Kodi + Windows Storage Spaces w/ parity or Raid5?
#16
You can always have more than one parity disk to improve your chances, and yeah, I agree with your approach. And yes, Flexraid might be a good option (even if I think the guy is a total dick). On a side note, my house was hit by lightning which started a fire in the roof cavity and blew out a whole lot of house wiring, a router and a couple of computer motherboards. All hard drives remained working.
Reply
#17
Just a warning form a Transparent RAID and RAID over File System customer and user.

A note for everyone going with Flexraid: the license is "locked" the the machine it is initial generated for.
For more information you can read this forum thread and this wiki page -Licensing: hardware changes and license transfer.

I cannot understand how i missed it!
Reply
#18
(2016-02-15, 17:35)NEOhidra Wrote: the license is "locked" the the machine it is initial generated for.

Yeah. In one fell swoop it went from free software (with no indication that anything was likely to change) to overpriced and locked to your hardware. One of the reasons I won't go back.
Reply
#19
(2016-02-14, 07:37)devsfan1830 Wrote:
(2016-02-14, 02:29)DJ_Izumi Wrote:
(2016-02-10, 23:18)devsfan1830 Wrote: I know the ideal protection would be mirroring but I think mirroring 10+TB would be impracticable.

Power supply blows out, burns out all hard drives.
OS for some reason or other corrupts the data on it's storage, the mirrored array will happy written the corruption to both drives as instructed.

Repeat after me, 'RAID Is Not A Backup'. Tongue

That all said, mirror or RAID5, they both go kaput if more than one drive fails. If you want more options, look at RAIDZ. but there's also the whole mater of 'Well, if it comes to it, I really can just 'aquire' it again.'

Oh for the love of... I am FULLY aware that RAID is not a backup. I don't WANT a true backup. As i said, backing up TERABYTES of movies and TV shows is not a priority nor is it really logical. I'm not storing critical data. For THAT data on my desktop I have it stored in 3 separate locations. One HDD in my desktop, one external HDD and a copy of it all in the cloud. So I do not need a lecture in proper data backup. All I am looking for is drive pooling and SLIGHTLY better failure protection than just having a JBOD. Parity would offer such protection. I know its not fail PROOF but far more failure resistant than just 4 drives sitting in a machine.

Plus, what are the realistic odds that a PSU failure would actually fry every component in the machine? If anything a power surge would cause that. Which is why my machines are on strong surge protectors.

:-)

I think if you change the original text to "I know the ideal redundancy would be mirroring but I think mirroring 10+TB would be impracticable", or to something else, people would't push the redundancy vs backup issue. It is a bit misleading... Just my .02 cents...
AFTV (non-rooted + Kodi)
WD My Book Live NAS
Reply
#20
(2016-02-12, 17:41)devsfan1830 Wrote:
(2016-02-12, 16:28)crazygambit Wrote: I've been using unraid for years and I think it exactly fits the bill of what you're looking for.

It has single parity like you want, which is great for a media server where losing data is annoying, but not catastrophic (it's not your family pictures there). In unraid if you lose 2 or more data disks at the same time you will only lose the data on those disks and not the entire array like on RAID 5 and other raid setups, which makes it a little less annoying.

But the best thing about it is that you can mix and match any drives and you still get their full capacity. The parity drive will always be the biggest. So if you have 3 4TB and 2 1TB drives you get 10TB of usable space. The more drives you have the less space percentage you "lose" to parity. My server supports up to 20 drives, but there's no need to go that far.

I know you said you don't want to buy a NAS, but you can use your spare parts to build it. I use an old motherboard I had lying around and as long as you don't need transcoding it's more than enough to run anything you need. I have an intel NUC running Kodi. The other approach is to use beefier hardware and run everything from the NAS via docker apps. I know many people run Kodi without issues that way I personally like to keep them separate.

(2016-02-12, 14:51)QLink Wrote: Take a look @ Drivebender http://www.division-m.com/drivebender/

I'm using it for years and i'm still happy with it.

The big advantage is you can duplicate whole drives or just single folders.
Really easy to setup and manage.


best greetz

I took a look at Drive Bender, but this jumped out at me:

Quote:Drive Bender uses file duplication (optional down to the folder level) as its primary means of file redundancy. This means that any files written to the pool, are written to two physical hard drives simultaneously. And unlike software based RAID solutions (i.e. Windows Storage Spaces), there is no performance hit when writing to the pool

So it's just mirroring the files? That means just like RAID 1 you need twice the space to have any level of redundancy, just what the OP is trying to move away from.

Right, i dont want or need anything resembling RAID 1 since it would halve my capacity for data that not impossible to replace eventually. So i just need parity really. Being able to read disks individually would help a ton since if there are any failures or i want to replace an individual disk i can do a direct transger with my external drive dock.

And when i said no NAS, i just meant not a totally separate system leaving me with two pcs in my living room. Im BASIACALLY using my existing hardware but just basing it in Windows since thats what I know. Id have my os on an onboard m.2 SSD, then plug drives into the 4sata ports. Id get a raid controller down the road if i need to expand to more drives. But id pool the drives with parity. I would use Windows Storage Spaces but i guess if a drive dies then it can rebuild the lost data but individual drives are unreadable outside the pool. So i guess i need something that i can port the pool to new hardware or OS clean installs. Also need something that can rebuild a lost drive AND leaves the data readable on individual drives so if i need to pull one that isnt failed but id like to replace it with a bigger drives i can do that and pull the files off with a drive dock.

I understand your reasoning for not wanting 2 boxes, but there are many advantages of doing it that way. I think it's wise to have your storage and your computing separate. Power consumption for one. You can keep a NAS going 24/7 and use very little power, plus up time is much greater. Since your NAS is not running Windows you can expect it to be up and running for weeks or months before needing to be rebooted. Windows machines need to reboot much more frequently. A crash on your Windows machine will mean having to run a parity check which is a big strain on the system.

I personally wouldn't want to keep a gaming GPU anywhere near my NAS drives. They already get pretty warm on my 5 in 3 cages in the summer, so I'm definitely not looking to add anymore heat inside that case.

That doesn't mean you can run basic stuff on your NAS though. Everything having to do with downloading and sorting date can be done there remotely and it works great.

I get it's more convenient to have everything in one box, so unraid is not for you, so I'm interested in what you end up using.
Reply
#21
Hmmmm. Can't remember the last time that a Windows machine crashed on me. I like Microsoft only marginally more than I like Apple (which is not at all), so I don't want to get in a holy war over it. I had a Hp Microserver running Windows 7 and DriveBender- doing what he wants to do basically- until it was killed by lightning. Very stable.

If he goes with unraid he's going to have to buy at least one new hard drive so he can build his unraid box, copy one drive across, take that drive over to his unraid box and add it to the pool (is that possible?) and repeat for each drive in his new pool. He's already got a box and an OS and drives. All he has to do is create a pool by installing one piece of software. I know what I'd rather do.
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
Kodi + Windows Storage Spaces w/ parity or Raid5?0