Please advise on 25TB storage requirement

bhvn

bhvn

bhvn

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10 Aug 2012
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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!!
 
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.
 
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!
 
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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?).
 
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!
 
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.
 
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.
 
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,
 
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.
 
bhvn said:
Could anyone please advise decent RAID5 enclosure with HDDs? Less the price the better.
Click to expand...

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. :)
 
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.
 
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