8TB Server - Raid 0 for all 4 bays ?

I just want a big NAS server for movies, music and some personal pictures . . . what do you recommend ?

Also Freenas gives me the option to format in Advanced 4K format (Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB) Should I enable, would it be beneficial ?

I'm using the HP Proliant microserver if that helps :)
 
Jakeee said:
what do you recommend ?
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Not to RAID0 4 large disks like that. 1 small glitch and you could lose the array and all the data on it.
With 4 disks you're best size to redundancy option is RAID5 - you'd lose 2TB is space, but you'd be able to lose a disk without losing data.

RAID10 is an option, but you lose 4TB, but you could (in theory) lose up to 2 disks and still retain data.

I run RAID0 on 4x 80GB Velociraptors as the OS drive for a machine and it's fast, but it's backed up everynight (for speed of restore not as the data is worth anything) and my data is stored on a RAID6 array which is is also backed up to 2 seperate locations.
 
Personally i would try software RAID 5 you would lose 25% of the storage capacity but allows for 1 drive to fail and not lose anything.
 
JonRohan said:
RAID5 over large disks can suck the big ones for performance.
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RAID5 write performance (without a hardware card) sucks regardless of disk sizes as it's not limited to large disk. But read performance will be much faster.

As it's for a storage server the writing will be happening a lot less frequently than reading so will be less of an issue and much less of an issue than losing all the data.

He can't have it fast and safe without extra expensive hardware so it will be a compromise one way or another.
 
I have 3x2TB in a software raid5 under debian stable at home for media storage. I have no issues streaming over gigabit network.

I also have a similar configuration at work with 7x1.5 in raid6 for general storage and the odd storage vmotion and it easily handles 100mb/s speeds.
 
With software raid5 you will notice a lag in performance if you do more than one thing at a time.

My backup server at home runs 8x 2TB's in raid6 with a hot spare, with software raid5 I was getting about 80mb's transfers over arrays and about 68-75mb over a 4Gbit network, note the usable space was larger and less parity but with a LSI raid controller and at raid6 I get around 580mb's read and around 450mb's over the network.

I would stay away from raid0. It's fine for a paging setup or a temporary work drive, which is what I use raid0 for, a place to repair with pars, unrar before moving my files somewhere else or encoding folder etc.

I guess you could unraid if you dont need the performance and still want parity, but its not free if you want to use more then 3 drives.
 
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UnRAID IMO.

Without parity i've managed upwards of 80MB/sec sustained and over 100MB/sec peaks (Writes!)
Haven't tested with parity yet but i'd imagine it's pretty slow, but that's only for writes.

RAID0 is NOT the way to go about this.
 
Concorde Rules said:
UnRAID IMO.

Without parity i've managed upwards of 80MB/sec sustained and over 100MB/sec peaks (Writes!)
Haven't tested with parity yet but i'd imagine it's pretty slow, but that's only for writes.

RAID0 is NOT the way to go about this.
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How can I combine 4 drives into one mount point without raid ?
 
Concorde Rules said:
UnRAID IMO.

Without parity i've managed upwards of 80MB/sec sustained and over 100MB/sec peaks (Writes!)
Haven't tested with parity yet but i'd imagine it's pretty slow, but that's only for writes.

RAID0 is NOT the way to go about this.
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Depends on how much you value the data in question.
 
Jakeee said:
How can I combine 4 drives into one mount point without raid ?
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JBOD/ Dynamic disks. But this also lacks in data integrity, though you don't lose everything if a disk fails; you will lose what was on that particular disk. Which can be a lot if there are a bunch of files with portions spread across disks.

Software RAID5 is the cheapest way to go (while doing it properly). But don't expect epic performance, also bear in mind the following:

Software RAID uses the main CPU and memory to do it's work, so the harder you thrash the disks the more your memory and CPU usage go up. This should be allowed for when speccing up.
The RAID array is bound to the OS. If you start with Freenas and choose to change the OS, you need to re-make the array usually.
RAID5 works best with larger numbers of smaller disks. With 3 big disks if one fails the rebuild time will be a lot longer than 6 drives of half the size. During this time the Array is vulnerable and performance is greatly reduced.

Those points are not to say don't do it, just advisories to be aware of. Whatever you do, RAID isn't ever substitute for a decent backup regime.
 
8TB and Raid 0? What need would there be for that though? Why do you need it to read quicker than the bottleneck of gigabit lan anyway?
 
jaybee said:
8TB and Raid 0? What need would there be for that though? Why do you need it to read quicker than the bottleneck of gigabit lan anyway?
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pretty much all my PC's are connected with dual or quad nic's teamed together and have speeds between 200-450mb/s
 
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