If that is your SLA with your users then RAID is the way to go…
I assume your friends are watching 24x7. That being the case. Redundancy is important.
I, for one, try and keep my expenses reasonable.
If a disk goes down… The Oh Well friend. U gotta wait till I fix it.
I would be willing to bet that if your RAID array was to crash and one of my HDDs was to crash, I could be back up and running much more quickly…
If drive sizes vary you should look at Drive Bender or Drive Pool.
Both of them are pooling software and not raid solutions. They allow the use of different size drives and will automatically balance the data between the drives. You can protect data by using duplication settings in the pool which will automatically duplicate data between drives to prevent data loss. When a drive is lost the software simply duplicates the data immediately to new drives in the pool. This minimizes the impact of rebuilds as you only duplcate the data that needs to be copied. It is expensive from a storage perspective as it essentially like running mirroring without the raid setup.
Any devices that uses ZFS will also be less impactful then RAID solution as well. ZFS only rebuilds the part of the drive that had data so instead of rebuilding a 8 TB drive it would rebuild lets say the 5TB of data you actually had on it in the virtual volume.
Another possible benifit of Drive Bender is the ability to add cloud storage to the environment. I believe you may be able to have it automatically backup to the cloud using a cloud disk as part of the pool. This may need to be confirmed though as i haven’t tried it, i have just seen indications this can happen…
Be very careful of setting something up with different size drives. You can run into a case very quickly where allot of space in unusable if you mix and match drive sizes with many raid solutions. Even ones that try to say that they are compatiable with it.
As far as performance for 4k video lets put some perspective on that. A bit rate of 60mbps means that the video needs about 7MB/s of data to play back. That is very insiginificant for playback. Most modern drives will far exceed that. What raid may help with is random pater IO or several streams being played back at once. Raid helps with this somewhat but not as much with raid 5 as some might think. You are better off with something like drive pool that will simply spread the load across several drives and give each drive full throughput for sequential reads.
@mavrrick said:
If drive sizes vary you should look at Drive Bender or Drive Pool.Both of them are pooling software and not raid solutions. They allow the use of different size drives and will automatically balance the data between the drives. You can protect data by using duplication settings in the pool which will automatically duplicate data between drives to prevent data loss. When a drive is lost the software simply duplicates the data immediately to new drives in the pool. This minimizes the impact of rebuilds as you only duplcate the data that needs to be copied. It is expensive from a storage perspective as it essentially like running mirroring without the raid setup.
Any devices that uses ZFS will also be less impactful then RAID solution as well. ZFS only rebuilds the part of the drive that had data so instead of rebuilding a 8 TB drive it would rebuild lets say the 5TB of data you actually had on it in the virtual volume.
Another possible benifit of Drive Bender is the ability to add cloud storage to the environment. I believe you may be able to have it automatically backup to the cloud using a cloud disk as part of the pool. This may need to be confirmed though as i haven’t tried it, i have just seen indications this can happen…
Be very careful of setting something up with different size drives. You can run into a case very quickly where allot of space in unusable if you mix and match drive sizes with many raid solutions. Even ones that try to say that they are compatiable with it.
As far as performance for 4k video lets put some perspective on that. A bit rate of 60mbps means that the video needs about 7MB/s of data to play back. That is very insiginificant for playback. Most modern drives will far exceed that. What raid may help with is random pater IO or several streams being played back at once. Raid helps with this somewhat but not as much with raid 5 as some might think. You are better off with something like drive pool that will simply spread the load across several drives and give each drive full throughput for sequential reads.
I think i will rather go with ubuntu software raid 5, since i am buying new drives. 4 drives for storage and 1 for redudency. Drive pool was a good idea, but i read a bit about it, and it seems like there is some performance loss.
I have never experienced any performance loss. That may be configuration specific. I have always gotten full drive speed even when moving data between drives locally.
On thing to remember when discussing drive speed is that no matter how fast the drives are you can only transfer data as fast as the network connection the server has. So unless you are using a 10Gbps link a fast single drive can easily saturate the entire link.
If all of your drives are the same though a real raid solution like a HW raid card or ZFS for Linux is a better option.
Well, ive finally made a desiccion. Going for 5 8tb drives. I do have one 8tb from before, so going to buy 4 more external ones, as they are cheaper. Will dissesembly them. But the 4 new drives are a bit faster than the one i Currently have. Should i put the slowest drive as redudency drive? Will be using unraid.
@dent^ said:
Well, ive finally made a desiccion. Going for 5 8tb drives. I do have one 8tb from before, so going to buy 4 more external ones, as they are cheaper. Will dissesembly them. But the 4 new drives are a bit faster than the one i Currently have. Should i put the slowest drive as redudency drive? Will be using unraid.
Well, not a fan of unRAID as it is not real RAID and too limited, and you’re going against common knowledge best practices for setting up a drive array in 2017, so I’m bowing out.
