So...what Raid levels are you guys using.

[rdefino]

I just ordered 5- 2TB drives to rebuild my Raid array. I would love to use Raid 10, but I only get half of the total space to use. So I might use Raid 6.

What are you guys using?

[PiX64]

Was using Raid 5 for a while, but recently (2 months ago) I switched to unRAID which is a sorta kinda sudo raid 4 .

Raid 5 was SUPER fast on a TRUE hardware raid controller (Perc 5/i). I just felt that after 2 years of running it with no drive spin down, and such it was a bit overkill for my needs. I chose to go with unRAID which to me was a much more sensible solution. drive spin down, the ability to add multiple drives, using heterogeneous drives (makes/model) as well as the ability to grow my array as i saw fit..

If i had to do it over i would have gone with unRAID from the get go.

What are you looking to do with this array?

~Pix64

[rdefino]

unraid??? Exactly what is that?

I'll be storing all my dvds, recording, picture, music and software installs there.

[tonysathre]

unRAID is a NAS OS.

http://www.lime-technology.com/

[rdefino]

Looks cool, But the only thing holding back is that now I basically have to build another system. Already have my sage server and a Vmware ESX server. I would be putting the raid and drives int eh sage server.

[stanger89]

If you've already got a ESX server with Sage on it, you can pretty easily run unRAID in a VM. That would be my recommendation, and what I've been trying to do. Unfortunately it's not looking like my Sage hardware will play nice in a VM

[rdefino]

don't have sage on the ESX, it's all by itself on it's box.

[stanger89]

Wow, I totally spaced out the "and a"

But in that case, I'd consider tossing unRAID on the ESX server, it seems to run pretty good. Just be sure if you got Advanced Format drives you jumper them first. I didn't do that with the first 3 I got, so I got two more and I'm preclearing (unRAID script that sort of tests/torturetests new drives and configures them) them right now and it's going at ~100MB/sec/drive on 2 WD20EARS drives in my ESXi box.

[rdefino]

I mess with my ESX box to much to want to store my Sage stuff there. I keep the sage by itself so theres minimal downtime. that's why I keep the raid in the same box. It's big enough to physically hold the drives.

[CollinR]

3ware RAID 5 (DVDs) and RAID 1 (Family Pictures/Music). Happy.

[mikejaner]

Looks to me like you already have that Promise Raid controller, so either you are going to use that or buy another one. Another option in the spirit of what Stanger and others are saying is, to run a VM on your actual SageTV server, then install UnRAID, Linux, FreeNAS, etc... and run your RAID that way. There are people currently using this method today.
As for advice on what type of RAID? Not sure what your needs are. I agree with you on the, losing half of your storage in a RAID 1+0 situation. As for me, I realized I don't need the speed a RAID 1+0 would give me with media recording and storage. I have a 6X1.5 Terabyte RAID5 Array running on an Ubuntu server sharing out a windows share for my primary storage. I went RAID5 with 4 disks originally, then dynamically expanded the array when I bought the 5th disk, then added a 6th later on, and made it a hot spare. I plan to expand with a few more disks in the future, but am way under my usage at this point.

[dcardellini]

Hardware RAID-6 with 17 drives. Lost two drives within 2 hours of each other after 1 year 24/7 a couple of weeks ago.......so "I am a believer....it can happen to you."

Would never consider RAID-5 for more than 4-5 drives now...and even then....

UnRAID looks real promising, because RAID-5 means lose two drives, lose the entire array. With UnRAID, lose two drives, lose one-drives worth of data. Still think RAID-6 is better, though, but UnRAID has a strong list of other advantages for media serving.

There may be experts out there that understand the statistics on "large arrays" that might even question my RAID-6 strategy with lots-o-drives.

I can say this about my hardware RAID. Flawless, predictable, easy, independent of OS. When I lost two drives, one of the drives "came back to life" and I rebuilt the 2-drive-down degraded array with a new drive and the re-born drive. The reborn drive failed again half-way thru the re-build after two days. The 3Ware didn't miss a beat. Power-down in the middle of the operation, no problem. They just seem to have figured out every ridiculous scenario. I have learned with these types of systems that the true test is not "that they work," but how they recover when things eventually DO fail under a large number of scenarios.

Don't know what the idiosyncrosies of UnRAID are yet.....and that may just be ignorance on my part.

My only advice is "think big." I never would have believed five years ago starting with a ReadyNAS 4x400GB that my needs would have EVER grown so ridiculously.

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by dcardellini

Hardware RAID-6 with 17 drives. Lost two drives within 2 hours of each other after 1 year 24/7 a couple of weeks ago.......so "I am a believer....it can happen to you."

Ahh, you got me thinking with this one. Since you can never know, I might have to do that to my array. Good thing mdadm converts raid levels on the fly!

[dcardellini]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

Ahh, you got me thinking with this one. Since you can never know, I might have to do that to my array. Good thing mdadm converts raid levels on the fly!

As a postscript to my story, I did not fail these two drives on a 17-drive array. I had 11 drives for nearly one year, and failed the two on that 11-drive array. I only expanded my array to 17 right after fixing my degraded array.

[PiX64]

my post on unraid from another simliar thread...


http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...773#post452773

[barney B.A.]

Originally Posted by stanger89

If you've already got a ESX server with Sage on it, you can pretty easily run unRAID in a VM. That would be my recommendation, and what I've been trying to do. Unfortunately it's not looking like my Sage hardware will play nice in a VM

I'm not familiar with ESX but I used to use Parallels workstation to create "guest" OSs which simply ran on the "host" OS

Could you run the Sage stuff on the host OS and set up unRaid in a guest OS?

[stanger89]

I'm sure you can, but in my "New server" thread, another user posted performance issues with unRAID in a VM under a host, vs just under ESXi. It's easy enough to try though.

[barney B.A.]

Maybe I'll give it a try. It's been quite a while since I've messed with VMs. I remember the last time I was into that I wasted a whole lot of time. It was addictive.

[madpoet]

Also a big Unraid fan

[davephan]

I also recommend unRAID for your video library. UnRAID has many upsides, but the downside is much slower throughput to write to the disks. The slow write problem can be to mitigated by adding a cache drive, which I plan to do very soon. UnRAID is fast enough for playing back several HD video streams at once. In a future version of UnRAID, the data protection will be improved to better than RAID 6 by allowing any two drives to fail with no data loss. I think when unRAID introduces P+Q parity, if you loose 3 drives, then you will only loose the contents of one drive, not losing all your data, like a 3 drive failure with RAID 6.

The best answer for large storage SageTV systems may be unRAID for the video libraries and on-board RAID for recordings - a two computer system. The movement of video files you want to keep long term is then moved from the recording drives to the unRAID server - this sounds like a great 'plug-in' idea.

UnRAID is also hardware independent, as long as the computer will boot to a USB flash drive. RAID controllers are hardware dependent. You might want to have an identical spare RAID controller on hand, just in case your RAID controller fails. If your RAID controller fails, you will loose all your data unless you have a spare RAID controller, unless your data is backed up elsewhere, which is tough to do with many terabytes.

My unRAID server will grow to 16 TB plus a cache drive very soon. I plan to reconfigure my SageTV computer's recording drives to RAID 5 with four 1.5 TB drives.

Dave