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Options for home server storage
Donkey Kong
Putting Nintendo out of business with AI nipsRegistered User regular
Putting Nintendo out of business with AI nipsRegistered User regular
I almost titled this thread "What RAID setup should I use" but before posting, I thought better of it. I don't even know if I want a RAID setup! I sure don't want the hassle of managing one!
I have a server in my home. It's not rack mounted or anything, just a PC mid tower running Windows 7 64 bit. It can fit 4 hard drives inside easily but once installed they're a real pain to swap in and out. I'm looking for a better storage solution than having a bunch of totally independent odd disks shoved into this machine that all tend to fail randomly and are a pain to replace and keep backed up.
My requirements:
~6TB+ Capacity on one logical drive
High performance (streaming HD video to multiple clients)
On-site
Minimal maintenance (preferably stuff that can be done automatically or at least live)
Data security not tied to a single specific piece of hardware (that includes the host PC, the storage enclosure, whatever)
Here's what I envision as the ideal solution to my problem:
The two big points are: A.) never lose data due to hardware failure and B.) make hardware failure hassle-free when possible. I envision a RAID setup because that's all I really know. But if there's some kind of new hotness I don't know about, I'd love to hear it. Maybe there's a way to make all my dreams come true in software. Maybe there's a premade hardware thing that does it all for me and it guaranteed to stick around for at least a decade.
I am willing to throw money at this problem. I don't want to spend more than $2000, but if really great solutions that will last years and years bump into that limit, I still would love to hear about them. What would you guys advise?
I have a server in my home. It's not rack mounted or anything, just a PC mid tower running Windows 7 64 bit. It can fit 4 hard drives inside easily but once installed they're a real pain to swap in and out. I'm looking for a better storage solution than having a bunch of totally independent odd disks shoved into this machine that all tend to fail randomly and are a pain to replace and keep backed up.
My requirements:
~6TB+ Capacity on one logical drive
High performance (streaming HD video to multiple clients)
On-site
Minimal maintenance (preferably stuff that can be done automatically or at least live)
Data security not tied to a single specific piece of hardware (that includes the host PC, the storage enclosure, whatever)
Here's what I envision as the ideal solution to my problem:
Some kind of box full of hard drives that connects to my server via eSATA. The box is relatively dumb, just power and wires. The box could be replaced at any point in the future. The eSATA port on the box connects a really well-supported, standard, RAID card in my server.
I fill the box with 2TB hard drives and put them into a RAID configuration. This controller card could be easily be moved to a new PC or replaced in the future. This card handles all RAID control, including rebuilding disks and shit. If a drive fails, the server gets a notification and I just slide out the dead drive and slide in a new one form a package. That's it, no additional intervention is required.
At regular intervals, the server backs up the RAID to a couple rarely used, high capacity internal drives.
I don't want to, in 5 years, have the RAID controller card die and suddenly I can't find another. Or buy a slightly different card and my elaborate RAID setup is dead in the water because the last card was working some kind of incompatible RAID voodoo. I want everything to be standard, hassle-free, and as futureproofed as makes sense. Obviously when it comes times to change drive technology or upgrade capacity, I'll need to rebuild from scratch, possibly with a new enclosure or card, but I want the basic setup to remain the same.
The two big points are: A.) never lose data due to hardware failure and B.) make hardware failure hassle-free when possible. I envision a RAID setup because that's all I really know. But if there's some kind of new hotness I don't know about, I'd love to hear it. Maybe there's a way to make all my dreams come true in software. Maybe there's a premade hardware thing that does it all for me and it guaranteed to stick around for at least a decade.
I am willing to throw money at this problem. I don't want to spend more than $2000, but if really great solutions that will last years and years bump into that limit, I still would love to hear about them. What would you guys advise?
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Otherwise you'll hear a bunch of mumbo-jumbo still going on about floods in Taiwan inflating the cost of hard drives.
The problem with raids though, is if your controller goes bad you are almost always shit out of luck without a raid 0. But it's been a long time since I've dealt with raid in any reasonable sense so I don't know if that's been standardized or whatnot.
I always considered eSATA because I wanted to use it pretty much as an internal drive. Having the PC do live re-encodes of videos in the storage and send them out to mobile devices. Serve files directly off the drive through Apache. But I suppose gigabit ethernet is probably not the performance bottleneck at this point. So it's an interesting option. I'll be sure to give it a look. The simplicity and standalone aspect is certainly attractive.
My ZFS-on-Linux box is currently the best system I've ever used for used in terms of disk management, simply because the disk rebuilds are really, really fast due to the checksumming when there's a transient error on drives. It also solves the situation described below:
Whereas previously my mdraid RAID6 system still managed to lose data, because I had one drive develop some bad sectors and get started rebuilding, which then discovered some bad sectors on another drive (and kicked that from the array as well and start rebuilding) and then that discovered some bad sectors on a third drive but hey, with no more redundancy (and no will to read from a disk booted from an array) I just had to cope with it.
I went to ZFS after this happened specifically because, thanks to the checksums, it would've just used the good data on all the drives to fill in various glitches across the array.
The punchline? Ultimately you need backups. Not online RAID but frequent, off-line backups for anything truly important, which means you need to budget for about 3x as much storage investment as you need, minimum (live set, backing up set, backed up set).
My setup: I have a Mac Pro with 3 ea. 4tb hard drives in RAID 0 running iTunes for video distribution to AppleTVs with AirVideo serving up to iPhones and iPads on the go (Transcoding). This backs up with a program called Folderwatch to a matching 12tb RAID 5 in an ESATA 12 Bay DatOptic enclosure. Also in the enclosure is 2 ea. 4tb RAID 0 that back up to one another for video and music production work.
So you can do all that without Apples, but here are some general stuff I have found when dealing with that much storage.
1. ZFS sounds brilliant up front, and I toyed with doing it originally but never did. Once you start down a path it becomes difficult to contend with switching out one format for another.
2. here's why: I finally reached 1 to 1 ratio on storage space between primary and back up... before I had a 16tb mostly empty RAID 5 with a 6tb backup... I exceeded 6tb and I was suddenly slave to my primary drive. It went through three rebuilds on pins and needles for over 24 hours each time (since I didn't have a 1 to 1 backup) before I bit the bullet and went to the plan I have now. When it was 16tb to 6tb, I couldn't change over to ZFS because I had no place to park the data while reformatting. Always go 1 to 1 is what I am saying.
3. ESATA is awesome. Go that way. Spend money on the best enclosure you can, then go ahead and rip out the fans and get quiet ones. I have the 8 bay TowerRaid from Sans Digital and that thing was never quiet enough for me. The Dat Optic I have now (i got it under 500 dollars, they list at 1500 so I don't recommend this exact one for that reason) is awesome because i can see every single component and rebuild it down to the port replicators if i have to.
4. Be careful to study the ESATA support you have, and the RAID you are doing . Make sure it's transportable between machines and ESATA cards if something dies.
5. One RAID i have is puesdo hardware off the Rocket Raid card I have the other is off OSX software RAID that way I am not tied to a particular format if something goes screwy with the next OS release etc.
6. Watch your drives. Green drives are great but slow. My through put is horrible though on them. They stay at under 100 degrees though even going full out
7. Oh wow RAID 0 with the 4TB drives I have are awesome. You end up paying more per GB of course, but only taking up three drive bays and maxing out SATA II for the most part I am a happy camper. I get better results off it then my SSD drive.
8. Like the guy above says, data errors can unfortunately spread like plague but users can be even worse damage. I had folderwatch running full time with a 60 second delay for awhile and I learned my lesson. I was retagging movie files and the tagger stripped audio from 1300 of the files I had. Yea. Folder watch was 1 minute behind me dutifully erasing over my backups with the new and improved audio files. I turned off auto back up at that time. Since I just do movies on this thing I check them three times before I send them over now. If i am doing more then say 20 new movies that have to be sent over I spot check that everything is ok before I commit a backup run.
So yea, be careful on your back up plan, ESATA is awesome, RAID rebuilds are horribly suspenseful and I highly recommend doing a RAID 0 (for speed) main pool and RAID 5 or ZFS backup. In my setup I would have to loose one drive on the main pool and two drives on the second before I was crap out of luck.
Edit:
Oh yea : this is going to be more expensive then you think.
I have purchased 3 enclosures, 12 ea 2tb drives 3 ea 4tb drives, two RAID cards and more just for this current build going on 3ish years old.
I'd vote for ZFS in general. As long as whatever controller you're using (including the one on your mobo) isn't in hardware RAID mode you can switch controllers basically at will.
Battle.net
This. The biggest take-away I had for my RAID experience is that RAID is a bit of a pain (I was just doing software RAID, but still a slight hassle) and at the end of the day RAID is not a backup solution. It really just isn't. For starters, you're still vulnerable to all the physical risks of having the drives together...fire, theft, flood, whatever. Then, really, what you often want is a backup (as the music tagging story highlights) that you can revert to if you accidentally hose something in your library. RAID isn't doing that, either.
If you need some sort of RAID for the performance bump, and to have the one large logical drive, cool. But don't depend on it to protect your data. An off-site backup (even just another enclosure in a safe-deposit box or with your parents) is essential.
Battle.net
It runs SMB, AFS+Time Machine, a VPN server, and a million other things like management of the UPS that sits in my closet for my router. I can let my friends dial in to the VPN and use a couple shares. They get to manage their own passwords. All painless to set up.
Highly recommended.