So I just got four WD Red 4TB drives...


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I really feel sorry for the people who pay close to a thousand$ for a pathetic 4 bay qnap nas.

Forget about adding a 15$  card off ebay that can run rings around a 1000$ 4 bay pos with 8 ports,RAID6,Battery Backed Cache,... You know you could have got a 12 bay SAS expander off ebay for like 80$ hell add another 30$ and you could get a sodding dual domain module for MPIO  :rofl:

 

EOL Enterprise gear > any consumer storage on the market at a fraction of the price. These boxes are one of the biggest rip-off's around

 

When you arnt restricted by the insane prices of synoligy and qnap you wont need to buy expensive drives in the hope that your 4x4 RAID 5 wont die during rebuild because you can just add an extra drive and get double parity  (Y)

 

You can say that there is the increased complexity of the OS but that comes with the advantage of having something more powerful than PHP for software

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Actually your 2TB was more expensive than your 4..

200/4TB vs 160/2TB, so 5 cents a GB for the 4 vs 0.08 a GB for your 2..

If you really need 8, prob would of been cheaper to just wait until you could of gotten another 4 ;)

"Loosing 4tb of personal data when a drive dies"

I really doubt he has 4TB of "personal" data - more like 4TB of movies/music.. Now if they are HOME Movies, then raid is not a backup.. Better to put the money into BACKUP of that space vs spending money on some array with parity..

Raid 50, if you loose 2 disk in the same 5, you just lost the whole 12TB.. Ouch.. 8 disks is lot of chance of failure ;) Did you buy them all at the same time, are they all from the same batch? That ups the likely hood of very close failures if you ask me. What is cost of expansion of that system to say 14TB of storage vs your 12?

 

You take a gamble with any raid 5 loosing 2 discs.  To date, I have had one drive go bad and rebuild without issue.  At least with the raid 50, you can loose "2" and still have a working array as long as they aren't in the same set.  And as far cost in upgrading to larger drives I bought the 2tb drives when the red were just coming out, at the time no 4tb existed, maybe the 3.  I can't recall for sure. 

 

We all take risks and have our comments on raid setups.  I'm sure the OP is willing to take his/her risks as well.  Before I went to raid 50, I just had a jbod setup.  To each their own.

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"Missed emails, inaccessible live tv, lost phone service, and others can be problematic..."

That is not the same as "storage" So you run your OS on a raid 1, 2 SSDs for example this is low space requirements if you need a PC online in case of failure. Or just backup the OS and restore from image to new disk you either have on the shelf or stop by the store on the way home and buy. This seems more like internet access in your examples to me.. Nothing to do with your PCs on your network from those examples... More your modem or router need a spare, etc ;)

My plan if my server died that has my router on it in VM, is to just change over one of my AP to router mode again. If the modem died, have to stop by the computer store or order 1 with over night delivery, etc. ;) She could always access email via hotspot fire up off phone service on her laptop or ipad. If either of those die there is other equipment she can use. If the server did die, the only loss of access would be to media library - if she really wants to listen to a song or what movie that was in the library - she can pull out the optical media copy of it, etc.

"To each their own."

Exactly - run raid if you want, its your money, its your data.. The fun is in the discussion of different opinions and options.

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"Missed emails, inaccessible live tv, lost phone service, and others can be problematic..."

That is not the same as "storage" So you run your OS on a raid 1, 2 SSDs for example this is low space requirements if you need a PC online in case of failure. Or just backup the OS and restore from image to new disk you either have on the shelf or stop by the store on the way home and buy. This seems more like internet access in your examples to me.. Nothing to do with your PCs on your network from those examples... More your modem or router need a spare, etc ;)

My plan if my server died that has my router on it in VM, is to just change over one of my AP to router mode again. If the modem died, have to stop by the computer store or order 1 with over night delivery, etc. ;) She could always access email via hotspot fire up off phone service on her laptop or ipad. If either of those die there is other equipment she can use. If the server did die, the only loss of access would be to media library - if she really wants to listen to a song or what movie that was in the library - she can pull out the optical media copy of it, etc.

"To each their own."

Exactly - run raid if you want, its your money, its your data.. The fun is in the discussion of different opinions and options.

 

As usual, all things are situational. For my setup, all of my servers are VMs running on a RAID5 datastore. I'm willing to take the IOPS hit for the RAID5 as I'm using SAS drives entirely (I got them for ridiculously cheap on Amazon via Warehouse Deals... I have never seen them this low again so I'm sure it was a pricing error on them.)...

 

There is no router to put in the middle as I only use pfSense on my network running in a VM. There is no phone service to redirect as that is running on a VM using 3CX. There is no email to access because that too in running on a VM for Exchange 2013... Our Comcast service is also pushed out via Ethernet to HTPCs...

 

It also wouldn't be appreciated if such a drive failure were to happen while I was working from home... Not to easy to explain to my manager that I had no phone or access to the company VPN due to having to restore from backup...

 

For me, VMs going down due to a failed drive wiping out the datastore is too big an issue so I mitigate against it. Of course, there are other points of failure along the chain such as a Comcast outage wiping out my phone and email servers... But that is less likely than a HDD failing.

 

I likewise love the discussion. I just think your view against redundancy at all in the home environment is a bit too far off mark. I would agree that it is likely not needed in most home environments, but there are always edge cases. Ideally, we're smart enough to identify whether or not we're an edge case.

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EOL Enterprise gear > any consumer storage on the market at a fraction of the price. 

 

 

I would never use any EOL enterprise gear for something in production that I needed to keep running. Sure there are used replacement parts out there or complete systems, but when you need it what are you going to do, go search EBay or Craigslist to till you find what you want, then wait for it to ship, while you are down?

 

Not good business sense IMHO.

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"but there are always edge cases. Ideally, we're smart enough to identify whether or not we're an edge case."

Very true -- That is great you have mitigated your loss of your datastore with a raid setup, since your Vms being up is critical to your network. So clearly your way beyond a typical home setup.. I also run my router in VM, but other stuff on my esxi is play, or media storage - nothing critical to me working.

We could debate if 5 was the right choice for such a setup.. I would be more prone to 1 in your case. Doesn't sound like you need large amount of space so 1 gives you better protection for what your looking for from my take on it.

I would be concerned with loss of the powersupply or server hardware in your case. Do you have a secondary vm host you can migrate your VMs to in case of this sort of failure? If not doesn't seem like your mitigating the many other points of failure that could cause you grief. And just causing performance hit and more complexity in the setup. To be honest, to mitigate loss of your datastore wouldn't a just a backup work? Vs running online parity? You take a backup of your VMs and if you have drive failure you use a different disk for datastore, mount something over the network and restore your backups and your back up and running.

This is lower cost way to mitigate your setup imho. To me your more critical point of failure is the ability to run the VMs, no so much the data on the datastore on loss of hdd failure. While loss of hdd is a point of failure to be sure, loss of one if correct backups are done would mean min down time in your case. What could cause a much larger down time is loss of the host, or parts in the host. Money on to provide online parity might have been better spent on redundant or alternative host, etc.

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I would never use any EOL enterprise gear for something in production that I needed to keep running. Sure there are used replacement parts out there or complete systems, but when you need it what are you going to do, go search EBay or Craigslist to till you find what you want, then wait for it to ship, while you are down?

 

Not good business sense IMHO.

Perhaps you misunderstood me ? Im not suggesting this be used in enterprise but for home use instead of the pathetic overpriced offerings of synology and qnap
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The Red drives are designed for NAS use. Shouldn't you be looking at the black version maybe?

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I wouldn't go with RAID-5 or 6 simply for the write hole issue, unless you have serious RAID hardware to with it.  ZFS is a good choice for storage/NAS usage. :)

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"but there are always edge cases. Ideally, we're smart enough to identify whether or not we're an edge case."

Very true -- That is great you have mitigated your loss of your datastore with a raid setup, since your Vms being up is critical to your network. So clearly your way beyond a typical home setup.. I also run my router in VM, but other stuff on my esxi is play, or media storage - nothing critical to me working.

We could debate if 5 was the right choice for such a setup.. I would be more prone to 1 in your case. Doesn't sound like you need large amount of space so 1 gives you better protection for what your looking for from my take on it.

I would be concerned with loss of the powersupply or server hardware in your case. Do you have a secondary vm host you can migrate your VMs to in case of this sort of failure? If not doesn't seem like your mitigating the many other points of failure that could cause you grief. And just causing performance hit and more complexity in the setup. To be honest, to mitigate loss of your datastore wouldn't a just a backup work? Vs running online parity? You take a backup of your VMs and if you have drive failure you use a different disk for datastore, mount something over the network and restore your backups and your back up and running.

This is lower cost way to mitigate your setup imho. To me your more critical point of failure is the ability to run the VMs, no so much the data on the datastore on loss of hdd failure. While loss of hdd is a point of failure to be sure, loss of one if correct backups are done would mean min down time in your case. What could cause a much larger down time is loss of the host, or parts in the host. Money on to provide online parity might have been better spent on redundant or alternative host, etc.

 

Yeah there are many ways to improve upon my current setup. I do have a backup host that can run the VMs in the case of a hardware failure in the host. It would be minimal downtime to do so (simply putting the disks in the other host will allow me to boot the VMs faster than I can restore from backup)... In my experience, I have HDD failures more than other hardware failures in my hosts so I mitigated the most likely scenario, but I have to trade off on where the cost outweigh the benefits.

 

I do nightly backups of all of my VMs using Veeam locally and another set monthly that goes off site. Restoring from a backup will lose at most a days worth of emails and phone information, but can be less of an issue depending on the day.

I wouldn't go with RAID-5 or 6 simply for the write hole issue, unless you have serious RAID hardware to with it.  ZFS is a good choice for storage/NAS usage. :)

I have a BBU on my RAID controllers to help mitigate against this...

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Maybe I'm the odd one out but I don't see the perpetual need to have the enormous amount of space some folks around here strive for

 

500GB is way more than I'd ever need. Just as an example.

 

Then again, I don't store a lot of music/pictures. Mostly just application coding.

Yeah, actually, until I moved overseas and had to convert all my CD music to digital (FLAC files, which use a lot of space), I wouldn't have had such need for so much space.

 

Now, all my music is played into my stereo via my PC, so I'm glad I have plenty.  Having said that, I would never need 16 TB.  I have a 3 TB and a 1 TB drive, and a 85 GB SSD for my OS and apps.  Even with a lot of video files and music, I've got tons of available space for growth.

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Man what do you people store so much on your computers? I don't own a desktop PC anymore and my Ultrabook has 256GB SSD and I have 1.5 TB external HDD plugged into my USB hub at the office and another 1 TB that I carry with me and both have tons and tons of space left even after I have half of the ISO's from my MSDN subscription... Then again I don't download movies from torrent sites often...

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Man what do you people store so much on your computers? I don't own a desktop PC anymore and my Ultrabook has 256GB SSD and I have 1.5 TB external HDD plugged into my USB hub at the office and another 1 TB that I carry with me and both have tons and tons of space left even after I have half of the ISO's from my MSDN subscription... Then again I don't download movies from torrent sites often...

For me, lossless and lossy music I've ripped.  I have videos from my HD Sony video camera, and pictures from my Canon DSLR. Many ISOs from my old MSDN and TechNet Subscriptions.  I have a 17 month old little girl, and we want to preserve these memories in video and photos!  But mostly the space is from music.

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Perhaps you misunderstood me ? Im not suggesting this be used in enterprise but for home use instead of the pathetic overpriced offerings of synology and qnap

 

I wouldn't even use them in my home, if it was data I didn't want to lose or wanted to keep the system up and running. I'd rather pay ($199) for an excellent 2 drive Synology that does a TON of stuff, with a warranty and piece of mind knowing it's going to work with minimal setup/administration once you configure it. You get what you pay for, and honestly, if $199 is out of your price range you shouldn't even be dabbling in a setup like this.

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Budman is very loud in here :laugh:  I need a couple of those drives.  Waiting for the gift from Budman.

 

I want those drives but dang bad review on newegg

post-956-0-24180100-1399581799.png

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I wouldn't even use them in my home, if it was data I didn't want to lose or wanted to keep the system up and running. I'd rather pay ($199) for an excellent 2 drive Synology that does a TON of stuff, with a warranty and piece of mind knowing it's going to work with minimal setup/administration once you configure it. You get what you pay for, and honestly, if $199 is out of your price range you shouldn't even be dabbling in a setup like this.

Do you buy your computers from Packard Bell with recovery partitions for the same reason ?

lol @ $199 for 2 bays :rofl: You could get 2 SAS expanders for that price with support for 28 SAS drives. Its not that the price is high (typing this on a g19s on a network with clustered HP servers running close to 100VMs) but the fact that for 15$ you can get a card that will run rings around what you get from qnap and sinology... A card which is isn't the best available by a longshot P800 P812 etc but again has 8 ports 512MB cache BBU RAID6 etc

 

Oh well some people like paying more and getting less I guess. I just want to let people know that there are far far better alternatives than these trashcans and no need to buy WD RED AKA the poor mans SAS drive in order to overcome the limitations of these boxes.

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I wouldn't even use them in my home, if it was data I didn't want to lose or wanted to keep the system up and running. I'd rather pay ($199) for an excellent 2 drive Synology that does a TON of stuff, with a warranty and piece of mind knowing it's going to work with minimal setup/administration once you configure it. You get what you pay for, and honestly, if $199 is out of your price range you shouldn't even be dabbling in a setup like this.

Do you replace all of your hardware as soon as the warranty expires? Otherwise, you're operating without a warranty at some point...

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Do you buy your computers from Packard Bell with recovery partitions for the same reason ?

lol @ $199 for 2 bays :rofl: You could get 2 SAS expanders for that price with support for 28 SAS drives. Its not that the price is high (typing this on a g19s on a network with clustered HP servers running close to 100VMs) but the fact that for 15$ you can get a card that will run rings around what you get from qnap and sinology... A card which is isn't the best available by a longshot P800 P812 etc but again has 8 ports 512MB cache BBU RAID6 etc

 

Oh well some people like paying more and getting less I guess. I just want to let people know that there are far far better alternatives than these trashcans and no need to buy WD RED AKA the poor mans SAS drive in order to overcome the limitations of these boxes.

Additionally, you can carry LSI arrays across to other LSI hardware.. So you don't need to always find the exact card you're using...

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Do you buy your computers from Packard Bell with recovery partitions for the same reason ?

lol @ $199 for 2 bays :rofl: You could get 2 SAS expanders for that price with support for 28 SAS drives. Its not that the price is high (typing this on a g19s on a network with clustered HP servers running close to 100VMs) but the fact that for 15$ you can get a card that will run rings around what you get from qnap and sinology... A card which is isn't the best available by a longshot P800 P812 etc but again has 8 ports 512MB cache BBU RAID6 etc

 

Oh well some people like paying more and getting less I guess. I just want to let people know that there are far far better alternatives than these trashcans and no need to buy WD RED AKA the poor mans SAS drive in order to overcome the limitations of these boxes.

I think what really devalues your attempt at "help" is the condescending tone that you are so superior to the poor people that are idiots because they don't buy what you think they should buy.  If you want to help, share information, just don't sound like an ass.

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I think what really devalues your attempt at "help" is the condescending tone that you are so superior to the poor people that are idiots because they don't buy what you think they should buy.  If you want to help, share information, just don't sound like an ass.

I try but its hard to keep a straight face when talking about synoligy and qnap selling their dinky cramped boxes for outrageous prices

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I try but its hard to keep a straight face when talking about synoligy and qnap selling their dinky cramped boxes for outrageous prices

I definitely don't know enough about the subject to comment on it but it's hard to take your comments seriously when you're basically insulting someone that knows less than you (like me).  If you have the knowledge or even a well-formed opinion just try to be respectful about it and it'll go a long ways.

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I'm looking for a backup solution but don't want to pay for a QNAP when I have a box that performs all of the functions I would use NAS for. Obviously part of the cost is in its functionality, I literally just need something that can backup multiple sources over my network and nothing more. I could easily throw a couple more HDDs into my main box but this wouldn't protect from a catastrophic failure. It would be good to have something hidden away.

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Man what do you people store so much on your computers? I don't own a desktop PC anymore and my Ultrabook has 256GB SSD and I have 1.5 TB external HDD plugged into my USB hub at the office and another 1 TB that I carry with me and both have tons and tons of space left even after I have half of the ISO's from my MSDN subscription... Then again I don't download movies from torrent sites often...

For me it's digital video.  I do video production... and a weekend shoot could generate 20-30GBs of material.  

 

In the old days... I had videotapes of the originals. But now... my camcorder generates a bunch of files that I need to keep somewhere.

 

I have a pair of 2TB Green drives that act as my archives... one drive is a copy of the other.  But now they're almost full.

 

I averaged about 400GB of video a year from my camcorder in 2012 and 2013.

 

4TB drives would keep me going for a while :)

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  • 2 months later...

"I realize RAID5 is not a real backup solution but it's good as I can get right now"

 

No it is not, and you understand the larger your disks and array get, the more likely it is that you wont be able to restore from parity anyway..

 

What exactly is in your 6TB of data that can not be recovered?  Calculate the cost of your parity - you needed a raid card?, you for sure needed to buy a disk that gives you enough space to create the parity.  For what - you have clearly stated that you understand raid is not a backup.  So you have spent money to hope that if a drive fails you an recover the files from the parity - that may not even work.  What if 2 disks die?  What if your machine catches fire?  Your spending money for backup, that is not even a backup ;)  What is that not having to restore from backup buy you - a few hours of your time "maybe" down the road for non critical stuff..  Rather spend that money on beer ;)

 

And what is so critical in 6TB of data?  Unless you say home movies/pictures/something you created then I have to disagree on its critical nature in a home setup.  I have the complete Star Trek original series in my library - It would suck having to rerip it sure, would take some time.  When was the last time I watched one of those?  Would I loose anything if went away?  No not really other than some point in the future I would pop the disk back into my computer and rip it to my library again.. Because I like to have it there at my fingertips vs having to pull out the disk, etc.  Worse case scenario my house burns down.. Oh #### lost my "backup" media of ST-TOS -- what to do what to do.. Oh wait my home owners insurance, I am quite sure they have 100 if not 1000s to buy still.  Oh #### look at that new  HD version of ST-TOS on BR..  Well screw my old SD copy, now I have better copy and when I get around to it put back in my library, etc.  What was the point of spending money for parity again?  I just do not see it in the home sorry..  I would love to hear why you feel the money your short on is was best spent on parity for something that if not online 24/7 looses you what?

 

So should I spend money on parity to save me possible future time that I may or may not even spend?

 

Now you know what I can not loose - videos and pictures of my grand daughter..  Should I trust that to raid, F no as we clearly all understand raid is not a "backup"  So I have copies on multiple disks in my home, I have copies on optical media both local and my son's house that is 30 plus miles away..  You would hope that any sort of natural disaster would not take out both locations..  Now if they drop a nuke on Chicago - both places prob gone, etc..  Lets hope Amazon storage is online still in that worse case scenario ;)  The roughly 100GB of actual critical movies and pictures cost me a whole $1 a month on glacier to have my piece of mind and DR..  When it grows to the point that its more cost effective to back it up with some unlimited for price per year service - then will move it there.  Either way the money spent on actual backup of my "critical" files I assure you is way less than the cost of your disk for "parity"..

 

You mention lack of $, well your method I am fairly sure is $ not very well spent in overall safety of your critical files.  And that your storing them on RAID without a backup shows that they are not very critical in the first place - so your spending money that buys you nothing but possible loss of some future time in a rerip, redownload, etc.  For someone that has lack of $ this seems less than wise ;)

 

I realize this is old but I missed this. I didn't need to buy a raid card, I have 8 SATA ports, 4x2TB + 2x3TB (+SSD+Blu-Ray drive), didn't need to buy a drive for parity either, I already had the data on 2x2TBs backed to the other 2x2TBs, so I simply copied the data off to a 3TB while I still had not much data, then created the RAID5 out of the 4x2TBs. I think everyone has different priorities, the data is just not that important, but I would rather not re-acquire it. So I could have 6TB backed to another 6TBs, but I'd need 2 more 2TB drives, plus a SATA port card or RAID card, plus my case won't take more HDDs so a new case, and my power supply is out of SATA connectors (though I could probably use splitters). In certain circumstances, like mine, RAID5 is pretty good. Like I said I had a drive fail and it rebuilt fine, if it fails to rebuild eventually it's not a big deal most of my data are just downloads which I can re-acquire, it's just time and hassle. And I keep the stuff I like the most on the 2x3TBs which are mirrored using robocopy. Seems like you're grasping at straws to make RAID5 look bad, but it can be useful depending on the person and their requirements. Don't look at it as 'omg my data can never be deleted' or 'pfft who cares if it gets deleted tomorrow', think more in degrees of desire to keep it, and offset that by money restrictions. RAID5 fits these perfectly in my case.

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Not grasping at anything to make raid5 look bad. Its a great tech, be it 25 years old or not ;) I just don't see it as needed in a home setup. Raid is meant to mitigate down time on hardware failure. All disks will die at some point, this is just fact.

If the data is critical to have online 24/7/365 then raid makes for a great mitigation of loss of time where data is not online. This makes no sense in a home setup - it just doesn't plain simple fact.

Your wife/kids might bitch at you if your media library is offline - to me this does not justify cost of raid.

If you want to create parity for your data to mitigate rerip there are more cost effective way in the home. Unraid is a more cost effective way of creating parity. flexraid, snapraid, zfs all options to help protect you from having to restore from backup in case of disk failure. All of which have plenty of pro's vs your typical hardware based raid5 setup.

As disks get bigger and bigger, and arrays get bigger and bigger the odds of your array even being able to restore a failed disk become less and less likely. Its time to move on and get with current ways to mitigate risk of disk failure is my point. And most of us don't have enterprise budgets to protect our libraries to there are many cost effective ways to go other than raid5.

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