Raid Failure

[LqHnyBear 23]

I lost my raid 0 array do to a faulty seagate hunk-o-junk hard drive. I've been using raid 0 for like 10 years but switch out to new drives and 8 month later my data is gone. I HATE YOU SEAGATE!!! I lost 9TB of files.... I'm rebuilding a raid 5 array so if one of my drives fails I don't lose everything. Keep your fingers crossed 2 drives don't fail at same time on me. lol

 

I want to clear out all caches but keep the custom settings I've made for MB3/MB-Classic. How can I clear all images, metadata etc etc but still keep my settings?

[TugboatBill 16]

Sorry about your array crashing.  10 years is a REALLY long time for a raid 0 array.    Consider yourself lucky to have gone that long. 

 

Raid 6 will give you another drive worth of security.  Or you could go unraid.  With unraid you can lose 1 drive and lose nothing.  2 drives and you lose only the data on those drives.  It's a really good option for videos that you don't have a backup plan for.

[LqHnyBear 23]

Yeah raid 5 with 4 drives I think is going to be my best bet for now. Thanx for the info though.

[Redshirt 1487]

Just so you don't end up kicking yourself in the ass 2 years from now... If you foresee your storage going over 16TB. Format your NTFS partition with a cluster size of 8KB or even 16KB. You don't want to experience what you have to do if you hit this scenario

[LqHnyBear 23]

Why so small? I think I had the raid 0 at 128KB. What's the benefit of the small cluster size? I thought the larger cluster size was better for larger files.

[Redshirt 1487]

It is. I'm not talking about your raid striping size though. Which is what I believe your referring to. It's fine at 128kb. I'm talking the physical partition that you'll create in windows.

[LqHnyBear 23]

My bad I read that too fast. I will be doing NTFS naturally but why 8 or 16KB. Will it benefit write speeds?

[Redshirt 1487]

No, 4kb clusters on an NTFS partition will have a max partition size of 16TB.... So if you find yourself at 16TB and want to increase the size of a partition (by adding drives, or swapping out drives for larger capacity). You won't be able to easily. 

 

an associate of mine made that mistake as he discused here.

[TugboatBill 16]

Unless the raid card/software supports it you cannot expand a raid 5 array.  Definitely something you want to research beforehand.

[Redshirt 1487]

That's true enough. I've always used stand-alone raid cards. The one I have currently (adaptec 5805) allowed me to add drives and even migrate to raid-6 when I had enough drives. 

 

Lq if your planning on using Raid-5 using a controller built into your motherboard your probably going to be disgusted by the write speed. They tend to use the main CPU which isn't as fast as a dedicated controller card when it comes to calculating parity.

[LqHnyBear 23]

I'm doing 4 3TB drives in a raid 5.  I have no plans to upgrade the size. It will be used as primarily a media drive with large files usually 1GB or larger. What should I set the stripe and cluster too? 128/?

[Redshirt 1487]

If it's purely for media then 128 is a good size.

[LqHnyBear 23]

I'd say 75% media 25% video games and maybe mp3's or pictures.

[JeremyFr79 228]

I haven't seen anyone address this yet, but RAID5 is not really intended for "huge" drive array sizes.  Most enterprise is or has moved beyond RAID5 for this reason.  The likely hood of losing 2 or more large (read above 1tb) drives simultaneously or losing 1 drive and losing another during a LOOOOOOONG rebuild on an array that size in a RAID5 is exponentially high.  Especially when all drives were purchased at the same time.  I saw one person post they have 4 3TB drives in a RAID5, this is almost asking for a catastrophic failure to happen.  Mind you I personally have an 8 drive RAID5 array and am getting ready to build 2 addtional 7 drive RAID5's, But I do it for the speed.  Anything important on any of those array's is backed up in triplicate and offisite.  Do not get a false sense of security from RAID5 it is no longer and has not been for a long time reliable with the current drive sizes on the market today.

 

http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ydi6i/dell_raid_5_is_no_longer_recommended_for_any/

 

If you want far better security in your data go with RAID6, or something like ZFS.  If you just want the shear speed and dont care if you'll most likely lose all your data in a few years then use RAID5.

[JeremyFr79 228]

Lastly if you're using consumer grade drives in an array that opens you up to even more issues since they do not have the same monitoring and feature sets in their firmware for RAID's that Enterprise drives do.  I.E. a consumer grade drive will get stuck on a bad sector and break your array due to it hanging on the sector and the controller finally giving up on waiting for the drive, where as an enterprise drive will mark the sector bad, move on and flag that there's an imminent failure of the array on the horizon (if all works correctly)  This is why you now see drives labled as NAS drives because they add some but not all of the features from enterprise drives in this regard.

[TugboatBill 16]

If speed really is a concern then be sure to look into faster drives.  Definitely stay away from 5900rpm drives.

[LqHnyBear 23]

Yeah I'm using nas drives and 7200 rpm drives. Not so much worried about speed as it being fault tolerant. The array is initializing now. I'm guessing it'll take just about 24 hours total.

[politby 88]

I say ditch the hardware RAID and move to a software based setup such as Flexraid.

H/W RAID is for reduced downtime in enterprise environments, not protection from data loss. I wouldn't trust is as far as I can throw it in a consumer scenario. Too expensive, too complicated and dependent on specific hardware and drivers.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[LqHnyBear 23]

It's IRST on a Asus Sabertooth z77 motherboard.

[JeremyFr79 228]

If speed really is a concern then be sure to look into faster drives.  Definitely stay away from 5900rpm drives.

for sequential read's 5900's these day's are negligibly slower than their 7200 counterparts.

[TugboatBill 16]

for sequential read's 5900's these day's are negligibly slower than their 7200 counterparts.

True, but the OP was concerned about write speeds.