Looking for storage parity suggestions
#1
I've been using DriveBender for some years now, which only pools drives but offers no parity or redundancy, other than allowing file duplication for 1:1 redundancy, but nothing more efficient that that. My film school projects and important stuff are in redundant folders but all media is unprotected. This past weekend a 5TB drive went sideways, I rushed out and got an 8TB to replace it and was able to remove the 5TB from the pool, emptying it of data, without any loss. But now that I'm approaching 20TB, this is starting to seem stupid. I'd been considering parity for some time and when I got the replacement 8TB drive I also got a second one which is still unused, which I could use for some parity options.

...So what should I use? I'm looking for single disk failure protection with the ability to add more drives as needed. Adding additional parity drives to increase protection if I want would also be nice. My server runs Windows 10 Professional so it must run windows. In the event of critical failure, I'd like to be able to see 'files' on any drive that gets forcefully removed or that survives a large scale failure as I get with DriveBender.

FlexRAID? SnapRAID? UnRAID? I'm not sure, I've tried reading their sites but they seem to offer more 'marketing bullshit' than 'useful technical information on use cases and scenarios'. So which way should I look at going?
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#2
I've been using Flexraid for about 4 years and I'm pretty happy with it. When I built my new server a year or two ago I played around with Snapraid for a bit and it worked well, but I had the Flexraid license so I stuck with it.

It will pool all of your disks and offer parity protection. You can have multiple parity disks to allow for more than one disk failure. I also like that you can start with disks that already have data on them rather than starting from scratch. And the disks are readable like any normal disk, so you can remove them from the pool and get data, and if I decide to not use Flexraid in the future there's no issues with my data being locked in. And you can add new disks anytime, of any size, as long as it's the same size or smaller than your parity disk. I don't use the real-time parity since my server mainly just stores media. The snapshot parity is enough for me, it updates every morning at 4am. I get an email when it completes, if I add say 20gb in a day the update will take 10-20 minutes, on lighter days it's just a minute or so.

The setup is not the simplest and most intuitive, the interface could certainly benefit from a refresh and some simplification, but for just setting up a basic pool of a bunch of disks it is pretty easy and you don't need to to worry about any of the advanced options.

Probably the biggest reason I use it (outside of inertia since I picked it years ago) is that it just runs on top of Windows, and I use Win7 Pro for my server for familiarity.

If you have a Linux server Snapraid works well too, though it's more about parity and not disk pooling. There are a couple of pooling solutions that will work with Snapraid, when I was considering it I found a bunch of useful info here: http://zackreed.me/articles
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#3
Unraid all the way for me, real time parity, dual parity, robust VM manager, awesome docker support with hundreds of unraid specific containers, etc.

Plus, unraid was specifically designed for media storage
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#4
Unraid all the way for me too. I've just finished building a new server, and I think unraid is the best option.

I looked at freenas, rockstor, openmediavault but none came close to what unraid can offer.
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#5
(2016-06-25, 05:13)aaronb Wrote: It will pool all of your disks and offer parity protection. You can have multiple parity disks to allow for more than one disk failure. I also like that you can start with disks that already have data on them rather than starting from scratch. And the disks are readable like any normal disk, so you can remove them from the pool and get data, and if I decide to not use Flexraid in the future there's no issues with my data being locked in. And you can add new disks anytime, of any size, as long as it's the same size or smaller than your parity disk. I don't use the real-time parity since my server mainly just stores media. The snapshot parity is enough for me, it updates every morning at 4am. I get an email when it completes, if I add say 20gb in a day the update will take 10-20 minutes, on lighter days it's just a minute or so.

I like that I could add n drives that already have data on them. My DriveBender drives could be ejected with their data, the 'normal folders' are buried in deeper on the DriveBender folder structure, but I could just move all the files 'up' to be in their 'normal folders' and it'd make migration easier.

Is the FlexRAID accessible when generating it's first parity data? I'd be dumping in 18TB or so of data on the first go, I realize this could take DAYS, will I be able to get my server to serve data to my Kodi machines or is it going to sit useless as it generates parity data?
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#6
(2016-06-24, 03:50)DJ_Izumi Wrote: FlexRAID? SnapRAID? UnRAID? I'm not sure, I've tried reading their sites but they seem to offer more 'marketing bullshit' than 'useful technical information on use cases and scenarios'.
Have you seen http://www.snapraid.it/compare ?
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#7
(2016-06-25, 13:08)DJ_Izumi Wrote: I like that I could add n drives that already have data on them. My DriveBender drives could be ejected with their data, the 'normal folders' are buried in deeper on the DriveBender folder structure, but I could just move all the files 'up' to be in their 'normal folders' and it'd make migration easier.

Is the FlexRAID accessible when generating it's first parity data? I'd be dumping in 18TB or so of data on the first go, I realize this could take DAYS, will I be able to get my server to serve data to my Kodi machines or is it going to sit useless as it generates parity data?

Yeah, it's still usable as long as you're not writing more data to it.
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