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Building a home server. Please help, DC!
superboyac:
OK, guys. I've changed my mind again, and yes, I'm going to go back to the NAS suggestions that you all recommended to me in the beginning. I've read around and asked about it, and I think there's no need for anything else really at this point.
The company I like so far is Synology. I like them a lot. I'll just get a 4-bay drive, and have a RAID5 array in there. I think with the redundant disks, I can get 4 TB for now with it. And that's good enough for now. I might get two of these so I can store one in a remote location and sync it that way for backup.
Any thoughts? Does this seem more reasonable and not so much of the overkilling that I tend to do?
(er...I may change my mind back. sheesh. I'm annoying myself now!)
superboyac:
P.S. Don't use RAID-5. If you have a good backup strategy and can afford occasional downtime to perform hardware maintenance or replacements, RAID-5 is more trouble than it's worth IMO.
--- End quote ---
40hz said that earlier. I'd like to understand this better. because Geoff from Stallard recommended using RAID-5, and it sounded good to me. If I don't use RAID-5, what are my alternatives? Keep in mind that I will be handling about 6-10TB of data that I want backed up and very safe. Also keep in mind that I am going to get a business quality RAID controller, not any consumer grade ones.
But I also shy away from RAID if I can help it. I just need to know what alternatives I have if I don't RAID, especially when it comes to backing up and redundancy and all that. I can only think of two things: RAID, and mirroring (file syncing). Is there any other way? Images are not the same, versioning is not really the same.
40hz:
For 6-10 TB that you need kept very safe and available, RAID-5 is a viable first line of defense if you go with "business grade" RAID controllers and hard drives. But as you probably already know, you'll still need to combine it with a backup or sync of some sort so you have a copy as well as a resilient original of your data. RAID mostly assures you of availability since an array drive failure won't take down the entire array. But it does nothing to get data back if a catastrophic failure occurs. For that you'll need a backup or mirror copy.
There are flavors of RAID (50 etc.) that combine striping with mirroring and parity check options. But they're expensive solutions and usually only found in data center level installations. In short - fuggeddaboutit!
f0dder:
RAID5 is great (if you spend $$$ on a fast card or fast CPU to do the parity computation), right until a disk dies and you need to rebuild the array... and the second and third disks croak.
If you do end up building some form of RAID (and frankly, without a bunch of computers and a distributed file system, that's probably your only choice for that kind of storage), be sure to use drives from different vendors AND from different batches - that'll somewhat reduce the risk of your drives shitting themselves at the same time. Check out stuff like Everything you know about disks is wrong and Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?... and cringe.
superboyac:
For 6-10 TB that you need kept very safe and available, RAID-5 is a viable first line of defense if you go with "business grade" RAID controllers and hard drives. But as you probably already know, you'll still need to combine it with a backup or sync of some sort so you have a copy as well as a resilient original of your data. RAID mostly assures you of availability since an array drive failure won't take down the entire array. But it does nothing to get data back if a catastrophic failure occurs. For that you'll need a backup or mirror copy.
There are flavors of RAID (50 etc.) that combine striping with mirroring and parity check options. But they're expensive solutions and usually only found in data center level installations. In short - fuggeddaboutit!
-40hz (August 01, 2011, 05:14 PM)
--- End quote ---
That's how I feel, thanks for confirming. That's why I'm thinking of having no RAID. Just the disks on their own. To merge them into larger directories (spanning), I can use Window 7 or the server's capabilities for that, right? And backing up is easy that way: just file sync onto an identical hard drive. I've been doing this for years now and see no real problems with it.
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