[mockranouse]

I've only been using xbmc for about 3 months now and I love it. I currently am using the zotac zboxhd nd01 as my main HTPC and I have one 2TB external HDD and one 1TB external HDD attached via USB to the zotac. I've been looking into setting up a centralized home media server because I want to set up another HTPC in another room. I've been reading as much as I can about it for a couple weeks, but I still am a little confused about the RAID or unRAID configurations.

My main question is what are the advantages of using, say an unRAID NAS configuration over using a windows 7 box with network shares. The only thing I can think of is that power consumption might be lower with the unRAID setup. I'm mostly confused about the way in which RAID handles data. From what I've read, in certain configurations, if one drive fails then all the data is lost, so I see no advantage of using any kind of RAID configuration over windows 7 shares because if one of the network drive fails then just the data on that drive is lost, unless I'm mistaken on that point.

I'm sorry if this sounds a little newbish, but I read for hours upon hours and I still haven't found anything that discusses the pros and cons of windows over RAID. Can anyone point me to some resources that may clear up my confusion?

Thanks,
Dave

[Kirky99]

FlexRAID works along with Win7 to provide some redundency, pooling of drive (only expose one share to the network) etc. I've been using it for over a year with great results. chose that route since I want my NAS doing more than just serving files. I use it to rip movies, mumble server, it's running my VM machines, TV server, etc. I found all that easier to do within Windows.

I use the SnapShot RAID setup in FlexRAID. The data doesn't change all that often to incur the cost of real time raid. I still get parity on my files for recovery. It's the best of both worlds IMHO.

[jackh]

Windows = bloated. Designed for desktop usage. Plus sharing folders from Windows is inefficient and slow. Plus the $$$. Plus, well, it's Windows... ('nuff said)

RAID or any NAS implementation = Designed for data storage and sharing. RAID (redundant array of independent disks) by definition (see here) has the ability of not losing your data if a drive fails. You could use unRAID, FreeNAS, hardware-based RAID cards, OS-based RAID support...

But you don't need to use RAID. Like me, I have only 1 disk with media being shared over my home network. I share just the media, which I do not consider valuable enough -yet- to be hosted in a RAID array. I share it in a very easy way: from an old Linux computer running Samba and NFS servers. VERY simple to set up. And it's all freeware

[dtviewer]

I've only been using xbmc for about 3 months now and I love it. I currently am using the zotac zboxhd nd01 as my main HTPC and I have one 2TB external HDD and one 1TB external HDD attached via USB to the zotac. I've been looking into setting up a centralized home media server because I want to set up another HTPC in another room. I've been reading as much as I can about it for a couple weeks, but I still am a little confused about the RAID or unRAID configurations.

My main question is what are the advantages of using, say an unRAID NAS configuration over using a windows 7 box with network shares. The only thing I can think of is that power consumption might be lower with the unRAID setup. I'm mostly confused about the way in which RAID handles data. From what I've read, in certain configurations, if one drive fails then all the data is lost, so I see no advantage of using any kind of RAID configuration over windows 7 shares because if one of the network drive fails then just the data on that drive is lost, unless I'm mistaken on that point.

I'm sorry if this sounds a little newbish, but I read for hours upon hours and I still haven't found anything that discusses the pros and cons of windows over RAID. Can anyone point me to some resources that may clear up my confusion?

Thanks,
Dave

This isnt true at all. With Unraid or Raid losing one drive will never result in all the drives data being hosed.


The whole idea behind Unraid or Raid is to protect you against a drive failure.
With Unraid if a drive fails then all you do is replace that failed drive with another and the lost information is rebuilt from the parity drive.
As another poster pointed out Flexraid running on top of Windows 7 is another option.

As far as just using Windows 7 alone, many do that but if you have a drive fail (which will happen eventually) all that info is gone...no way to get it back.

Only you can decide if your media is valuable enough to you to have some sort of protection for it.
In my case, once I went past a single drive of media I decided that it was worth exploring some sort of back up.

[mockranouse]

Well, I guess I may have read something wrong. I read a lot about RAID5, RAID6, RAID0, and RAID10 and they all seemed to work differently and I thought with something like RAID0 that if one drive failed then all the data was lost. So, if I'm understanding this a little better and correct me if I'm wrong, if I set up an unRAID system with 3 2TB HDDs, then one of those drives will be used as the parity drive to rebuild any failed drives, so the parity drive would not be usable storage??

[dtviewer]

Well, I guess I may have read something wrong. I read a lot about RAID5, RAID6, RAID0, and RAID10 and they all seemed to work differently and I thought with something like RAID0 that if one drive failed then all the data was lost. So, if I'm understanding this a little better and correct me if I'm wrong, if I set up an unRAID system with 3 2TB HDDs, then one of those drives will be used as the parity drive to rebuild any failed drives, so the parity drive would not be usable storage??

Exactly.

When I had a Windows home server set up it used redundancy for protection.
4 2tb drives would mean 4tb for usable storage and 4tb for a back up.
With Unraid 4 2tb drives would mean 6tb storage, and one 2tb drive for parity.

Thats one of the main reasons I went unraid....1 parity drive for as many drives of storage I wanted...3...10...20...still only one parity drive needed.

[saitoh183]

Exactly.

When I had a Windows home server set up it used redundancy for protection.
4 2tb drives would mean 4tb for usable storage and 4tb for a back up.
With Unraid 4 2tb drives would mean 6tb storage, and one 2tb drive for parity.

Thats one of the main reasons I went unraid....1 parity drive for as many drives of storage I wanted...3...10...20...still only one parity drive needed.

You should check out Flexraid

[mockranouse]

Well, I think I'm just gonna dive in and go with the unRAID setup. If I do go with the unRAID basic, is the parity drive included in the three drives? So if I had 3 2TBs, I could only get 4TB of usable storage? Or is it 3 usable drives? Thanks again guys, you've been extremely helpful.

[thethirdnut]

Lotsa good info on wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels ...for basic information that is.

[steeve23]

Hi,
I've been looking at going down the RAID (of some flavour) route, but don't know if its for me, as I did read that RAID in itself should not be considered a backup, it provides redundancy if a drive fails etc, but you should still have a separate backup of the data.

Only asking the question, not saying the above is correct?

For me, I think about going for no RAID, but backing up the data separately, as I'm not worried about a bit of downtime to restore a backup.

Thoughts?

Steve

[Kirky99]

Parity drive(s) are not storage. They are necessary, and need to be the largest capacity drive on the box in order to be able to protect the contents of the rest. I'm not sure how unRaid licensing works.

FlexRAID allows multiple parity drives (I bet unRaid does as well), so it's possible, if configured that way to recover from multiple drive failures at the same time.

It is true, RAID shouldn't be considered a backup, but it's better than nothing IMHO. There are some other benefits to different RAID solutions. Usually centered around performance.

[thethirdnut]

@steeve23

Valid points - RE: RAID not a backup. However, if as with a lot of people you're going to venture into the multiple TB's range it's going to be very costly to have two setups.

In my case what I plan for the summer is a FreeBSD 9 + ZFS system using multiple raidz2 vdev's (2 parity disks for each array) within a zpool.

That means for each 'segment' of the larger zpool more than 2 disks will have to fail for data loss.

This of course won't do sh*t if the house burns down or something god awful happens to the server, but it's a tradeoff I'll consider since creating two setups of approx 14 TB useable space is very expensive...especially post Oct 2011.

[steeve23]

This of course won't do sh*t if the house burns down or something god awful happens to the server, but it's a tradeoff I'll consider since creating two setups of approx 14 TB useable space is very expensive...especially post Oct 2011.

Thats what I was thinking, that having a RAID array then having to back the whole thing up would take a hell of a lot of space for the type of files (ie video) that people here are using. I like the idea of a offsite backup, but the trade off of storage space, performance & redundancy offered by RAID is tempting.

Maybe I'll have to think about RAID and offsite only the crucial files, after-all I can always rebuy the DVD or BR, but can't do the same for my holiday snaps or personal documents.

Thanks Guys for the advice.

Steve

[GavinCampbell]

Well, I guess I may have read something wrong. I read a lot about RAID5, RAID6, RAID0, and RAID10 and they all seemed to work differently and I thought with something like RAID0 that if one drive failed then all the data was lost. So, if I'm understanding this a little better and correct me if I'm wrong, if I set up an unRAID system with 3 2TB HDDs, then one of those drives will be used as the parity drive to rebuild any failed drives, so the parity drive would not be usable storage??

Not all raid is meant for data protection. Raid 0 I believe is striping and meant more for performance. If you lose one drive it is all gone.

Raid 1 is mirroring and if you lose one then all the data is on the other and you are fine.

Raid 5 is parity. If you lose one then you can rebuild the data that was on that one drive from data on the other drives.

You get the idea. Mainly when people talk about data protection and Raid I think they are referring to 1 or 5.

[dtviewer]

Hi,
I've been looking at going down the RAID (of some flavour) route, but don't know if its for me, as I did read that RAID in itself should not be considered a backup, it provides redundancy if a drive fails etc, but you should still have a separate backup of the data.

Only asking the question, not saying the above is correct?

For me, I think about going for no RAID, but backing up the data separately, as I'm not worried about a bit of downtime to restore a backup.

Thoughts?

Steve

You are right in that Unraid, Flexraid, Raid, etc are not technically a back-up.
With any of those solutions you can still have data loss by means of accidentel erasure or a house fire, a hurricane, or many other disasters.
If any of the above are a huge worry then there are other, usually much more expensive options.
You can use a off site back up cloud type service to copy all your data to....of course once you get to 10 or more TB's it will get extremely expensive plus probably ridiculouslly slow to do.
You can store 1 to 1 copies of all your media in a safety deposit box...then you are looking at double the Hard Drives plus the hassle of actually bringing your back ups to the second location.

If there is a hurricane or my house burns down, my collection of ripped movies is going to be my last worry. Hopefully, Ill never experience a disaster like that.
But a hard drive failure is inevitable. They do die, its not a question of IF, but when. So for me, a fairly simple, fairly inexpensive option such as UnRaid fit the bill perfectly.
I built my server for under $250 dollars plus the cost of drives.
Its quiet, reliable, and out of the way. It does what its supposed to and I havent touched it in probably a year. It stores my movies, TV Shows, music and photos and serves them to multiple xbmc boxes around the house. (I do keep my photos on my UnRaid and a copy on my home pc...those are more important to me than my movies.)

In the end only YOU can decide how much redundancy is appropriate for what you want to protect, and what cost and (in)conveinence is worth it to you.