Raid users - your experiences

[+Fahim S. MVC]

I don't know of any hardware raid cards which can support what you want. But to be honest ZFS is better anyway. I've read quite a few studies on the reliability of ZFS and in every one it has been found to be much more reliable than hardware RAID cards.

So it has a lot of benefits such as..

File Deduplication (Although this needs a lot of RAM and isn't recommended to use right now)

3 Disk Parity instead of dual like RAID6

Use different sized disks

Constantly checks the least accessed sectors of your disks for consistency so data corruption doesn't creep up on you

A lot more cost effective because you can use cheap interface cards instead of expensive raid cards

Doesn't care if disks have TLER or not because it will happily wait for a disk to complete its 1+ Minute recovery of bad sectors without dropping the disks from the array.

With all these pros the only reason not to use ZFS is that choosing it pretty much dictates your chosen operating system to FreeBSD, FreeNAS or Solaris. Apart from that it is the perfect storage system.

That was what I suspected. I don't really want to go the ZFS route because I don't want to learn administration of a *nix/BSD system. Storage spaces has me very interested but I wouldn't exactly describe it as trusted yet.

[Vice]

That was what I suspected. I don't really want to go the ZFS route because I don't want to learn administration of a *nix/BSD system. Storage spaces has me very interested but I wouldn't exactly describe it as trusted yet.

I feel the same way, personally my main server runs Windows Server 2008 R2. And although I want to use ZFS I can't make the sacrifice of switching operating systems at this point. It just doesn't make sense in my infrastructure but I would love to be able to use it one day. Right now I'm using Dedicated Raid Cards with Intel CPU's SAS Expander cards and RAID6.

[+Fahim S. MVC]

I feel the same way, personally my main server runs Windows Server 2008 R2. And although I want to use ZFS I can't make the sacrifice of switching operating systems at this point. It just doesn't make sense in my infrastructure but I would love to be able to use it one day. Right now I'm using Dedicated Raid Cards with Intel CPU's SAS Expander cards and RAID6.

I am building my server and right now it is running as a test rig with WHS2011. I am seriously thinking of going Server 2012 Essentials.

I have 4 x 2.5" bays and 4x3.5" bays with a RAID0/1/10/5/50 card. Ideally I would like to make a single large storage pool but the largest 2.5" TLER friendly drive would be 1TB but 1TB would be a waste in the 3.5" bays where 2/3TB per bay sounds more sensible.

[metro2012]

No it wasn't clear because you said expanding. Expanding an array is completely possible if you use the same sized disks or larger disks. It is known as Online Capacity Expansion or OCE and it is common in RAID language to say Expanding when adding an extra disk to a pre-existing array.

If you had 250GB + 250GB + 250GB + 250GB and then added a 1TB disk to that array you can expand that array. But that array won't be expanded by 1TB, only an extra 250GB with the remaining 750GB of that 1TB disk going unused.

What you should have said in your original post was that you wanted to change from lower capacity disks to higher capacity disks you then have to replace all your old disks in the array. Saying expanding the array makes it sound like you are unable to expand the array in any way at all.

In your post here:

You never mentioned what your current RAID array was made up as. I believed from your post that your RAID5 array was already made up of 3TB disks and you merely wanted to add more disks to it and you were saying that you had to add another 4x3TB because your RAID controller wouldn't allow you to only add 1x3TB to your pre-existing array. You didn't make it clear that your array was using much smaller disks and you actually wanted to change disks.

someone else saw that it was pretty clear that i ment expand as in bigger storage space.....

but now we all understand each other :)