So I am buying my first house and no longer have to rely on WiFi for streaming from router, pt, etc. minus Rokus and such. I have been researching all options lately and still unable to decide on best, safest bet.
Building my own NAS. I’ve been building my own gaming pc’s for years now and this would be no issue. Local streaming only, no more than two 1080p clients going at a time. Gigabit router and rdy to go. Would prolly run FreeNas.
Buy a bigger computer case and just run all HD’s from gaming pc. Power usage is not a concern as would not be in use 24/7. Again storage pools, raid?, unsure.
I am mainly concerned with safety of my data loss. I know some people are worried about losing years of data and have perfected this option. For about 3 months daily I have been getting all my media moved to an external 3tb drive (MKV’s) and this bad boy is already full and am needing more room. Looking to have around 10tb usable to start, expanding later. Obviously I know a direct backup is the best, but I am also the type of person that likes to experiment with new things. Never used raid, nas, or anything.
What do the backup gurus recommend? is raid5 of raid 6 best? Love the option od replacing a disk in real time and letting it rebuild itself, and keeping an external of the most important docs. But ma rather clueless when it comes to media this large in compacity. TY for any advice in advance!
There’s a whole thread dedicated to this somewhere. Search for it, it’s full of great information.
For the record, you’ll be told that RAID setups and such aren’t a real backup solution because that needs to be off-site (if your house burns or is flooded, well, you lost your data).
I just run a mac mini i7, dual solid state drives (1TB processing, 256GB for OSX), 16gb ram, with a 10 USB splitter with 4TB portable HD’s. Works perfect. The case your asking for, the HD’s are noisy. Even with 10 portable HD’s running, they run super quiet.
Consider UnRAID. It’s a fault tolerant system, not a backup. It will allow an HD to go belly up and recover your data (as well as continue to use the array), soon moving to dual parity, which would allow 2 HDs to die at the same time and still be able to recover data. It’s pretty easy to set-up and if you’re handy building PCs should be a no brainer. It need very little horsepower, can run virtualized and has Docker support. I currently have a 46TB server running and really have not had any issues with it. It acts like JBOB and you can add disks of any size as your needs grow. I’m just a happy user.
@Thronic said:
Another option is StableBit DrivePool & Scanner. Requires a Windows system to run, but is rock stable and very easy to manage. Mix any size drives to one or more pools. Easy handling of bad drives. Single files or 2x+ duplication on folders or entire pool (1-2 drives can be lost without loosing data, without interruption). Albeit this costs double storage space if used, but will have no rebuild time or downtime at all if a drive goes. Drives are readable and can be read as NTFS individually both while being in the pool and if removed as they aren’t striped, but still has read striping as an option which is very cool. As far as easy and flexible goes, I don’t think you can beat it. The support from StableBit should you need it, is also second to none. Over a gigabit local network I have 100-110 MB/s read/write normally, and consistently.
Amen to that… Certainly the best bang for buck software I ever purchased.
@Thronic said:
Another option is StableBit DrivePool & Scanner. Requires a Windows system to run, but is rock stable and very easy to manage. Mix any size drives to one or more pools. Easy handling of bad drives. Single files or 2x+ duplication on folders or entire pool (1-2 drives can be lost without loosing data, without interruption). Albeit this costs double storage space if used, but will have no rebuild time or downtime at all if a drive goes. Drives are readable and can be read as NTFS individually both while being in the pool and if removed as they aren’t striped, but still has read striping as an option which is very cool. As far as easy and flexible goes, I don’t think you can beat it. The support from StableBit should you need it, is also second to none. Over a gigabit local network I have 100-110 MB/s read/write normally, and consistently.
Amen to that… Certainly the best bang for buck software I ever purchased.
I was wondering, I have a nice number of NTFS USB drives with data on, if I was to go for drivepool, if I added an existing drive, would i lose the existing data on the drive.
@Thronic said:
Another option is StableBit DrivePool & Scanner. Requires a Windows system to run, but is rock stable and very easy to manage. Mix any size drives to one or more pools. Easy handling of bad drives. Single files or 2x+ duplication on folders or entire pool (1-2 drives can be lost without loosing data, without interruption). Albeit this costs double storage space if used, but will have no rebuild time or downtime at all if a drive goes. Drives are readable and can be read as NTFS individually both while being in the pool and if removed as they aren’t striped, but still has read striping as an option which is very cool. As far as easy and flexible goes, I don’t think you can beat it. The support from StableBit should you need it, is also second to none. Over a gigabit local network I have 100-110 MB/s read/write normally, and consistently.
Amen to that… Certainly the best bang for buck software I ever purchased.
I was wondering, I have a nice number of NTFS USB drives with data on, if I was to go for drivepool, if I added an existing drive, would i lose the existing data on the drive.
Absolutely not.
DrivePool does not format the drive or alter any data on drives that are added to the pool.
If you need any more help PM me (so as not to hijack the thread)
@Thronic said:
Another option is StableBit DrivePool & Scanner. Requires a Windows system to run, but is rock stable and very easy to manage. Mix any size drives to one or more pools. Easy handling of bad drives. Single files or 2x+ duplication on folders or entire pool (1-2 drives can be lost without loosing data, without interruption). Albeit this costs double storage space if used, but will have no rebuild time or downtime at all if a drive goes. Drives are readable and can be read as NTFS individually both while being in the pool and if removed as they aren’t striped, but still has read striping as an option which is very cool. As far as easy and flexible goes, I don’t think you can beat it. The support from StableBit should you need it, is also second to none. Over a gigabit local network I have 100-110 MB/s read/write normally, and consistently.
Amen to that… Certainly the best bang for buck software I ever purchased.
I was wondering, I have a nice number of NTFS USB drives with data on, if I was to go for drivepool, if I added an existing drive, would i lose the existing data on the drive.
Absolutely not.
DrivePool does not format the drive or alter any data on drives that are added to the pool.
If you need any more help PM me (so as not to hijack the thread)
In fact if you add a drive with existing files on it to the pool it gets a directory created that is a long string of letters and numbers. If you want some, or all, of the existing data in the pool all you must do in move the data you want to that new directory. Then, if you access the pool’s drive letter you will see the moved files under that letter. That makes taking a bunch of drives with videos on them and combining them into one structure both easy and fast.
I use Drivepool for all my storage. I have one pool mostly for movies and another for TV both of those use X2 duplication. Since I started using Drivepool the only problem I have had was when a server (The computer itself) failed. When that happened I simply moved the drives, at that time 8 of them, to a new computer and installed Drivepool on it and transferred the license and all the pools were there without change. That is all the configuration, duplication and structure was transferred over without any further intervention by me.
One more thing, Stablebit also has a scanner product that works well to monitor the health of drives BUT the scanner and the pooling software do not seem to work and play well together. That is I had problems on three different computers with both running and no problems with Drivepool running alone. I do not recommend that both programs run on the same computer. There may be other monitoring programs that work better with Drivepool.
One more thing, Stablebit also has a scanner product that works well to monitor the health of drives BUT the scanner and the pooling software do not seem to work and play well together. That is I had problems on three different computers with both running and no problems with Drivepool running alone. I do not recommend that both programs run on the same computer. There may be other monitoring programs that work better with Drivepool.
That’s interesting I haven’t had any issues with them running alongside each other.
One more thing, Stablebit also has a scanner product that works well to monitor the health of drives BUT the scanner and the pooling software do not seem to work and play well together. That is I had problems on three different computers with both running and no problems with Drivepool running alone. I do not recommend that both programs run on the same computer. There may be other monitoring programs that work better with Drivepool.
That’s interesting I haven’t had any issues with them running alongside each other.
It could be something else that causes me problems. I run the Plex server as well on that computer but nothing else. That is it has Windows 10, Drivepool, Plex and nothing else beyond what is required by the operating system.
If I install the scanner on it Plex becomes unstable and the computer itself sometimes reboots. For me the scanner is just not important enough to deal with the instability.
For best practices I try to reboot the server at least weekly but I have had a couple of periods where I forgot and the system ran for a month without needing a reboot. With the scanner installed I had freezes regularly if I did not reboot at least every other day and sometimes more often.
Stabelbit produces high quality products but it is not surprising that a complex system behaves differently for different people. Chaos theory (which applies to complex systems) states that small differences can have large and mostly unpredictable effects on results. That is two systems running virtually the same software and running on nearly the same hardware can behave quite differently. Or it can behave the same. It is one of the reasons that networking and computer science and systems design are as much an art as science.
Actually I think the whole thing runs by F.M. where the “M” stands for “magic” and the “F” is obscene.
RAID5 is of almost no value with modern drive capacities. You really do need 2 drive redundancy. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t dealt with this much. Don’t try and fool yourself in order to justify saving a little money. The day you lose all your data because you got an URE during drive resilvering, you’ll kick yourself for not buying +1 drive for RAIDZ2/RAID6 redundancy.
Building your own NAS can be a great learning experience, but don’t buy any hardware until you’ve learned the requirements of your OS of choice. Match the hardware to the software, don’t just try and run on any old stuff you have lying about.
I can’t recommend unRAID. It lacks basic features necessary to really support you in the event of failure, and while it’s great that “sometime soon” they should be getting features that will make it more RAID-like and bring it into 2005, I’d rather see someone on something that has been there for a while. Most proponents of unRAID have not had to recover from real failure yet… akin to recommending a fire extinguisher based on price and how easy it was to hang on the wall. unRAID also has no checksumming and cannot protect your data integrity from URE, soft corruption and bitrot.
Don’t run PMS on the NAS unless you’re building your own high-power NAS.
USB is for temporary hard drive connections. Don’t depend on it for server drives connected 24/7 where availability is critical. Especially with software RAID where SMART data is critical.
RAID5 is of almost no value with modern drive capacities. You really do need 2 drive redundancy. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t dealt with this much. Don’t try and fool yourself in order to justify saving a little money. The day you lose all your data because you got an URE during drive resilvering, you’ll kick yourself for not buying +1 drive for RAIDZ2/RAID6 redundancy.
Building your own NAS can be a great learning experience, but don’t buy any hardware until you’ve learned the requirements of your OS of choice. Match the hardware to the software, don’t just try and run on any old stuff you have lying about.
I can’t recommend unRAID. It lacks basic features necessary to really support you in the event of failure, and while it’s great that “sometime soon” they should be getting features that will make it more RAID-like and bring it into 2005, I’d rather see someone on something that has been there for a while. Most proponents of unRAID have not had to recover from real failure yet… akin to recommending a fire extinguisher based on price and how easy it was to hang on the wall. unRAID also has no checksumming and cannot protect your data integrity from URE, soft corruption and bitrot.
Don’t run PMS on the NAS unless you’re building your own high-power NAS.
USB is for temporary hard drive connections. Don’t depend on it for server drives connected 24/7 where availability is critical. Especially with software RAID where SMART data is critical.
@labguytodd said:
Strorage spaces? In win 10 it has the required extea features, safe remove and optimize.
I’ve seen too much bad press about Storage Spaces, including some very smart and reputable veteran members on here complaining about it. I’d be hesitant to recommend it
(I don’t have personal experience with it because aside from VMs, our house is Microsoft-free).
@labguytodd said:
Strorage spaces? In win 10 it has the required extea features, safe remove and optimize.
I’ve seen too much bad press about Storage Spaces, including some very smart and reputable veteran members on here complaining about it. I’d be hesitant to recommend it
(I don’t have personal experience with it because aside from VMs, our house is Microsoft-free).
I’ve tried Storage spaces a few times and had problems every time. It was easy to setup and sounds good on paper, but whenever I had an issue, I would loose everything in the pool. (I never could get past the test phase so nothing I didn’t have a copy of). I even engaged MS and they were unable to provide any solution nor tell me what the cause of the problem was.
Stablebit drivepool, like others have already said, works absolutely perfect and is rock solid. I have a 63TB pool with everything duplicated consisting of 2,3, and 8 TB drives with a pair of 120G SSD’s for the buffer. I’ve replaced smaller drives with larger drives without having to shut anything down or making anything unavailable. It’s an awesome product and makes life simple.
@Thronic said:
If you’re running any kind of pooling component to team those those drives to a single mounting point, you’re in the same voodoo club. I doubt you run the drives completely separate, so it got me a little curious about your setup. I hope you won’t say LVM or any similar volume spanning JBOD solution - that’s not only voodoo, it’s a very deadly spell. Even with mirrored LVM volumes, it’s pretty hardcore as a single drive failure will kill the entire volume. So if one drive in each mirror would go… Ouch.
Nice hardware!
Thanx.
No pooling, no spanning, JBOD in the literal sense (we’ve had that argument discussion before in other threads).
Singular Drives, Singular Volumes, all completely independent, just mirrored every night if there are changes (as shown by the arrows).
Plex has no problems being pointed to M:, N:, O:, P:, etc, etc.
If I lose a drive (which has never happened), I just slip it out… move it over… insert a new one… and dupe.
Love the case (Lian-Li 343B-XT, I don’t think it’s made anymore). Had to order it out of Norway because it was never available in the States.
Even with the cost of International Shipping it was a good bet.
