Please advise on 25TB storage requirement

bhvn · 14 Oct 2018 at 22:33

Hi,

I have a requirement of around 25TB space with redundancy so planning to buy a RAID enclosure.

- ~25TB usable space
- No need for NAS capability
- RAID 5 (for redundancy & speed is not an important issue)
- atleast 5 bays
- USB 3 or 3.1 is fine
- planning for 8TB x 5 drives OR 6TB x 5 (6TBx5 might be tight as usable would be around 22-23TB. I might go with 6TB as they are cheaper if I buy 8-bay enclosure)

Could anyone please advise decent RAID5 enclosure with HDDs? Less the price the better.

Thanks!!

SupraWez · 14 Oct 2018 at 22:42

Subscribed to see what gets recommended.

A six to eight bay should do the trick.

Resistance · 14 Oct 2018 at 23:16

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/networking/nas-devices/professional-nas

bremen1874 · 15 Oct 2018 at 00:31

RAID5 isn't a good idea for this. The odds of loosing the entire array during a rebuild is too high.

Look at RAID6 or some other dual parity option.

More complete information on how it's going to be used would help with providing suggestions.

xb8browney · 15 Oct 2018 at 01:18

I don't have anything to add,

I'm just curious as to why you need that much storage.

MissChief · 15 Oct 2018 at 01:24

Don’t forget the only true backup is an off-site one. Look into cloud storage and get it backed up overnight.

bhvn · 15 Oct 2018 at 01:34

We are in Professional photography and video business. ATM we have lot of individual disks and making 2 copies of each video/photo (these are very HQ, big size files and we must maintain 2 sets of copies). It's very difficult to manage data on multiple drives. So instead of 2 sets of copy/backup we thought of RAID solution with huge volume so its easy to maintain data/integrity. Thanks!

bhvn · 15 Oct 2018 at 01:41

bremen1874 said:
RAID5 isn't a good idea for this. The odds of loosing the entire array during a rebuild is too high.

Look at RAID6 or some other dual parity option.

More complete information on how it's going to be used would help with providing suggestions.

Could you please throw more light on why i should NOT use RAID-5? It has one 1 disk redundancy with distributed parity. If one drive goes down and I replace it immediately (before 2nd one goes down) then I should be good, right? Also we are using smart disk monitoring tools to keep a track of drives.

bremen1874 · 15 Oct 2018 at 02:34

The rebuild of a RAID array is the time when the drives will see the highest sustained load (and with 6TB+ drives over an extended period).

You're therefore hammering the drives at the time you can least afford for a drive to fail.

And as always 'RAID != backup'.

Also you say that you have 'No need for NAS capability' when it sounds like a NAS is what you should be looking for (or do you only have one PC you want to connect to it?).

bhvn · 15 Oct 2018 at 03:29

We have few machines but We want to restrict the storage only to 1 machine. Maybe we will use "Windows share" temporarily when needed. Thats why not preferring NAS option. BTW what would be the cost difference between "NAS storage" vs "RAID enclosure connected to a PC"?

Thanks!

Resistance · 15 Oct 2018 at 03:33

You never said how much you want to spend

bhvn · 15 Oct 2018 at 04:46

Resistance said:
You never said how much you want to spend

Because I have no idea about it.
I would like to hear from experts here about few models/solutions with their rough prices then I can perhaps make a decision.

Resistance · 15 Oct 2018 at 05:38

bhvn said:
Because I have no idea about it.
I would like to hear from experts here about few models/solutions with their rough prices then I can perhaps make a decision.

See the other post I made post 3

FreeStream · 15 Oct 2018 at 07:45

If absolute performance isn’t a requirement then UnRAID is the way to go.

Been using it for years.

Either use it on a pre-built NAS or something you’ve knocked up yourself.

bledd · 15 Oct 2018 at 14:28

DS1618+
6x 10TB Western Digital Red (get Red Pro if it'll be used by many people heavily at the same time)
Set it in RAID10 mode, that'll give you 30GB of space.

RAID5 shouldn't be used with larger disks, the rebuild time/performance hit is too great.

bhvn · 15 Oct 2018 at 17:57

Thank you bledd & everyone for your replies.

Any suggestions on just RAID enclosures please ( without NAS option) as I prefer to connect it directly to a PC.

regards,

Armageus · 15 Oct 2018 at 18:17

bhvn said:
Any suggestions on just RAID enclosures please ( without NAS option) as I prefer to connect it directly to a PC.

A NAS will be a better option 99% of the time. Buying a separate enclosure and pcie raid card to run it will cost a similar amount.

Vince · 15 Oct 2018 at 18:27

If it's just straight up backup and possible duplicate data I would go with a HP StoreOnce 4500. I have a couple of 24tb ones in sync for vmware backups and they do an admirable job of dedupe and compression across my estate. They basically back up 84 x 600gb SAS mech drives that we use in our 6500 eva. If you want it for anything data critical do it properly, otherwise something like an 8 bay qnap might do the job.

Journey · 16 Oct 2018 at 08:08

bhvn said:
Could anyone please advise decent RAID5 enclosure with HDDs? Less the price the better.

How much do you value your data? If this is the main storage array and not a back up then you really be looking at something far more 'redundant' than a RAID 5 setup connected to a single PC. I'm not saying don't connect it to a PC, I've not long just setup a Qnap Thunderbolt 3 NAS/DAS box (TVS-1282T3), which has 60TB of local storage and an 4TB SSD cache, and a third tier of M.2 SSD disk for cache acceleration, this is connected directly the 3 computers using TB3 allowing the Video work to be done directly on the device but it wasn't bargain basement, far from it but it's a solution that will pay for itself over it's lifespan.

More information, and some kind of budget would help, you must have had a cost in mind when deciding this was the approach you wanted to take? The fact you mention that "I might go with 6TB as they are cheaper if I buy 8-bay enclosure" means you have obviously looked into it already. You could grab something like an 8-Bay HighPoint RocketStor 6628T which cost about £1k un-populated, and does most of the RAID configurations you asked for.

Come back with more info if you can.

ToTheMax · 16 Oct 2018 at 09:26

Raid 5 where the total array size is over 12tb is a complete waste of time fyi, the reason is the statistical chance of getting a URE (unrecoverable read error) during a rebuild is extremely high. A degraded raid 5 array encountering a single URE will fail the rebuild. You want to consider raid 6 or raid 10 for resilience against URE events.