished I then plug the esata RAID box directly into the HTPC to copy the files across so I'm not flooding the network for hours on end.

Questions:
Is there a flaw in my logic or anything I should be aware of?

Anything else you recommend I consider in re-laying the data out?
 

[jmone]

Hi Hiltonk

I've got 2 x 30TB+ Pools, the "main" one that I use to serve content from is on my Win 8.1 Box that rund 24x7 and one that I on my Win Serv 2012 R2 Box is the "backup" that I use FreeFileSync to preview changes before I push to it.  I use:
- ReFS (no more CHKDSK for me!)
- Drive Bender to mount all the drives as one Pool (mix of drive sizes, speeds and type) though this can be unnecessary as MC abstracts the drives anyway but it does make behind the scene mgt easier.

I agree on the speed of drives maxing gigabit.  Both the PC's I have the pools on have a teamed dual nic to a decent switch, but all the clients pull over std gigabit or WiFi so raw performance of the pool is not the limiting factor.  I now avoid RAID like the plague, it is not a Backup but Uptime facilitator. 

I just got a couple of 8TB Seagates and I'm swaping one into the pool as we speak and keeping the other as a cold spare as with 20 odd drives in use one is sure to fail at some point.  I also run HD Sentential on both PC's to monitor disk health.

Thanks
Nathan

[jmone]

I'd avoid Windows Managed Storage Spaces at this time as there are issues serving DVD rips etc from it.

...also another thing with Drive Bender (that I've not tried), is you can select a drive (eg SDD) as a landing zone for fast writes and they are then moved to the rest of the pool

[jmone]

Here is a pic of my pool on my Back Up Server.  It was on WHS2011 and I've upgraded to Win Server 2012 R2 and the pool is portable across Win platforms.  I'm currently in the process of adding a new drive (ReFS) and removing an old (NTFS) and as you can see I'm getting great throughput on large files (drops off as file sizes drop).

[Hilton]

....

I now avoid RAID like the plague, it is not a Backup but Uptime facilitator. 

Thanks
Nathan

Thanks Nathan appreciate the input.

RAID has always been about performance and uptime for me, I've always backed up.
In the context of a media server I now think RAID actually brings more complications than it solves as you get into larger libraries and trying to protect them from multiple drive failures.

I worked for both EMC and NetApp and have seen too many drive failures even in million dollar enterprise kit. Once had a customer with double parity loose data due to a double drive failure from an electrical fault on a backplane and then a drive failure during rebuild.  The worst that can happen usually does happen at some point!

[jmone]

I bit the bullet and went the second pool for backup after losing everything on a RAID-5 Setup when I changed controllers.  Had to re-rip all my BD.  Well to be fair, it did not lose anything, just mixed up all the sectors so what looked like a video file would have audio or pics mixed in.  While progs like DB are not perfect at least they just abstract physical drives and write normal files and don't care about HDD size, type or even connection type.  Really liking ReFS, and I wonder why MS is not pushing it out with Win 10.