RAID 5 - Help!

Gammawolf · 30 Sep 2011 at 15:33

Ok so I was pretty set on putting some Raid 5 in my rig for storage and home file server solution, but.. i read about URE being more of a concern now that drives have huge capacity. Realistically what are the chances of this happening during a rebuild of a drive in say a 3x 2TB array? I'm not going to keep back ups of the array since it houses non essential media files. Any thoughts on what i should do?

Surveyor · 30 Sep 2011 at 16:50

Unrecoverable Read Error for anyone thinking of answering.

skyripper · 30 Sep 2011 at 17:14

Depends on the array controller as to how it will handle a read error when trying to rebuild the array. You're talking here about a read error after you've already had a hardware failure - so kinda rare - but the incidence of failure I suppose goes up the bigger the amount of storage. Maybe break the disks up into smaller arrays if you are that concerned about it.

I have had to manually rebuild data from a failed array after an Intel motherboard controller decided to have a hissy fit after a seagate 7200.11 drive did its famous dying act.. software called RAID Reconstructor from runtime.org got nearly all of my data back after that adventure. It took days, but was very effective.

I'd always use a decent hardware raid controller over an onboard motherboard controller just for the support and performance - if the data warranted the cost.

RAID isnt a substitute for backup, its a way of reducing the pain when a hardware failure occurs.

Its still better than having all your data on a single drive just crossing your fingers.

ecksmen · 30 Sep 2011 at 17:57

Gammawolf said:
Ok so I was pretty set on putting some Raid 5 in my rig for storage and home file server solution, but.. i read about URE being more of a concern now that drives have huge capacity. Realistically what are the chances of this happening during a rebuild of a drive in say a 3x 2TB array? I'm not going to keep back ups of the array since it houses non essential media files. Any thoughts on what i should do?

I had similar concerns over RAID, I couldn't afford a decent controller and I don't trust software raid as far as I could throw it.

In the end, I decided upon just simply using robocopy scripts running once a night if I loose a single disk I only loose 24 hours worth of changes, which isn't a problem as I will have other copies of semi important files such as holiday photos on other pcs in the first place.