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**patseguin** · 2012-02-21, 20:15

Yeah I tried that but I was getting some kind of error trying to create the array in its BIOS so I think the card or one of the cable may be no good, I don't know. unRAID is doing a preclear right now but I am researching and may very well go with Windows Home Server. The only downside is that I guess you can do mirroring but you can't make one voule out of multiple drives. I'm not sure that even matters to XBMC anyways. When space ran out on a drive I would just go to the next one and create a new video folder and share it.

I don't even know what a switched gigabit backbone is. I have my cable modem, my computers, and a switch in my living room all running into an Apple Time Capsule router. Are you saying that this backbone item is what everything would plug into?

mwkurt · 2012-02-21, 21:49

Have you checked out Flexraid yet? If not, you really should. Works really well and is free.

Mark

djmcnz · 2012-02-21, 22:22

patseguin Wrote:Yeah I tried that but I was getting some kind of error trying to create the array in its BIOS so I think the card or one of the cable may be no good, I don't know. unRAID is doing a preclear right now but I am researching and may very well go with Windows Home Server. The only downside is that I guess you can do mirroring but you can't make one voule out of multiple drives. I'm not sure that even matters to XBMC anyways. When space ran out on a drive I would just go to the next one and create a new video folder and share it.

I don't even know what a switched gigabit backbone is. I have my cable modem, my computers, and a switch in my living room all running into an Apple Time Capsule router. Are you saying that this backbone item is what everything would plug into?

If you think you have a hardware fault, especially a cable it's best to swap those out before continuing. Of course you wouldn't use the computer BIOS to set up RAID on your extra card as that will have it's own setup procedure and probably diagnostics.

I'm sure you'll learn a lot by experimenting but it's time consuming and often frustrating. Perhaps write your options down with pros and cons. I would suggest that a big "con" would be if you're unfamiliar with the specific hardware/software - despite what people say, the learning curve for any of these solutions, especially software ones, can be steep.

Regarding your Time Capsule, it is "switched" and also "gigabit" but you might want to read this:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/...rking.html

Finally, even though you won't get 99% uptime I'd recommend you stick with Windows options unless you're already comfortable with the operating system associated with the other options. To properly tune the box you'll need to know the OS reasonably well.

**patseguin** · (This post was last modified: 2012-02-21, 22:57 by patseguin.)

mwkurt Wrote:Have you checked out Flexraid yet? If not, you really should. Works really well and is free.

Mark

Thanks for another option, I think I'll go hang myself now. Tongue

I just went and took a quick look at Flexraid. It runs on Windows?!? So, I could install WHS and install Flexraid to create an array with redundancy?

lansalot · 2012-02-22, 00:37

If it was me...

Boot windows off of one smaller disk. Create the RAID5 set using *internal windows RAID* and that way you aren't tied to a particular RAID controller or motherboard. Any recent/decent Windows OS can read the dynamic set - you could take the 4 hard disks out, drop them in another system and Windows will recognise the set.

Nice and simple.

gollumscave · 2012-02-25, 18:15

Patseguin.....
Slow down, slow down...
With all respect, from all your posts and questions we all can assume that you're not really have a lot of experience in computers. The biggest mistake that you can make is try to go for the "best" thing out there if you don't really need it...

There are tons of options and possibilities to get to a desired goal. Your goal was to have security if I remember correctly. You wanted to have a big array and started building raid. We then told you that your drives weren't suitable in your existing hardware configuration. The solution for that was to go for SoftRaid like ZFS or UnRaid, or even flexraid. These solutions are all cheap and work with cheap drives. You however have changed AND the hardware AND the software because you are overwhelmed by the amount of information and options you are presented with here.

I'll try to give a recap of what has happened here so far and give my 2 cents on it...

Hardware raid (with your LSI controller)
Software raid (with any normal NON RAID controller or onboard sata ports)
please note that if you use a raid 5,6 card for software raid you are likely to run into problems as well...
even if you setup the card as jbod....

Hardware raid like stated above is with your LSI controller. Most of us don't go for that option. Not because it's not good, but because the card is expensive and the drives are too. Softraid is NOT better or worse than hardware raid. It's just cheaper, and in case of freenas/zfs more flexible.
Your main advantage on HardWare Raid is that it's supported by windows which is something you are familiar with so you can use the normal windows user interface to operate the whole thing.

Software raid is a different solution to achieve a redundant array. With software raid, the raid calculations are made by software running on your OS calculated by your processor. These resources are gone, but with modern processors you won't even notice the loss.
Software raid is more difficult to setup although there are excellent guides out there, specially FreeNAS can be up and running in less than 5 minutes. To install it follow the guide on the freenas website. Easiest is to burn that ISO to a CD (in nero it's called "Burn Disc Image) but windows 7 has that option build in as well. Simply click on the ISO file and top of your screen should have the option "Burn Image To Disc" If you boot from that CD you have the option to install freenas to a USB stick. Boot from that stick and you'll end up with a black screen and a command prompt... That's it... And that's all you should want... It will also list an IP address that your FreeNAS is accessible from.
On another machine type in that ip address in your webbrowser and you have the FreeNAS interface. Pretty easy to understand as well...

FreeNAS uses ZFS filesystem which totally rocks IF YOU NEED ALL THOSE OPTIONS. The second half of the previous sentence is what is KEY here... Reading your posts you dont understand most of the terminology that we use here, so i am 99.99% sure that this is NOT the best option for you if you want an easy to use and easy to maintain system.
FreeNAS IS easy IF you know what you're talking about.... you (with all respect) don't....

My advice...

Install windows 7, attach your new drives to your LSI controller, Install a raid5 array for single drive fault tolerance, or raid 6 if you want the added security of 2 drives which may fail... Keep in mind that all drives need to be compatible and need to be identical.

P.S. Raid does not BUILD a parity drive... The parity is not on a single drive. If you have 4 drives in a raid5 setup, your file is being spread over the 4 drives. The data on 3 drives and the parity information on the 4th drive. But with the next file, the data might be on drives 2,3,4 with parity on drive 1....
(This actually isn't what REALLY happens, but it's easiest to explain it to you like this...)

Again, You have compatible drives and a controller, go for hardware raid, specially since you're not very experienced...
If you wanna go on an adventure (which is the only way to learn....) give freenas a try with your old 2Tbyte drives, and see what happens... Remember, it's your personal collection of movies/music that you're storing here which in some cases is YEARS of work. So don't do stupid things with it and end up with a whole box of blank drives and no more data :-)

I have a system at the moment with 25 drives. They are all cheap 2Tbyte drives from WD. I have them running under Ubuntu Server and have installed ZFS-Fuse. They are setup as 2 sets of 10 drives running Raidz2, and 1 array of 5 drives running raidz. My speeds when I copy internally is around 320 Mbyte/sec... Over the LAN it's about 105 Mbyte/sec which is the max for my Gbit LAN....
Speed is NOT important for your movies! Your movie may usually take 90 minutes or so to transfer while watching it, because of the lenghth of the movie. What use is a disk array that is idling 99% of the time?

Go for raid5 on windows with your new drives, and use your old drives to experiment with ZFS and/or FreeNAS... You'll probably switch to FreeNAS after a few months, and switch to ubuntu with ZFS a few months after that... By that time you are giving others advice here in the forums from experience....

Have a nice one!

**patseguin** · 2012-02-25, 19:02

Gollum, with all due respect I've been building computers for 20+ years. What I don't have experience with is media sharing and this advanced networking stuff. :-)

WHS 2011 with SatbleBit Drivepool is working great so far. I really wanted to take your advice on FreeNAS/ZFS but I couldn't figure out how to install it. Everyone seems to like unRAID but sitting at a console and typing commands to prep the drives which takes 3 days is no fun. You may be right that I might end up with FreeNAS but I'm on day 3 of WHS 2011 and so far so good. :-)

My only remaining issue is XBMC buffering on my 1 box I had to go wireless with. I don't think it should be having to do that.

You have 25 drives? Holy crap! What enclosure fits all that, lol?

gollumscave · 2012-02-25, 19:48

WHS has NO redundancy, so if you lose a drive, you lose your data.. why would you possibly want whs 2011 Huh

what you CAN do, is install your drives on raid5 on your LSI and then use them as your drivepool in WHS

**patseguin** · 2012-02-25, 20:11

AFAIK Stablebit Drivepool writes 2 copies of every file, so there is protection plus parity. I shied away from my LSi because for one I only have 4 SATA connections coming out of it, so I would be losing a whole drive, and two because it only does SATA II. I suppose I could get a newer one with SATA III and cables with more connectors, but I thought Drivepool was giving enough protection with it's duplicate folders feature.

gollumscave · 2012-02-25, 20:58

sata II can transfer files up to 300 Mbyte per second... there's no way that is not enough for you...

What I don't understand is that you say that with only 4 drives, with raid5 you will lose a whole drive which is true.... 4x2 Tbyte is 6 Tbyte...

But with your current situation, 2 copies of every file you lose half of your drives...
Or am I missing something?
With duplicate files there is no parity, it isn't needed because all files are just duped...
In your current situation you have 4x2 Tbyte is 4 Tbyte... (because everything is written twice....)

**patseguin** · 2012-02-26, 00:01

Well because I have 5 drives and only 4 connectors on the lsi. I could do them all under raid 5 on the mobo but that's probably the worst option from what I've heard.

gollumscave · 2012-02-26, 07:02

Yes, using the onboard raidchip to achieve raid5 isn't what you want...
It's commonly called "fake raid"...
If you choose to go for SoftRaid, then you need to findout if you can completely disable the raid functions of your controller. Most controllers don't support this. It usually involves flashing a new firmware to it and logically the manufacturers who produce an expensive hardware raid card don't put time and money into a firmware that disables that product.
If you use your LSI in your softraid setup the card will overrule the advanced commands (Read/write time-outs etc etc) of the drives which will result in a broken array that needs to be rebuild...
SuperMicro has mainboards (expensive) and raid cards that CAN be flashed to a firmware that disables the raid functions on specific models. They are called the IR (with raid) and the IT (with raid functions disabled) firmware.
The biggest advantage with softraid in my opinion is that in my situation I use 5 onboard sata connectors, 2x 4port sas connectors (onboard) 2x 4port sas connectors on a card and a 4port sata card, and combine them all into a large pool of drives.
This works perfectly and incredible speeds....

Orclas · 2012-02-26, 14:40

patseguin Wrote:I could do them all under raid 5 on the mobo but that's probably the worst option from what I've heard.

gollumscave Wrote:Yes, using the onboard raidchip to achieve raid5 isn't what you want... It's commonly called "fake raid"...

Pardon for perhaps talking about things I don't know enough about, but isn't it exactly just the mobo /fake/ raid controllers which should be possible to completely disable, something in the direction of AHCI or raid mode?

gollumscave · 2012-02-26, 19:02

sure, you can set your onboard raid controller to AHCI mode instead of RAID.
That option is the best if you plan to use softraid...

in any scenario, fake raid, so the "hardware" raid controller on your mainboard is ALWAYS the slowest, least stable and unreliable solution...

**patseguin** · 2012-02-26, 21:28

I have a really nice Intel RAID card in this machine that I use for gaming. It does SATA III and I have 2x 256GB SSD's in RAID0 and 2x 2TB HD's in RAID0. I wonder if I could just as easily go software raid in Windows 7 on this and use this high end controller in my server box. With these SAS controllers, you can get cables with more than 2 SATA connectors I think right?