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UndyingShadow posted:Why exactly wouldn't raid-5 (or raidz) work? Was under the impression that unless I use a wicked expensive hardware based raid controller with battery backup, I was pretty much asking for trouble and that software raid 5 solutions would shit the bed early and often (regardless of HDD failure). Not really sure how raidz changes that (although I'm not 100% on what that is - my quick google research hasn't yielded a lot of info that I can understand). Edit: Am doing some reading on Windows Home Server (as I remember thinking that it seemed like an interesting solution for a while) and am finding that a lot of people seem to be replacing Windows Home Server with Windows 8 and its new Storage Spaces feature basically taking up the functionality of the abandoned WHS. My thoughts on this are that it's interesting, but concerning if there's zero fault tolerance built in. Granted, the storage pool is a nice factor in that if one drive goes out, only 25% of that data is lost, but it would be nice to see some form of parity built in to repair the disk instead of having to reload 3-4 TB of data. Psimitry fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Battery backup is 100% for performance, not reliability - it's to keep data in cache present and able to write back to the drives if you lose power during a write operation, allowing you to treat data in cache as "written" instead of waiting for the disk to catch up. Unless you configure the cache as write-back, it doesn't benefit you at all. And even if you do, it only improves writes; doesn't do anything for reads or rebuilds or anything else. RAID5 / raidz is only a problem if you are doing a lot of write-intensive work on a software RAID, and CPU performance for other tasks is a concern. raidz is the RAID5-type implementation of software raid within ZFS - which is probably what you would want to use if you switch from Win7 to FreeBSD or NAS4Free / FreeNAS / Ubuntu. The problem with keeping yourself Windows-only is that unless you go mucking around in the registry, you can't create a RAID5-type dynamic disk without going to a Server OS (though dynamic disks are awful anyway). Ultimately, what do you want the server to present to the rest of your network? If all you really want to do is present a bunch of SMB shares to the rest of your network, you'd be surprised what you can do with NAS4Free with relatively little work.
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Psimitry posted:Not really sure how raidz changes that (although I'm not 100% on what that is - my quick google research hasn't yielded a lot of info that I can understand). And then, ZFS is copy-on-write, which means that changes are always written elsewhere and the original data isn't overwritten. Same applies for the metadata tree. How it actually works is that the data is written first, then the metadata tree, and finally and only at the end, the uberblock is written, which is the root of the metadata tree. As long the uberblock didn't make it to the disk, for all your operating system knows after a power failure, the disks were never written to. Of course this is the simple version, if your app does partial writes over longer periods of time, your data might still be fucked after a failure, because it's incomplete. The on-disk format however will always be coherent, apart from cosmic rays fucking up memory cells (i.e. RAM) on metadata waiting to hit the disk.
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Woah, yeah I was more pointing out you don't want to do hardware raid5 with a cheap controller. You can do it if you want to but it's almost always better to just do it on software (As 5 or Z or whatever the beta BTRFS raid is called) if your SATA hosts can handle it. Not only does it often offer better control of the array, but it is often times much easier to recover a software based array. Since you're talking about a dedicated server for the NAS then the performance impact of a software based array is negligible. I pointed you to this thread for general advice and so you could check the OPs details. WHS is nearing EOL and it's a discontinued product so keep that in mind. Edit: One thing about Storage Spaces: it does have redundancy but it has to be configured at creation time. I guess this isn't exactly parity striping but it's something. Edit 2: Researched Storage Spaces on Win8 and they do support Parity Spaces, so I am not sure where this came from: quote:My thoughts on this are that it's interesting, but concerning if there's zero fault tolerance built in. Granted, the storage pool is a nice factor in that if one drive goes out, only 25% of that data is lost, but it would be nice to see some form of parity built in to repair the disk instead of having to reload 3-4 TB of data. deimos fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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I need a basic 2 or 4 disk NAS unit that's quiet and has NFS sharing and preferably wakes on network access. I obviously don't understand half of the OP. What should I be looking into?
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Cowcatcher posted:I need a basic 2 or 4 disk NAS unit that's quiet and has NFS sharing and preferably wakes on network access. I obviously don't understand half of the OP. HP microserver plus FreeNAS, NAS4Free, or your choice of UNIX-like distro. Synology or Drobo if you don't mind expensive and slow (pretty much all the offerings with 2-4 disks from those vendors are both).
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A Synology (a commercial off the shelf NAS with a friendly interface) might be perfect for someone who doesn't understand half of the Op. Unless, of course, you want to learn.
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deimos posted:Edit 2: Researched Storage Spaces on Win8 and they do support Parity Spaces, so I am not sure where this came from: On top of that, parity spaces are a) slow as fuck apparently, b) not supported by ReFS and as such not getting you the fancy recovery features, and c) can't expand to any late disk additions. If you have 4 disks in your pool, any created parity space at that time will be 3+1, requiring you to add disks in multiples of 4 to have it properly be able to allocate more space. Add only 3 disks instead of four, you'll have to recreate the parity spaces to use the newer layout (i.e. the now 7 disks leading to 6+1), or watch it shit the bed despite free space. Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Nov 27, 2013 |
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I'm trying to decide on how to set up a NAS for my ESXi box, and at this point I'm sort of conflicted. On the one hand I can buy either the Netgear ReadyNAS 314, the QNAP TS-421, or make my own Frankenstein setup using FreeNAS and a bunch of disks thrown into a mid-size tower. I like how much neater and easier it is to manage disks with the QNAP and ReadyNAS systems, but a friend brought up a question about portability - if the hardware dies, how likely is it that I will be unable to access my data if I choose to go to another NAS vendor? With the FreeNAS system I'm pretty sure I can get away with putting together another box and chucking in the drives and I'm good to go, but neither he nor I know much about how the 314 or the TS-421 store the data to be able to say with any degree of confidence that I can just move the drives in the event of a hardware failure and be up and running with a minimal amount of effort. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thoughts about an alternative setup?
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Daylen Drazzi posted:I'm trying to decide on how to set up a NAS for my ESXi box, and at this point I'm sort of conflicted. On the one hand I can buy either the Netgear ReadyNAS 314, the QNAP TS-421, or make my own Frankenstein setup using FreeNAS and a bunch of disks thrown into a mid-size tower. I like how much neater and easier it is to manage disks with the QNAP and ReadyNAS systems, but a friend brought up a question about portability - if the hardware dies, how likely is it that I will be unable to access my data if I choose to go to another NAS vendor? You're right. With manufacturer specific RAID, you can't just pop your drives into a new system and be up and running. With ZFS on FreeNAS, you can. You'd have to temporarily move the data somewhere, rebuild a new array on the new system and move the data back. Depending on how much data you have, this can be easy or hard. However, you should really have your data backed up, right? So this would be a non-issue for the most part.
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I recently bought a used D-Link 321 NAS, but I'm experiencing pretty slow transfer speeds. Transferring from a workstation (Debian) to the NAS, I'm getting a solid and steady 1.3MB/sec - at first I thought it was being limited by possible crappy WiFi (even though I knew this wasn't the case), but just to be sure I plugged in directly - but again, it reached 1.3MB/sec and stayed. What am I missing here? I can get fine speeds over USB, or from computer to computer, so I thought this might be the best thread to ask in. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks! ![]()
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Newegg has the 3TB Red for $120.
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Is drivebender still the defacto choice for softraid on Windows? Or is there something better?
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Crackbone posted:Is drivebender still the defacto choice for softraid on Windows? Or is there something better? I had great results in the past with FlexRaid. https://www.flexraid.com
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Yup. Got me 4 of 'em. Edit: Still trying to figure out what OS I'm going to be using on this server once I get the thing rebuilt. Psimitry fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Nov 29, 2013 |
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With these black friday deals, I'm considering upgrading the drives in one of my N40Ls. Would I be better off going with 6 drive RAIDz2 or a 5 drive RAIDz1 with 1 SSD cache?
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kiwid posted:With these black friday deals, I'm considering upgrading the drives in one of my N40Ls. Would I be better off going with 6 drive RAIDz2 or a 5 drive RAIDz1 with 1 SSD cache? How much do you care about your data? a little? RAIDZ1 a lot? RAIDZ2 Personally I have an 8-drive RAIDZ1 because most of it is downloaded media which is replaceable if lost. If I was storing family photos or things that weren't replaceable, I'd use RAIDZ2.
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titaniumone posted:How much do you care about your data? RAID is NOT Backup. If it's something irreplaceable you back that shit up. For home use Z1 vs. Z2 is irrelevant because your downtime is relatively insignificant. And that's what you're getting protection from, downtime.
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deimos posted:RAID is NOT Backup. If it's something irreplaceable you back that shit up. For home use Z1 vs. Z2 is irrelevant because your downtime is relatively insignificant. And that's what you're getting protection from, downtime. My point remains, the reason people use RAIDZ2/Z3 instead of Z1 for home use is because they're afraid of having a second disk fail during a rebuild from an initial disk failure. Backing up to the cloud or whatever is a separate discussion.
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titaniumone posted:My point remains, the reason people use RAIDZ2/Z3 instead of Z1 for home use is because they're afraid of having a second disk fail during a rebuild from an initial disk failure. That has nothing to do with how much or how little you care about data, it matters how much or how little you care about your ~~ precious downtime ~~. So your point was moot.
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Yeah I'll definitely have a separate backup. I really want z2 but im willing to go z1 + l2arc if it's a major performance difference.
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L2ARC makes only sense on high workloads combing through large datasets. If you're just streaming movies, music and access ISOs on it, at most get another stick of RAM or two.
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Combat Pretzel posted:L2ARC makes only sense on high workloads combing through large datasets. If you're just streaming movies, music and access ISOs on it, at most get another stick of RAM or two. That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Decision made.
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eightysixed posted:I recently bought a used D-Link 321 NAS, but I'm experiencing pretty slow transfer speeds. Transferring from a workstation (Debian) to the NAS, I'm getting a solid and steady 1.3MB/sec - at first I thought it was being limited by possible crappy WiFi (even though I knew this wasn't the case), but just to be sure I plugged in directly - but again, it reached 1.3MB/sec and stayed. What am I missing here? I owned both a DNS-321 and later a DNS-323. They're slow devices. I used to get around 8-10MB on my 321, but man, you're torturing yourself still using that thing. There's probably a few things you could do to troubleshoot it (reformat the HDD/check the HDD for errors/reflash NAS firmware), but you should really upgrade. There are far superior options out there that will improve your transfers easily by 10x on a gig network.
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Out of all the shit on sale this whole week, the WD RED's never go on sale...
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Gozinbulx posted:Out of all the shit on sale this whole week, the WD RED's never go on sale... It wasn't the $99 that I was expecting (and HOPING for), but they DID go on sale...
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Well I guess I meant the 4tb's. Gotta maximize those bays.
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Psimitry posted:It wasn't the $99 that I was expecting (and HOPING for), but they DID go on sale... Yeah, B&H still has them (well, as the retail packaged "Network" drive, but it seems to be a WD30EFRX inside the box all the same). Amazon matched Newegg as a ligtning deal. I think the $180 price that someone had on the 4TB Red is far and away the cheapest you'll see them for quite some time; the flagship capacity drive is not usually one that gets much in the way of discounts.
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For anyone interested, this is how Newegg is shipping the drives:![]() ![]() Looks like they're still not shipping them in manufacturer's packaging.
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Buy like 20 and they'll ship them in a box like this![]()
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kiwid posted:For anyone interested, this is how Newegg is shipping the drives: What's wrong with that? It looks like the drive is still surrounded by a 1" cushion on all sides, which is about all you'd get from a retail box anyway. To me that looks even better than the old plastic cradles on each end, because it would give a little more resistance if something hit in the middle of the box.
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Mthrboard posted:What's wrong with that? It looks like the drive is still surrounded by a 1" cushion on all sides, which is about all you'd get from a retail box anyway. To me that looks even better than the old plastic cradles on each end, because it would give a little more resistance if something hit in the middle of the box. According to others in the thread, drives from Newegg have a high failure rate and high DOA rate which some have attributed to the packaging (also take a look at Newegg feedback for the drives). I guess I'll find out soon.
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That looks way better than my last one. I last ordered a hard drive from Newegg about 6 months ago and they weren't using that style of wrap then. Just the drive in an anti-static bag and some air bubble stuff randomly stuffed in the box around it.
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Yeah, that's better than the last batch of three I ordered - each had a lot of bubble wrap on it, but they were ultimately loose in the box with packing peanuts. Those drives have the same amount of bubble wrap but are actually held in place in the box by the bubble wrap.
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There are some brilliant reviews on Amazon from people who ordered drives with "frustration free packaging." Sounds like they basically just put the drive in a jiffy padded envelope and sent it out. ![]()
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I have a 7 drive Z3 freenas setup, backing up to a NL54, it's a great setup. The problem is I don't use them that often, so I shut them down and start them up every once in a while, which is probably bad for the drives, but whatever. In any case, every so often I'll get a couple of checksum errors on 2 of the drives, I don't know if they are random drives, but only 2, probably the same drives every time. in the 10s, or hundreds, of checksum errors. This past time I did a scrub, and cleared the status, and all seemed well. Should I be alarmed? Is this a sign of coming failure of both drives? Is this common? Or is this some weird transient thing?
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Sharrow posted:There are some brilliant reviews on Amazon from people who ordered drives with "frustration free packaging." Not for my drives. They came like this: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images...ZtL._AA300_.jpg (Not my picture.) Inside a box with enough airbags to anchor them semi-firmly to the bigger box they are in. I ran destructive badblocks twice on each drive and they had no problems.
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deimos posted:Not for my drives. They came like this: Consider yourself lucky they upgraded their packaging from the last time I ordered a HDD from them - they literally took a static bag wrapped HDD, dropped in one of their 12x8x4 boxes, put in a single cell air cushion and shipped it. Returned that post-haste.
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Last time I ordered two drives from them (and a few other things), they just tossed them into the bottom of one of those large flat boxes, tossed in a motherboard box, 2 layers of paper on top, and shipped it.
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I bought Reds drive from Newegg last year and they were packed in bubble wrap in a big box of peanuts and one was DOA. I don't think it's normal or good to have regular checksum errors on the drive. Run a SMART test and RMA that shit ASAP.
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