StunningSuits Posted February 12, 2016 Share Posted February 12, 2016 Hey, I recently bought some four 4TB Nas Drives, and was looking at my options for different raid, I bought a HighPoint RocketRAID 2680, but can exchange it for a 2720 that supports raid 6. I currently have about 4.5 TB of data I would transfer to it, and would want to be able to expand it in the future. I was thinking raid 5, but I read that its not reliable with larger volumes, and also was thinking about raid 6. And my original plan was a raid 10 but not 100% sure if I can expand it in the future. I'm currently running server 2012 R2 essentials, but thats not required for me as its mainly a media/storage server and I can configure computer backups to go on a network share. The specs of the server are an AMD phenom 9650, 7GB of ram. I'm open to also doing something like freenas, but not 100% sure what the best option is for me, Any Advice would be greatly appreciated Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted February 12, 2016 Share Posted February 12, 2016 I would not do RAID anymore for non-business use. I would suggest Storage Spaces. You get all the benefits with less technical restrictions. RAID10 is hard to expand with some controllers, RAID5 sounds nice but in practice is risky, with RAID6 you will lose two drives like with RAID10. Storage Spaces is also compatible with any other Windows machine. I have my media server running as a VM on my main desktop that has a data drive stored on a 10TB Storage Spaces array in parity. You don't lose any capacity this way and you're still protected against a drive failure. UnRAID is also an option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Circaflex Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 (edited) Storage spaces is crap if you want to create a giant pool to store stuff on invest the 30 bucks into stablebit drivepool you'll be happy to never have touched storage spaces. It it works great with 2012 and has saved my butt a few times with bad drives. Just ask @budman how great drivepool is. You can continue to add drives whenever you want and removing a drive is simple as well. I fiddled with storage spaces for to long and found it is a half assed attempt at creating something similar to what drive extender did in whsv1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
binaryzero Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 Storage Spaces works great if you have the correct infrastructure and networking in place, not the home labs people use here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Circaflex Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 Except, isn't the idea of Storage Spaces is that it offers a solution for home users, who can't afford a fancy expensive RAID card to get things going. It's software RAID, so it's normal performance is slow. My other gripe is the fact that the system unmounts full drives without the ability to remount manually is beyond stupid. The lack of proper rebalancing is just laughable. I actually think this is geared for home labs and home users, not the enterprise level. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
binaryzero Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 (edited) When has Windows Server been marketed towards home users? lol.. TL;DR - I've only setup Storage spaces once in production, rest of the time the client orders a proper RAID solution (NAS or SAN). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Circaflex Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 (edited) So that wasn't your original argument, but storage spaces is not limited to server 2012 r2 essentials, you can find it in windows 8 and 10. Most home brew nas/mediaserver/homeserver people have upgraded to server 2012 essentials if they were familiar with whs v1. My point still stands, storage spaces is very underwhelming when compared to stablebits drive pool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
binaryzero Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 And stablebit is underwhelming to a proper solution ;x I really don't care lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BinaryData Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 So, there are a few options for you. 1. Stable Bit - It offers some redundancy but at the cost of disk space (Lose whatever space based off options). I use Stable Bit, I love it however it irritates me some what. 2. Storage Spaces - It's nice, if you can get it to work. I had massive problems with it. 3. Software RAID - For home users, this'll work just as well as Hardware. I've had a few good discussions with our storage engineers at work, they use software raid on their home networks because of the cost of RAID Cards + SAS Expanders. 1 minute ago, Circaflex said: So that wasn't your original argument, but storage spaces is not limited to server 2012 r2 essentials. Most home brew nas/mediaserver/homeserver people have upgraded to server 2012 essentials if they were familiar with whs v1. My point still stands, storage spaces is very underwhelming when compared to stablebits drive pool. Storage Spaces is Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2 are the ones with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Circaflex Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 (edited) 4 minutes ago, Jared- said: And stablebit is underwhelming to a proper solution ;x I really don't care lol. what exactly is your argument here? the OP specifically stated for a home server type setup. Drivepool is perfectly fine for a home server, I just don't see why you are in here arguing the things you have, and then when someone questions what you are arguing about you say you don't care. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
binaryzero Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 Dude, I'm just talking ######. Passing the time? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StunningSuits Posted February 15, 2016 Author Share Posted February 15, 2016 5 hours ago, Circaflex said: Storage spaces is crap if you want to create a giant pool to store stuff on invest the 30 bucks into stablebit drivepool you'll be happy to never have touched storage spaces. It it works great with 2012 and has saved my butt a few times with bad drives. Just ask @budman how great drivepool is. You can continue to add drives whenever you want and removing a drive is simple as well. I fiddled with storage spaces for to long and found it is a half assed attempt at creating something similar to what drive extender did in whsv1 I'll look into Stablebit, I wont have the drives till Tuesday anyways and want to do a full write on them as I've heard bad things about getting DOA drives, and I always bought locally before this. 4 hours ago, BinaryData said: So, there are a few options for you. 1. Stable Bit - It offers some redundancy but at the cost of disk space (Lose whatever space based off options). I use Stable Bit, I love it however it irritates me some what. 2. Storage Spaces - It's nice, if you can get it to work. I had massive problems with it. 3. Software RAID - For home users, this'll work just as well as Hardware. I've had a few good discussions with our storage engineers at work, they use software raid on their home networks because of the cost of RAID Cards + SAS Expanders. Storage Spaces is Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2 are the ones with it. It seems like other people have had problems with storage spaces too, when it comes to Stablebit I'll look into some more, and maybe try it out to see if it works well, I'm not really worried about the space it will take awhile to fill another 3TB if I go with a 2 drive redundancy. Mainly looking at something that will keep my data accessible if I have a drive die, I don't need fast write speeds as backups generally happen overnight, and media files I can transfer overnight also if I have a lot of them, read speeds as long as it can support 2-3 plex streams at a time I'm happy with that lol. I do also plan on having a 8TB HDD that I keep offsite as a backup that I do once a month or when every I have any major changes to the content on the array. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BinaryData Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 Hmm.. I suggest poking BudMan about StableBit. He's quite knowledgeable in that respect. I still haven't quite got mine configured right. Stable Bit is JBOD but with some nifty configurations to make it live up to it's name. I have 16.3TB of space. I'm adding 3 more drives, and then I'll enable some redundancy. You can have it setup to eject a drive before it fails, saving data, or have it copy all that data to other drives before failure. How it detects failure, I don't know. I think they keep cloning Genie from Aladdin. =/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Circaflex Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 it detects failure based on the scanner app; usually smart warnings show first. i love it, glad i invested in this when i moved to 2012r2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BinaryData Posted February 15, 2016 Share Posted February 15, 2016 6 minutes ago, Circaflex said: it detects failure based on the scanner app; usually smart warnings show first. i love it, glad i invested in this when i moved to 2012r2 What I love about it is, it doesn't limit you on space. Well, it does but honestly, whose going to have like 200 YB in a single pool? That's just asking for a problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StunningSuits Posted February 15, 2016 Author Share Posted February 15, 2016 4 minutes ago, BinaryData said: Hmm.. I suggest poking BudMan about StableBit. He's quite knowledgeable in that respect. I still haven't quite got mine configured right. Stable Bit is JBOD but with some nifty configurations to make it live up to it's name. I have 16.3TB of space. I'm adding 3 more drives, and then I'll enable some redundancy. You can have it setup to eject a drive before it fails, saving data, or have it copy all that data to other drives before failure. How it detects failure, I don't know. I think they keep cloning Genie from Aladdin. =/ I'll have to do that, I'm honestly paranoid of losing data again, I've only had 2 drives with a lot of data die on my in my life (Lots of laptop HDD have died on me, before I moved to SSD only back when 80GB SSD were like 200 bucks lol) and one of those was recently, luckily it wasn't anything I could get back with time, and some CPU Horse power. As long as I can set it up to it have some data redundancy I'm happy, again my long term plan is to have a offsite HDD for Backup just in case but would rather have redundancy so I can at least still access my files while it rebuilds rather then having to recopy everything over lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted February 16, 2016 Share Posted February 16, 2016 I don't know what all the fuss is about Storage Spaces. It's super simple to setup, performance is not bad at all, and it's a built in Windows feature. Hell, I even have my entire 10TB array encrypted with BitLocker. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
binaryzero Posted February 16, 2016 Share Posted February 16, 2016 ^ It's home labs with a mixed bag of hardware that you get strange results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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