What RAID systems are you using

[SafetyBob]

If you look at my system you can see I have a very basic system and I am storing all my Sagetv recordings over 3 Western Digital 250GB SATA drives. Currently, I keep all three drives at about 40-50% full and go to 60 to 70% occasionally. Sage really does a nice job of spreading my recordings around. Last night, one of my drives lost its ability to read and write. Disc error 5, I believe. I replaced it with a new one and am formatting it as we speak.

My question is, what are you guys that are using RAID to keep your SageTV recordings on really using? Please be specific, as I believe I have a RAID capable Intel mobo, but wondering what would be best. Actually, I have another MCE-500 on the way and will need to look at getting a full sized mobo to accomodate 3 MCE-500s, so if you have a mobo you like with RAID onboard, give me model numbers please. I would prefer hot swappable drives, but I think the motherboard has to support it and that means a "real" server board doesn't it?

I would appreciate anyones suggestions as I figure out how to go on this venture.

Bob E.

[mattdcknsn]

Just to let you know, SATA is already hot swappable. Its built into the drive. You have to prep it for removal though (that varies by vendor).

If you have the space, resources (monetary) and power go with a RAID 10. It mirrors each drive and stripes the data, plus side is RAID 0 performance, down side you loose half your space to redundancy. I prefer RAID 5, as long as it doesn't get too big its performance is good. I wouldn't go above 7 drives and include a hotspare in there so it automatically rebuilds. For HTPC usage it should be fine.

I use 3ware raid cards. They are good, PCI or PCI-x and not that expensive. However it all depends on how much you want to spend.

[GKusnick]

If you're looking for an excuse to trick out your system with cool hardware, don't let me stop you. But honestly, I'm not sure that RAID buys you much practical benefit here. It's not like this is a mission-critical server that cannot go down under any circumstances, not even for maintenance. So hot-swappability doesn't seem that crucial. And for backing up recordings you don't want to lose, a nightly xcopy script to mirror files onto a second drive seems adequate. RAID would perhaps make the restore process more automatic in case of disaster, but really, how often do you need to do that? For me, it's almost never.

Again, it's your money, and if RAID is what you want to spend it on, then go for it. But to me it seems like overkill for a home entertainment appliance.

[src666]

I'm not sure I would go RAID again myself. If I did, I would buy a MUCH better controller than I have now (Promise 6000). I would also look at RAID 6 before trying RAID 10. RAID 6 is just like RAID 5, only there are 2 parity drives. For small arrays it's not worth it, but once you get into the 5+ drive territory it can start paying off. The big benefit is that you can lose up to 2 drives in the array before it fails.

Right now, my biggest problem with RAID 5 is that my controller can't dynamically grow the array, either by adding drives or by swapping out larger drives. Somehow I thought it could grow through drive swaps when I bought it - my mistake. I'm considering backing off of RAID 5 and just running mirrored drive sets. I'll lose some capacity, but will have more options when it comes time to grow the array.

I have my drives in a pair of 3Ware 4 drive hot swap chassis, which I consider essential for PATA drives. Even though SATA has built in hot swap capability, it's best not to be messing with the cables. A hot swap bay of some sort is a nice thing to have.

As for "Mission Critical", losing a season of LOST or Heros can certainly seem like the end of the world, at least my wife could make it feel that way. Thank goodness for Backup Internet Television Transfer Or Redundant Repositories Enabling Network Transfers.

[AngelofDeth]

Using a script to mirror a drive, isn't practical to me... especially if you are talking a terrabyte of storage(or more). RAID won't always save you, but RAID5 is pretty safe, losing two drives at the same time is not impossible, but not very common either, and completly automated. Even if your not looking for huge storage, I think a RAID1 setup would be better than using scripts to copy files to another drive.

[stanger89]

I'll start by saying I don't run RAID on my recording drives, I just don't care about my recordings enough, and can't see having more than 500GB of recordings.

However for my DVDs, I've got them on two arrays at the moment.

The first is my 8x250 RAID-5 array consisting of:
3ware 7506-8 and 8 250GB WDs. This has saved my DVDs once, I had a drive crap out on me got an email from the RAID controller saying the array was degraded. Ordered a new one from newegg. Plopped it in and rebuilt the array. Total effort on my part was about 1 hours time. Really wish I'd have sprung for the hot-swap enclosures, not because I have a problem with taking the system down for maintenance (I can work that into recording schedules easy enough, but because it's a real PITA to replace one drive of 11 in a 3-in-2 enclosure.

Of course the drive that died was one of the ones not in a fanned enclosure, but that's been rectified now.

Other array is my ReadyNAS X6. That thing's been great, completely self-contained and priced "similarly" to a good RAID card, but with the added benefit of including a case, PSU, not needing a PC, and other coolness like a slimserver and automated backups of other data (it backs up my SageTV directory nightly and my digital photos weekly.

I started with the X6 and 1 500GB Seagate. Ran like that for a long time. A couple months ago I knew I'd be needing more storage so I figured it was time to make it redundant, so I ordered the second 500 plopped it in the X6 and a couple hours later I was redundant. Then maybe a month ago, I was out of space (1.75TB for DVDs, full ), so ordered the third 500GB plopped it in and a few hours later I had 1TB of space.

FWIW I'm 100% sold on the use of these new breed of NAS for media storage. If I was doing it over (mass media storage) today I'd definitely get a ReadyNAS. With 750GB drives (which aren't too bad price wise) you can get a 2TB media server in a single NAS. That's ~400 "un-compressed" DVDs, or probably enough for every HD DVD or Blu-ray available one would want.

I haven't bothered recording to it, but like I said, I can't see needing more than 500GB (1HDD) for recoridngs.

[SafetyBob]

Thank you everyone. I feel really stupid that I didn't realize there were so many RAID options out there and/or storage solutions for backup. I really see the point to RAID, and falling cost has some appeal, but I had not considered an 8 or more drive array. However, This is the first drive failure on this setup which I put together a little over two years ago. SMART worked and told me something was up, to bad it was to late to copy anything. All of you are right to focus my attention right now on a backup solution somewhere in my network here at the house. Should I get the old P3-233 mobo out?

Being a backup novice, and not a script wizard, point me in the right direction towards the simple (I hope) and ironclad backups over the network. Any favorite programs anyone uses?

Thanks again for your responses.

Bob E.

[src666]

Well, you got lucky if SMART gave you a useful warning. Take a look at the recent study done by Google on hard drive failure and SMART reporting. Pretty pathetic track record if you ask me.

And as someone who loses at least 2 drives every year, I know for a fact that the MTBF figures are outright lies. Drives die, faster than anyone in the industry will admit.

Either resign yourself to loss, or implement a sound backup/redundancy strategy.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by src666

And as someone who loses at least 2 drives every year, I know for a fact that the MTBF figures are outright lies. Drives die, faster than anyone in the industry will admit.

The only drives I've had die are the ones that weren't adequately cooled.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by SafetyBob

Thank you everyone. I feel really stupid that I didn't realize there were so many RAID options out there and/or storage solutions for backup. I really see the point to RAID, and falling cost has some appeal, but I had not considered an 8 or more drive array. However, This is the first drive failure on this setup which I put together a little over two years ago. SMART worked and told me something was up, to bad it was to late to copy anything. All of you are right to focus my attention right now on a backup solution somewhere in my network here at the house. Should I get the old P3-233 mobo out?

Being a backup novice, and not a script wizard, point me in the right direction towards the simple (I hope) and ironclad backups over the network. Any favorite programs anyone uses?

Thanks again for your responses.

Bob E.

I have used this in a number of small office enviroments and my own home. It's free and it works. It doesn't compress files into a proprietary format like some of the software out there, which is good and bad. It also isn't as easy as some of the off the shelf software out there and only works on Windows machines (since it needs to use Task Manager).

http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/backupscript.html

Edit: I have used this to backup to a FreeNas server on many occassions. Nice thing about all of this is that it is all free.

[Fuzzy]

I may be a 'do it simple, or don't do it guy', but I'm actually using Windows XP Pro, and have it tweaked to do RAID 5 totally in the OS (see this). This allowed me to mix newer SATA drives, with an older PATA version of the same drive. Performance may not be has high as a dedicated hardware card, but the cost is MUCH nicer. Currently just using the onboard SATA and PATA controllers, but I can easily add an external SATA enclosure if I feel the need to expand. Also, it is simplified because all the RAID control is in the Drive Management tab in windows.

[jptaz]

I am confused as to how all the work in hacking Windows and potentially destroying the OS is simpler than buying a real RAID card and drives. I will grant you cheaper, but not simpler...and will that RAID be available if you have to rebuild the OS?

1. Buy 3ware card and drives.
2. Power off computer and insert card and drives.
3. Run through easy RAID configure wizard
4. Install Driver in Windows.
5. Format drive.
6. Use nice big safer drive space.

I have had a drive fail in my RAID 5 array and it caused a brief hiccup in playback when the drive failed, but did not effect any of the 6 recordings that were happening and in fact started an automatic rebuild. I tend to think that the Win XP Solution will not do that unless you have some major CPU power.

[GKusnick]

You left out:

2.5: Lug keyboard and monitor into server closet so you can do RAID BIOS setup on headless server.

If you're going to do RAID, a NAS box of the sort Stanger is touting makes more sense to me because it can be administered via LAN, and is probably better designed for cooling several drives than an ordinary PC case.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

You left out:

2.5: Lug keyboard and monitor into server closet so you can do RAID BIOS setup on headless server.

If you're going to do RAID, a NAS box of the sort Stanger is touting makes more sense to me because it can be administered via LAN, and is probably better designed for cooling several drives than an ordinary PC case.

Kind of depends on the scale you're going for. NAS boxes can really only be found in 4-drive configurations for any reasonable amount of money. If you need more than that you might as well build your own with "normal" PC components and a good RAID card (Areca/3ware).

FWIW, my server can be quite easilly administered via the lan. I Remote Desktop in for most things (updating Sage, etc). And also, the 3ware cards' administration program is web-based so it can be administered from anywhere.

[jptaz]

I have not done it myself, but I do not think you even need to go into the BIOS with the 3ware card to set them up the first time. I know I have done most maintenance after the fact, including rebuilding, assigning a new spare drive, creating new RAID arrays or stand alone partitions from my sofa via the web interface. In my case the 3ware actually hosts my OS too since I could not get my onboard RAID 1 to work along side the 3ware card which would have been my preferred option.

John

[stanger89]

I think it depends on the card, last time I really did anything with my 3ware I updated to the latest 3DM and there are a lot of cool features in it, but it seems that my (old) 7506 doesn't support a lot of them. I think the newer 8500 and 9500 series are much nicer in that regard.

[jhh]

Hi,

I've got a RAID5 setup running on an Adaptec 2810SA card. Quite easy to set up. Feature I like most about this one is the online capacity expansion so theoretically you should be able to add drives without rebuilding a lot - still sounds a bit scary though.

As others have also mentioned also I don't have tv recordings on the RAID array only DVDs - once in a while when I have something worthwhile keeping I move it over.

Today I'd probably follow a different approach - at that point selfbuild RAID was cheaper than the NAS boxes you find now but would need to look at pricing and capacity. Cheap NAS boxes usually stop at 1 TB not RAIDed (JBOD).

Jan

[jlindborg]

I switched my config over to a ReadyNAS+ with 4 500 GB drives on it - I have other things on there such as source code and a web site backup and such so it's not dedicated to the PVR, but that's it's primary use.

I record to a local drive on the sage server and then move recordings over to the NAS via a script at night - with Sage 6 you don't have to take the service off line when you do this which is a real big plus - it's been working smooth as silk for about a month and I'm pretty happy with it.

I tried recording directly to the NAS via the CAT5e gigabit network but recording 3 shows at once was just too much for it so I went with the local record/move method instead. Playback feeds off the NAS are no problem - I've had 4 going at the same time with room to spare.

The ReadyNAS is very slick - easy to setup and administer and hooked to a UPS with email reporting of drive/heat/power issues, it's a pretty solid offering if you don't mind dropping a little cash.

[erik]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I may be a 'do it simple, or don't do it guy', but I'm actually using Windows XP Pro, and have it tweaked to do RAID 5 totally in the OS (see this). This allowed me to mix newer SATA drives, with an older PATA version of the same drive. Performance may not be has high as a dedicated hardware card, but the cost is MUCH nicer. Currently just using the onboard SATA and PATA controllers, but I can easily add an external SATA enclosure if I feel the need to expand. Also, it is simplified because all the RAID control is in the Drive Management tab in windows.

Did someone using SW RAID1 or 5 under Windows ever succesfully recover from a dead disk?
I tried RAID1 and Windows declared both dead.

[sundansx]

...I tried recording directly to the NAS via the CAT5e gigabit network but recording 3 shows at once was just too much for it ...

You couldn't record 3 SD shows over gig ethernet to the ReadyNAS? That is ~10Mbit * 3 = 30Mbit? Something is wrong with your setup...does not compute. My Gig e-net does realtime transfers at a little over 200Mbit and that is not anywhere near optimal (PCI 32 slots, to non-raid drives)