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Drive Extender replacement due out in 2012. It's called Storage Spaces.

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superboyac:
Q: Is data protection or media pooling the more important feature for you?
-40hz (July 17, 2012, 07:17 PM)
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I'd say media pooling, but I'm not really sure what data protection means.  if it's a backup issue, I'm planning on having two sets of backups for everything, and since they're just files and folders, I'll be using SFFS to do all the backup management synchronization, etc.  But if data protection means something like bad clusters, then I'm interested in that also.  Looks like I have some more studying to do.

I asked one of the network guys at work, and he also said he's looking for something like I'm talking about.  From what I understand so far, it sounds like the "newest" feature in this kind of technology is being able to use a mish-mash of hard drives.  For RAID, you need to have bunches of similar hard drives.  i don't want that.  Some of these other software things I've seen will waste space if the hard drives are not the same size, I don't want that either (they are limited by the smallest drive in the bunch).

I guess I don't need the ability to be adding/removing drives a lot.  But what I don't want is this: let's say a hard drive goes down in a few years, i don't want to have to be forced to find a particular type of drive that is compatible with that bunch.  i want to be able to use whatever is available.  Also, I want to be able to add any kind of hard drive easily, without having to tweak too many things on the existing setup.  Yes...I think that is my #1 feature request: that I be able to use any drive.

superboyac:
Found another helpful explanation for some of these things:
Now... all that being said. You probably don't want to get involved in RAID 5. You want to look at the new options called "snapshot RAID". The major players are FlexRAID, SnapRAID, DriveBender, Stablebit Drive Pool, and a couple of others.

These products all create a software RAID (Similar to RAID 4, but no striping) that keeps the data intact on the disc (does not stripe across all the discs)... this is a nice feature as you can pull a drive out and put it in another computer and it will act like just another disc. This is impossible to do with real RAID.

Also, since they aren't calculating parity data all the time, read and write speeds are as fast as the individual hard drive will allow (which is usually many times over fast enough to stream multiple files at a time).

The best part about Snapshot RAID is that it provides the same amount of protection as a RAID 5 setup, but you can use any size hard drives that you have. So if you still have a couple of 500GB drives, and say three 1TB drives... you can protect the data on all of those with only one of those 1TB drives used as a parity drive.

In some packages, like FlexRAID, you can pool them all together and combine the 1TB with the two 500GB for a total of 3TB of usable space (one of the 1TB will be used for parity, and it always has to be your largest drive). This gives you JBOD-like ability to make all your drives (minus your one parity drive) appear as one large disk to the OS.

It's also really easy to scrap a snapshot RAID set and start over, or use a different drive for parity, etc... because you are not modifying the data drives at all.
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Perhaps this indicates that 40hz's suggestion, SnapRAID is the choice for me.  SnapRaid has gotten really great comments on the web regarding its reliability, I like that.  And it has a GUI in the Elucidate software.  The other option that is reviewed well is Drive Bender.  But Drive Bender doesn't seem to have the reputation for reliability like snapRAID.

tomos:
^ I'm curious and know very little about RAID even, but the maths in your quote there dont make any sense to me.

So if you still have a couple of 500GB drives, and say three 1TB drives... you can protect the data on all of those with only one of those 1TB drives used as a parity drive.
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that's 3x1TB + 2x500GB = 4TB total space.
IIUC a 1TB drive does to backup/snapshot of 3TB.
How does that work?

In some packages, like FlexRAID, you can pool them all together and combine the 1TB with the two 500GB for a total of 3TB of usable space (one of the 1TB will be used for parity, and it always has to be your largest drive).
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it's not at all clear -there's possibly a typo in there ("the 1TB")- but I think they are using the same example as above of 3x1TB + 2x500GB. That would mean again that a 1TB drive does to backup/snapshot of 3TB.

Do they both use the empty space on all drives? (Apologies if this was covered already - I just skimmed the thread and the SnapRAID home & comparision pages).

superboyac:
tomos, yeah I think something about the parity drive isn't as "linear algebra" as we're thinking.  It seems to be able to do more with less.  Snapraid also claims to be the only one that can potentially recover data in a pool with two drive failures instead of the normal one.  I have the same question for that also; how does the math work out there?

superboyac:
OK, so far it looks like the best solution to try is:
1) SnapRAID for dealing with multiple drives
2) Elucidate, a GUI for SnapRAID
3) Liquesce, the drive pooling for windows (SnapRAID doesn't include this funcionality)

This is the same as 4wd's suggestion.  It's pretty good if it works well.  Everything is free.

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