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FlexRaid: Transparent RAID (tRAID) vs RAID over File System (RAID-F)


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Airbender

Hi @ Shaun

 

My First Question:

I was wondering if it is possible to upgrade from (RAID-F) to Transparent RAID (tRAID) and use same Parity drive and Parity data ?

See Rebuild of Parity takes about 30 Hours give n take on my system and i am running FlexRaid 21 Days Trial



My Second Question:
I am confused about The Host Package or Client package
Do i need to install Host and Client on Same pc ?

which one do i need to use to configure the tRaid ?

 

Thanks in advance
 

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Airbender

Hi also

 

It seem tRaid does drive pooling not sure about Just Pooling

 

Unlimited RAID Configurations & Unlimited Disks

Data Protection (tRAID™):
Safe RAID™
Live Data Reconstruction
Online Data Expansion
Online Data Restoration
RAID Contraction
Background Scrubber

 

Native Storage Pooling

 

  • Drive Health Monitoring
  • Powerful Scheduler
  • Email & SMS Notifications
  • Centralized Host Managemen

 

So it says in their site

Native Storage Pooling

 

http://www.flexraid.com/try-buy-download/#tab1

 

 

Thanks

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Airbender

Hi Guys

 

So regarding Speed issue with tRaid , i am not trying to jump into changing the subject but in F  Raid i am seeing slow speed also so far it is not effecting the speed or streaming only transfer rate

 

Here is screenshot

 

2f8cb4294554383.jpg

 

Going back to my point so if the speed of file transfer in tRaid is slow just as F Raid then it wont be as big deal i guess as long streaming is not an issue and creating one pool of all drives

 

Thanks

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I agree with SF on pooling.  Makes life soooo much easier as there are a lot more things than just MB that need access to the location of my media.  With pooling that location is always the same - no matter the actual physical structure.  I was even able to move from UnRaid to FlexRaid without having to reconfigure everything in my environment because everything was still at \\mediaserver\movies and \\mediaserver\photos etc.

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Re Pooling

 

I used RAIDF pooling a lot and had all the standard RAIDF pooling issues. As far as I can see, the TRAID pooling is a lot better, as least I have had no problems as yet. It seems solid and a great improvement on RAIDF pooling.

 

Pooling by its very nature is going to occasionally cause problems, for example, one of the TRAID used has complained that his disks wo'nt go to sleep when the pooling is running (Now he's running Windows server 2008, so it prob an issues that wont effect us). But I am sure that Brahim will continue working on it until it is solid.

 

re Streaming Speed

 

Read is fine - I am getting very close to theoretical disk speed for read of one disk. I am have not looked at parallel reading across the pool.

 

Re Parity calculation

 

Its seems a lot faster than RAIDF - I Get 15TB done in less that 20 hours.

 

RE --  FlexRaid 21 Days Trial

 

JUst ask Brahim for another trail - it won't be a problem

 

shaun

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sfnetwork

Re Pooling

 

I used RAIDF pooling a lot and had all the standard RAIDF pooling issues. As far as I can see, the TRAID pooling is a lot better, as least I have had no problems as yet. It seems solid and a great improvement on RAIDF pooling.

 

Pooling by its very nature is going to occasionally cause problems, for example, one of the TRAID used has complained that his disks wo'nt go to sleep when the pooling is running (Now he's running Windows server 2008, so it prob an issues that wont effect us). But I am sure that Brahim will continue working on it until it is solid.

 

re Streaming Speed

 

Read is fine - I am getting very close to theoretical disk speed for read of one disk. I am have not looked at parallel reading across the pool.

 

Re Parity calculation

 

Its seems a lot faster than RAIDF - I Get 15TB done in less that 20 hours.

 

RE --  FlexRaid 21 Days Trial

 

JUst ask Brahim for another trail - it won't be a problem

 

shaun

@@Shaun

Do you know if you can make a pool without building a parity?

I need to test the pooling but I just don't want to build the tRAID itself (just its pooling)

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@@Shaun

Do you know if you can make a pool without building a parity?

I need to test the pooling but I just don't want to build the tRAID itself (just its pooling)

 

Absolutely, you can create your TRAID array without creating parity - just select the do nothing option when initializing the array.

The parity will be incorrect, so  until you do a sync, all your changes are a risk, but it should be fine for testing pooling.

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sfnetwork

Absolutely, you can create your TRAID array without creating parity - just select the do nothing option when initializing the array.

The parity will be incorrect, so  until you do a sync, all your changes are a risk, but it should be fine for testing pooling.

Thanks, very good to know!

I'll do some testing now..

 

Brahim mentioned that tRaid pooling will be ported to RAID-F later so, even without actually using tRAID, I want to confirm if the pooling is better (based on some issues I'm having)

Edited by sfnetwork
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Thanks, very good to know!

I'll do some testing now..

 

Brahim mentioned that tRaid pooling will be ported to RAID-F later so, even without actually using tRAID, I want to confirm if the pooling is better (based on some issues I'm having)

 

Brahim is a unbelievable developer but I doubt  he will have time to port the raid-t pooling to raid-f pooling in a time frame that you will find useful. He has just too many thing to do.

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pclausen

I've been playing with tRAID as well.  Considering moving to that platform from my large Raid 6 hardware raids (24 x 1TB and 18 x 2TB).  I almost lost the 18 x 2TB raid a couple of times when I started getting read errors during a rebuild where I was already down 2 drives.

 

The write performance is the killer for me.  As others have stated, when using 2 parity drives, the write performance it terrible.  I'm spoiled with 300 MB/s sustained transfers between my Raid 6 arrays (Areca controllers and SuperMicro SAS back planes), and 30 MB/s is just not going to cut it when transferring over my ~ 50TB collection.

 

Despite the low write speed, the fact that my entire collection I have built over the last 12 years would never be completely lost due to individual drive failures, I might just make the switch regardless.  The initial transfer of all the data will be painful, but after that, the 30 MB/s might be ok since I mostly rip my new BD movies (always lossless) directly to the Raid anyway.  I used to use eac3to and convert the audio to flac, but now that my clients can all bitstream the HD audio formats directly, I have switched to simply using MakeMKV, making the whole process so much easier.

 

On a side note, my server got quite a workout doing chapter image extraction on close to 50TB worth of movies and TV Shows.  I suspect that would have take weeks instead of days had my collection not currently been on hardware raid.

 

To answer the question about the tRAID server vs. client, the server is installed into the computer that has all the drives connected to it.  The client can be installed on the same computer, which can then be accessed via RDP if sitting in the basement or something, or the client can be installed on another computer.  This is especially useful if you have several physical servers that you want to manage from a single client.

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yea, its a bit of a bummer, when ever you do a write, you have to read from all the disks to calculate the parity in real time. Its the cost of getting rid on the out of date parity issues.

 

But really, it not a big deal. I bet that over any reasonable period of time your read/write duty cycle percentage far less than 1%. i.e you are only writing 1% of the time.

If you have data on your disks that is constantly being updated, move it to another location and use another TRAID config, or another technology say RAID 0. 

 

Remember we are going to set up our MB service and calc all our meta data before we create our array, so we should only have a brief flurry of writes when we add new media.

 

It will take a while to find all the bits and pieces that are writting too regularly, but we have all been through that already, ensuring that our disks can go into sleep mode 99% time.

 

Also, RAIDT duty cycle is nothing compared to RAID 5/6 where you all all your disks spinning all the time.

 

 
 

 

 

There is no reason why disk duty cycle time for RAIDT can't be close to RAIDF, remember, we only have all disk running when we are doing a write,

 

Well said.

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I've been playing with tRAID as well.  Considering moving to that platform from my large Raid 6 hardware raids (24 x 1TB and 18 x 2TB).  I almost lost the 18 x 2TB raid a couple of times when I started getting read errors during a rebuild where I was already down 2 drives.

 

The write performance is the killer for me.  As others have stated, when using 2 parity drives, the write performance it terrible.  I'm spoiled with 300 MB/s sustained transfers between my Raid 6 arrays (Areca controllers and SuperMicro SAS back planes), and 30 MB/s is just not going to cut it when transferring over my ~ 50TB collection.

 

Despite the low write speed, the fact that my entire collection I have built over the last 12 years would never be completely lost due to individual drive failures, I might just make the switch regardless.  The initial transfer of all the data will be painful, but after that, the 30 MB/s might be ok since I mostly rip my new BD movies (always lossless) directly to the Raid anyway.  I used to use eac3to and convert the audio to flac, but now that my clients can all bitstream the HD audio formats directly, I have switched to simply using MakeMKV, making the whole process so much easier.

 

On a side note, my server got quite a workout doing chapter image extraction on close to 50TB worth of movies and TV Shows.  I suspect that would have take weeks instead of days had my collection not currently been on hardware raid.

 

To answer the question about the tRAID server vs. client, the server is installed into the computer that has all the drives connected to it.  The client can be installed on the same computer, which can then be accessed via RDP if sitting in the basement or something, or the client can be installed on another computer.  This is especially useful if you have several physical servers that you want to manage from a single client.

 

 

Remember you can always blow away the raid and recalc parity from scratch. As a matter of fact, that is what Brahim recommends whenever you have large database changes to make.

So I guess your 50TB collection would take a couple of days to compute the parity - initial parity calc runs in parallel at full stream speed, so  you would get the full streaming speed of your parity disks when

creating the raid (say 130MB/S).

 

The who cares if your writes take 30MB/s-50MB/s - 108 GB/H / 2.5TB per day. If you are like most of us I don't see you adding 2.5TB a day. I know it is a pain to wait, but its just perception, its only IO happening, is not going to load down the system very much.

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Airbender

Hi all these are very good useful info but again it wont answer my concern , shell i go with Raid F and pay 59.99 or go with Raid T and pay $100

i just dont want to end up buying one and then regarding it and buy second one

 

Thanks

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sfnetwork

Besides the write/read speed, there is also one important difference on long term; in tRAID all drives are WAY more active (rt) than RAID-F.

In my RAID-F (the way my pooling is configured), if fills up one drive, leaves the reserve, than goes on the next one.

Besides the snapshots and the streaming, there is not much activity going on with those drives...

 

I only presume from the logic of it.

But the fact is that I have never kept my HD as long as when I started using RAID-F with this pooling option. (I have really old WD Green in there that, from my recent tests, are still fine. That REALLY wasn't the case before with those Green)

 

Am I wrong?

Edited by sfnetwork
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Besides the write/read speed, there is also one important difference on long term; in tRAID all drives are WAY more active (rt) than RAID-F.

 

 

yea, its a bit of a bummer, when ever you do a write, you have to read from all the disks to calculate the parity in real time. Its the cost of getting rid on the out of date parity issues.

 

But really, it not a big deal. I bet that over any reasonable period of time your read/write duty cycle percentage far less than 1%. i.e you are only writing 1% of the time.

If you have data on your disks that is constantly being updated, move it to another location and use another TRAID config, or another technology say RAID 0. 

 

Remember we are going to set up our MB service and calc all our meta data before we create our array, so we should only have a brief flurry of writes when we add new media.

 

It will take a while to find all the bits and pieces that are writting too regularly, but we have all been through that already, ensuring that our disks can go into sleep mode 99% time.

 

Also, RAIDT duty cycle is nothing compared to RAID 5/6 where you all all your disks spinning all the time.

 

 

But the fact is that I have never kept my HD as long as when I started using RAID-F with this pooling option. (I have really old WD Green in there that, from my recent tests, are still fine. That REALLY wasn't the case before with those Green)

 

 

 

There is no reason why disk duty cycle time for RAIDT can't be close to RAIDF, remember, we only have all disk running when we are doing a write,

Edited by Shaun
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  • 2 weeks later...
Airbender

Hello guys

 

Does anyone know the pro rated price of tRaid ? apparently Paid client of Raid F can see the hiden page of pro rated price 

if you guys cant update here pls PM it will be great help for me to deiced if i get f Raid or tRaid and i have more questions also

 

1- If i buy F Raid and then get tRaid would i lose my f Raid key ?

2- would i get both copies f and t Raid ?

 

That all i need to know to make a proper decision on buying

 

Thanks in advance

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wraslor

I believe it was $30 off so $69 and yes you get whatever you purchase, in my case I have both, using traid.

Edited by wraslor
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sfnetwork

@@Airbender

Did you test tRaid pooling to see if you still get those access denied during library scans?

Also, is it faster, the scans?

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Airbender

I tried triad on one of my test pc and so far I am not able to get it work

I created a post here in mb3 Coummunity with screen shots title it installing triad for first time. I will try again sometime this week and report back

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Airbender
I believe it was $30 off so $69 and yes you get whatever you purchase, in my case I have both, using traid.

 

Ok so for $ 60 I get raid and for 70 I get triad as pro price other wise it is 100 just for triad by itself

 

Thanks waraslor

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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