[DJ_Izumi]

I'm asking for advice here on how to upgrade my current media storage solution to something that offers some redundancy. My current setup is as follows:

A Windows 7 Pro machine running Drive Bender to merge 5 HDDs into a single 21TB storage array. This machine also runs all of my services, transmission, MySQL, sickbeard, couchpotato, and everything else. It's also ALSO a Kodi machine of itself. It's in my bedroom and serves as the bedroom machine while also serving services and data to the living room Kodi machine and my workstation. Drive bender by default offers zero redundancy unless I enable 1:1 redundancy, which would double the storage needed. I lost one of my 3TB Seagates and it took 1-1.5TB or so worth of files with it. Being media this was far from the end of the world but it was also a pain in the butt. I'm also increasingly concerned about failures as the next drive I intend to add to my pool would be an 8TB drive and that's a LOT of data to lose if one of those conks out.

So I'd like to know if there's an expandable, windows based redundant storage solution I could look into. Something with snapshots would be fine because losing 1-3 days worth of new media is only a simple task of getting it back again. It's another thing to lose files I added months or years ago. And I'm interested in opinions on how well these work.

I've used NAS4Free machines at work, and while that's great for three disk redundancy storage of visual effects productions for broadcast television, it's NOT really the best solution for my personal media hoard at home. Not to mention, expanding a ZFS pool is not trivial.

So, suggestions?

[aaronb]

Flexraid and Snapraid. I use Flexraid, you can use disks of any size, and for redundancy you need at least one parity drive that is as big as the biggest drive in the pool. Can add more drives at any time provided it is <= the size of the parity drive. There is a snapshot or live version of the software

[DJ_Izumi]

Flexraid and Snapraid. I use Flexraid, you can use disks of any size, and for redundancy you need at least one parity drive that is as big as the biggest drive in the pool. Can add more drives at any time provided it is <= the size of the parity drive. There is a snapshot or live version of the software

For Flexraid, what's the process for upgrading/migrating the parity drive? Like, if you had 5x4TB, and you wanted to add an 8TB, would you just have to add 2x8TB, one to be the new parity drive and the other for the 8TB of actual storage?

[aaronb]

You'd have to add the 8TB as a parity drive and then rebuild the parity

[DJ_Izumi]

You'd have to add the 8TB as a parity drive and then rebuild the parity

This is trivial however, aside from time consumed to do the job, right? Is the storage accessible while the new parity is being generated? How about removing/retiring older/smaller drives?

[aaronb]

This is trivial however, aside from time consumed to do the job, right? Is the storage accessible while the new parity is being generated? How about removing/retiring older/smaller drives?

Correct, it's a trivial operation, but depending on the amount of data and the speed of the drives it can take a while to regenerate parity. I think (not positive) the storage is still accessible during this time, but I've always taken my array offline when I do it to let it calculate without a bunch of people accessing the data and slowing things down.

For removing old drives you can just move the data to a different disk in the array and then remove the old disk and update the parity (wouldn't take as long as a full rebuild). A nice thing about Flexraid is the disks can be read outside of the array, just plain old NTFS disks

[smitopher]

I'm asking for advice here on how to upgrade my current media storage solution to something that offers some redundancy. My current setup is as follows:

A Windows 7 Pro machine running Drive Bender to merge 5 HDDs into a single 21TB storage array. This machine also runs all of my services, transmission, MySQL, sickbeard, couchpotato, and everything else. It's also ALSO a Kodi machine of itself. It's in my bedroom and serves as the bedroom machine while also serving services and data to the living room Kodi machine and my workstation. Drive bender by default offers zero redundancy unless I enable 1:1 redundancy, which would double the storage needed. I lost one of my 3TB Seagates and it took 1-1.5TB or so worth of files with it. Being media this was far from the end of the world but it was also a pain in the butt. I'm also increasingly concerned about failures as the next drive I intend to add to my pool would be an 8TB drive and that's a LOT of data to lose if one of those conks out.

So I'd like to know if there's an expandable, windows based redundant storage solution I could look into. Something with snapshots would be fine because losing 1-3 days worth of new media is only a simple task of getting it back again. It's another thing to lose files I added months or years ago. And I'm interested in opinions on how well these work.

I've used NAS4Free machines at work, and while that's great for three disk redundancy storage of visual effects productions for broadcast television, it's NOT really the best solution for my personal media hoard at home. Not to mention, expanding a ZFS pool is not trivial.

So, suggestions?

Upgrade to windows 10
Implement windows storage spaces http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windo...aces-pools
choose your level of parity

Can get more windows based than that.

It ticks all of your boxes.

Other than windows just generally sucking a**

[joazito]

Don't implement Windows Storage spaces, it's crap. I say this as someone who used it for a few months before taking it all out and looking for something else. Why? Because windows would tell me I still had a few TB left but then out of the blue it would say I need to add more drives to the pool. Gee, thanks windows, I'm so glad you hide fancy details like TRUE FREE SPACE LEFT from the stupid end user like me. When this happened I could no longer write to the pool, and reading also slowed down to a crawl. It sucked.

Use StableBit's DrivePool. It's not free but it just works. Actually, it does a lot more than "just working": you can define the redundancy down to folder level, you can take out a drive from the pool and it's readable without any software installed, ... I'm sure there's more but that should suffice. I love it.

[ProsjektX]

can recommend FlexRaid as many others here as well. Been running FlexRaid-F for many years with storage pooling and it's working nicely. Even did a recovery. the nice thing is that you can have existing data on the disk, not as Windows or other solutions.

[DJ_Izumi]

So I think what I'll do is migrate to FlexRAID once my current setup runs out of storage. The migration from DriveBender to FlexRAID might be interesting. DriveBender also just uses boring NTFS on the drives, though the data is in a special subfolder on each drive and there's medadata. But you can get in there and copy your files out of the slightly messy file structure. So I guess I'll build a FlexRAID setup with 2x8TB drives, then copy data from one DriveBender drive at a time, once a drive is empty, add it to the FlexRAID array instead?

[voochi]

Flexraid has several different products, and the dev seems to get kind of sidetracked with all these different directions and projects (eg NZFS).

So before you decide to use Flexraid, take a look at the different options. The simplest type (Raid-F) is just a fancier version of Snapraid, there is no 'migration' necessary, you can use populated drives, just add a parity drive and compute the parity data.

Since you already have Drivebender, I would take a look at Snapraid first. You can try it out very easily with a few old HDDs or even flash drives.