Advice Please: Raid controller for home server

Mad Professor

Mad Professor

Mad Professor

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Hi All

I am looking for help and guidance with regarding to purchasing a suitable raid controller for my home server.

Let me just start with saying that I am a Raid newbie, and as such I would like to get as much help and guidance before I start jumping in with both feet and purchasing something that would not be suitable for my needs.

The home server in question is running ESXi, I don't know if that will make any difference.

The home server is mainly being used as a home media server with Ubuntu and plex, I am slowly converting all my DvD's and Blueray's, and as such starting to used up large amounts of storage space.

The current proposal is to install 5x 4TB WD40EFRX WD Red's with the provision to expand to 10x 4TB WD Red's in the future.

The current setup is using 2x 4TB Red's and 2x 2TB Green's all as single drives, with no redundancy, and this is just not acceptable.

I want at least one drive redundancy, but ideally two drive redundancy. If the latter, then my understanding is that I would be looking at a raid 6 configuration.

Thanks for your time.

Best Regards.
 
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What do you expect to achieve? How do you know you need 5 disks? Have you looked up the different RAID levels? You might find a single RAID card that supports 10 disks is quite expensive for a home server.
Andi.
 
Andi raises some very good questions.

Personally...
I've never had an issue with the P410's (Remember to get the BBWC).

Then attach a SAS expander card.
http://www.allserver.co.kr/scripts/...&mKR=&sKR=&GotoPage=4&search=&search_content= <- Image here for the uplinks from the P410.

But it's two points of failure just to get the array. The good news is that the array information is on the disks, so you can just swap the HBA for another.
http://serverfault.com/questions/23...-array-raid-controller-to-re-recognize-drives
 
Are you thinking redundancy or backup/archive. I usually have data on two disk RAID 1 sets, then a synchronised copy (without deletes), then a backup and sometimes an archive on removable media if the data size allows.
Andi.
 
Unless you're happy to run the risk of LONG rebuilds and high odds of losing the array, don't use disks that size in R5.

As above, HP cards are very good.
 
Thank you for your replies.

I do not know that I need 5 disks, I only said about 5 disks as my home server already has two 5 disk hot swap bays.
I have looked at the raid types, but as I have not used raid much before that is why I am here asking questions before I go buying anything else. But I am thinking about Raid 5 or Raid 6, unless there is a better raid option for my needs.

I think I am using the term redundancy correctly. as in, if one or more drives fails within the raid array that I will not lose all the data there and then.

I have been doing some reading regarding the HP Smart Array P410 & P420 series controller.

It seems that the P410 can be got for very little money, where the P420 seems to be at least 3 or 4 times the price.

I am all for future proofing as much as possible, and I am more than happy to spend the extra on the P420 if it would be better suited.

As said before I am a newbie to raid setups, and this is why I am here asking for your advice.

Thanks again.

Best Regards.
 
I'll just echo what nutcase says, HP cards are good, RAID5 and 6 should be avoided where possible, especially on larger disks. AFAIK the HP410 does not do RAID6 without an additional license.

Unless capacity is more important than redundancy, RAID10 (0+1 in the HP tool) is the most obvious choice nowadays.
http://www.raid-calculator.com/ is useful for double checking what sized array you'll end up with.
 
Mad Professor said:
I have been doing some reading regarding the HP Smart Array P410 & P420 series controller.

It seems that the P410 can be got for very little money, where the P420 seems to be at least 3 or 4 times the price.

I am all for future proofing as much as possible, and I am more than happy to spend the extra on the P420 if it would be better suited.
Click to expand...

Why bother with either? If your RAID card itself fails you're left with having to find an identical replacement, down to the firmware revision in some cases.

I personally think a software RAID solution is much more appropriate, especially something advanced like ZFS. You can implement raidz1 (equivalent to RAID5, 1 disk redundancy), raidz2 (like RAID6, 2 disk redundancy) or even raidz3 (3 disk redundancy). In addition it comes with built in snapshots, error checking and encryption.

You can do all this with a cheapo disk controller, even the ones on your motherboard. Then if you have a complete system failure (motherboard dies or whatever) you can just plug them into a ZFS compatible machine and recover all your data that way.

ZFS is available in loads of OS like FreeNAS, OmniOS or even Ubuntu. If you have the right CPU you can just pass through the disk controller straight to the appropriate VM and away you go.
 
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Look on amazon you can normally pickup a rebranded LSI card for next to nothing i.e. I picked up a £600 LSI card that was branded Fujitsu for £80, still uses all the same firmware etc. I'm sure HP / IBM / Adaptec are the same.
 
I'll echo El Pew, stay away from hardware controllers unless you have either a support package or you can buy a number of the same controller at the same time; unless things have changed, there is no guarantee that you'll be able to replace a controller and access the drives should the controller die.

Software raid, e.g. Xpenology, FreeNAS, t-raid/s-raid for windows, mdadm in linux etc. will provide the most flexibility by offloading raid calcs to the cpu but is hardware agnostic. Modern CPUs are more than capable of doing the RAID calcs without hassle these days... Save you're self the hassle of a failed card and utilise a software based stack.
 
Why not look into drive pooling?

https://www.greyhole.net/

It would allow the disks to be setup as normal disks (removing all RAID config). If you had 4 disks you could setup two pools which mirror each other so if one disk fails you'd still have a backup and you don't have to worry about your raid controller failing.

That's my 20p's worth!
 
I would echo the sentiments of avoiding hardware RAID. Software RAID I have zero confidence in, so my recommendation is always either just straight backups or drive pooling software that uses the native filesystem. The fundamental thing is to be able to take your drives and connect them to any other system running similar OS (Windows or Linux), and to still have access to all your data.
 
The HP cards are very good at picking up an existing config when changing to a new card. Not that they fail very often at all.
 
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