swhitmore 781 Posted June 26, 2014 Share Posted June 26, 2014 I'm surprised people care that much about losing TV shows and movies (although I know it sucks in Red's case where he lost the whole thing). I don't back mine up at all and only use drive pooling. If I lose a drive I might lose 10-15% of my collection, but between friends who have similar setups, and a 500GB download limit, it's not hard to me to recover that stuff. All my important data I just backup to the cloud, but that's less than 100GB. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deathsquirrel 741 Posted June 26, 2014 Share Posted June 26, 2014 As I fill up server drives & need to expand storage I buy 2 drives. The extra is for offline backup. If you need 4tb more storage you need 4tb more backup space if you want a guaranteed backup/restore solution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redshirt 1487 Posted June 27, 2014 Author Share Posted June 27, 2014 It's funny you say that, cause the reality is that I don't care. I was really sad at first, but as the reality of what it was I'd actually lost set in it became apparent that it didn't matter to me. I'll take further steps to ensure it doesn't happen again, but it was just media. All my important stuff. Is actually backed up offline, documents and what-not. The only real impact is that I lost 3 days of potential coding because I was trying to save the array. And now that fact that my library isn't as sexy for testing/demoing on my client. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redshirt 1487 Posted June 27, 2014 Author Share Posted June 27, 2014 ebr. Can you or someone else give me a quick rundown on the differences between the 2 versions of flexraid. If I go software raid then flexraid would win out over unraid because I'll be running MB on the box as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve1977 67 Posted June 27, 2014 Share Posted June 27, 2014 I have tried flexraid many times and came to the conclusion that it is just not ready for primetime. Also, developers interest in the product varies by time. You should really consider this as a beta-product, which still has bugs and unstabilities. If you are willing to keep up with this, you are good, but just sharing to make you aware. Unraid is much more mature and the developer community is large and responsive. Unfortunately, I still do not use the product for the reason of the OP. The chance is very slim, but there will always be a 0.001% chance you lose everything at once. What I came to conclude is similar to one of the earlier posts. Not backing up movies and tvshows is the best way to go. You may eventually lose one disk, but that's rare and much lower of a risk compared to losing it all. To reduce the risk a bit, I will do two things: 1) I have one drive monitor, which monitors health condition. If the health drops, I change the drive. I can look up the name of the product when back home 2) I make multiple copies of really important things (honeymoon pictures, etc). Both cloud and just simple copy&paste to another disks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swhitmore 781 Posted June 27, 2014 Share Posted June 27, 2014 (edited) If you aren't too worried about redundancy, I wouldn't even setup a raid at all, and just stick to storage pooling. I find FlexRaid drive pooling to be very stable (haven't touched it in years). If I see a drive failing, or if it eventually does, the pooling still uses a NTFS file system. The disk can safely be removed and fixed, recovered, or thrown out, without any trouble. If you go down this route, make sure you sure the 'folder' storage method to fill the drives up, and not the 'size' method that keeps the sizes even. That way, items under the same folder will be saved on the same drive. So, if you do lose a drive, it will all be from the same series and you won't just lose episodes here and there (happened to me once and was a pain to find all the missing episodes) Edited June 27, 2014 by swhitmore Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve1977 67 Posted June 27, 2014 Share Posted June 27, 2014 If you aren't too worried about redundancy, I wouldn't even setup a raid at all, and just stick to storage pooling. I find FlexRaid drive pooling to be very stable (haven't touched it in years). If I see a drive failing, or if it eventually does, the pooling still uses a NTFS file system. The disk can safely be removed and fixed, recovered, or thrown out, without any trouble. If you go down this route, make sure you sure the 'folder' storage method to fill the drives up, and not the 'size' method that keeps the sizes even. That way, items under the same folder will be saved on the same drive. So, if you do lose a drive, it will all be from the same series and you won't just lose episodes here and there (happened to me once and was a pain to find all the missing episodes) The flexraid drivepool feature is indeed good. I was referring about the actual raid-like functionality, which I found less stable. The only drawback of the drivepool feature that only one pool is supported. I would prefer to have 3 pools (one for movies, one for tv shows, one for rest) and this is not implemented yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meep 1 Posted June 27, 2014 Share Posted June 27, 2014 genro, on 25 Jun 2014 - 5:16 PM, said: Unraid is another option that I can recommend that is software based and easy to expand. But the data is only accessible by Unraid. This is why I moved to FlexRaid. This is not the case. unRAID uses reiserfs and disks may be mounted outside of the unraid system for data recovery. It does not stripe data and has parity protection so can tolerate one drive failure. If more than one drive failed simultaneously, all data can be recovered from good drives. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rubepeta 2 Posted June 27, 2014 Share Posted June 27, 2014 I have been using flexraid for about a year now and continue to have problems with it. Parity never seems to be in sync properly. I had a drive fail about 2 months ago an although flexraid said the parity was all up to date I did loose data. Drive pooling works for the most part but I had problems with it also, like if I moved items from one location to another it I sometimes had to do it 2 or 3 times for everything to be moved. I have also used hardware raid, I have both a 16 port Areca raid card and an 8 port highpoint raid card.I went to flexraid because of the problems I had with RAID and data lost, Now I just have my hard drives as individual drives (7 3TB drives) and access them directly and just have the separate paths for the various TV and Movie folders set properly in MB3. I don't backup any of my media as I figure I can just redownload anything lost. I do backup all my important data, like documents, source code, pictures, music, home videos, etc. This seems to be the best way I have found to minimize data loss. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RaxPower 4 Posted June 27, 2014 Share Posted June 27, 2014 I imagine that if I were downloading this content I wouldn't care much either. But you rip and reencode a couple thousand discs, make sure the subtitles are setup the way you like them, build movie posters in photoshop when needed because the existing ones are text-covered messes or just don't exist, and then see how you feel about backups! The TV and movie collection on my server is a labor of love but it's definitely involved some labor I don't intend to repeat. As strange as it sounds im more concerned with the actual metadata rather than the content (Just because ive heavily customised it over the years) - Lucky its pretty easy to replace the content, though it wouldnt be fun reripping everything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sinjen 36 Posted June 28, 2014 Share Posted June 28, 2014 It looks like Unraid is almost ready to natively support virtualization which IMHO is a huge step forward. http://lime-technology.com/qa-with-tom-on-unraid-virtualization/ -Sinjen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deathsquirrel 741 Posted June 28, 2014 Share Posted June 28, 2014 I'm surprised people care that much about losing TV shows and movies (although I know it sucks in Red's case where he lost the whole thing). I don't back mine up at all and only use drive pooling. If I lose a drive I might lose 10-15% of my collection, but between friends who have similar setups, and a 500GB download limit, it's not hard to me to recover that stuff. All my important data I just backup to the cloud, but that's less than 100GB. I imagine that if I were downloading this content I wouldn't care much either. But you rip and reencode a couple thousand discs, make sure the subtitles are setup the way you like them, build movie posters in photoshop when needed because the existing ones are text-covered messes or just don't exist, and then see how you feel about backups! The TV and movie collection on my server is a labor of love but it's definitely involved some labor I don't intend to repeat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deathsquirrel 741 Posted June 28, 2014 Share Posted June 28, 2014 As strange as it sounds im more concerned with the actual metadata rather than the content (Just because ive heavily customised it over the years) - Lucky its pretty easy to replace the content, though it wouldnt be fun reripping everything. Movie posters are the worst in my experience. I had a drive die before I did full backups of everything and all I lost was time for the most part but I did lose several great movie posters that just weren't available any more when I went back to download them again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shaefurr 1337 Posted June 28, 2014 Share Posted June 28, 2014 I agree with Scott I just like FlexRAID for storage pooling, I was keeping it backed up for a year or so, running it once a week which would take an hour or two. Sometimes it would take an entire day if I hadnt run it in a month or so. Anyway, I stopped running it about 6 months back . A week or two ago I decided to just format the parity drive and use it in my pool since im low on space, and SUPRISE, the drive is dead At this point ill just stick to pooling, as others said, yeah it may suck but everything on my drives is replaceable, it would just take time. I run RAID-f, which isnt too bad to setup, but the need to run the parity update constantly annoys me since it turns my server into a commadore 64 while its running. I havnt tried RAID-t, but from what ive read, whenever you write to a drive, it autimatically creates the parity right then and there, which resulkts in slower write speeds, but you no longer need to manually update the parity.. I think anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
genro 4 Posted June 28, 2014 Share Posted June 28, 2014 I'm surprised those of you who have had issues with Flexraid aren't giving Unraid a chance (other than the need to have a separate PC dedicated to it). But if money is an issue you can build a reasonable Unraid PC for <$300 excluding the drives ($30-50 CPU, $80 MB, $40 Ram, $50 PSU, and $50 case (e.g. nzxt source 210 elite) that can hold 8 drives). If you went with 4TB drives, that machine could have a capacity of 16TB (assuming 6 ports on the motherboard, 1 used up for parity and one used up for cache though its not necessary) or get a cheap 2 port card as well and that goes up to 24TB for still less than $300. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasin 11 Posted June 28, 2014 Share Posted June 28, 2014 Raid is still important in my opinion. For larger space 1 parity isn't enough but I would take a look at zfs more specifically freenas. raidz2 would allow 2 failures. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
politby 88 Posted June 28, 2014 Share Posted June 28, 2014 I have tried flexraid many times and came to the conclusion that it is just not ready for primetime. Also, developers interest in the product varies by time. You should really consider this as a beta-product, which still has bugs and unstabilities. If you are willing to keep up with this, you are good, but just sharing to make you aware. I do not agree with this at all. I am running a total of 3 Flexraid servers and have had zero issues. All 3 have had drive failures, in one case several, and recovery has worked 100% every time. It may be a one man show, if Brahim gets run over by a bus development may halt, but the current Raid-F version is rock solid IMO. It will tolerate as many drive failures as you have parity drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TugboatBill 13 Posted June 29, 2014 Share Posted June 29, 2014 But the data is only accessible by Unraid. This is why I moved to FlexRaid. http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/ works to read unraid drives, and works on Win 8 too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kode 49 Posted June 30, 2014 Share Posted June 30, 2014 Unraid is much more mature and the developer community is large and responsive. Unfortunately, I still do not use the product for the reason of the OP. The chance is very slim, but there will always be a 0.001% chance you lose everything at once. That 0.001% is when your house burns down with your server inside it, or you accidentally drop your server out a 3rd story window. As others have said the data isn't striped so losing more than 1 drives results in only losing the data on those drives, not any other drives, and if one of those drives is the parity drive then the loss is even less, which is the exact reason I went for Unraid over normal raid Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cheesegeezer 3087 Posted June 30, 2014 Share Posted June 30, 2014 Red.... I only found out you lost your stuff from another member.... So sorry to hear it. Gutted for you. RAID ..... SMAID!!! It is more hassle than its worth, i use 2/3 TB drives and if i lose one..... So be it. Cheaper, less hassle and pretty robust, but as tech evolves i replace HDD's and move content over and that is generally before the HDD runs out of juice and dies. Big man hug for you bro! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CBers 6771 Posted June 30, 2014 Share Posted June 30, 2014 I don't use RAID either. I use Drive Bender (disk pooling) which can mirror data between disks on a file or folder basis. If a disk fails then it's easily replaced and disks can be taken out of the pool and read on a normal Windows PC. Not saying it's better than raid, but easy to use and meets my requirements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FlyGuyAZ 5 Posted July 1, 2014 Share Posted July 1, 2014 Sorry you had such a miserable go of it Redshirt. After suffering a similar error from one failed drive and losing the entire array I too have ditched RAID. I use Google's approach, forget the fancy RAID and just make sure your data is on more than one drive (and preferably in more than one place). Cloud backups are numerous and cheap and great for irreplaceable things like pics of the family and such. Movie rips and TV shows are different because they are so large. But once you have local metadata your media collection is pretty static. I have 6 drives of varying sizes setup in my server as single drives. After all, why care which drive is which when Mediabrowser does such an awesome job of aggregating multiple sources? I bought an external drive cage that houses 4 drives, equal to the size of the total of the other six. I keep it at work and then bring it home every month or so to copy new stuff to it. That way if I lose a drive in the server, just pop in a new one and copy the data back. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111177&cm_re=server_raid-_-16-111-177-_-Product Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FlyGuyAZ 5 Posted July 1, 2014 Share Posted July 1, 2014 How have people got this much data? Have you got every film and tv series ever produced??? Sent from my RM-875_eu_euro1_211 using Tapatalk What good is a monster TV and surround sound if you have nothing good to feed it? Full Blu-ray rips take a lot of space! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redshirt 1487 Posted July 1, 2014 Author Share Posted July 1, 2014 Red.... I only found out you lost your stuff from another member.... So sorry to hear it. Gutted for you. RAID ..... SMAID!!! It is more hassle than its worth, i use 2/3 TB drives and if i lose one..... So be it. Cheaper, less hassle and pretty robust, but as tech evolves i replace HDD's and move content over and that is generally before the HDD runs out of juice and dies. Big man hug for you bro! Yeah, I've learned my lesson. I've ordered a second case and will be mirroring the data to it. Not sure what I'll be running on it yet. There are lot's of compelling solutions offered here. The only thing that really made me sad was the loss of my music. Ripping my discs is a pita and the RIAA has done a good job of terrifying users who get media from other sources. Then I remembered all my music was on my iPod and no longer felt sad 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redshirt 1487 Posted July 1, 2014 Author Share Posted July 1, 2014 I use Drive Bender (disk pooling) which can mirror data between disks on a file or folder basis. Looks interesting. I think at this stage I'm going to migrate to either un-raid or something like this. Pretty sure FlexRaid is out of the equation. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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