Raid, plex, HTPC

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tennbrikket

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Hello, i currently have a big movie collection with 11tb filled up, but its with random disks i have bought over the years. one 8tb, one 1tb and one 2tb. When i have multiple people using my plex server, the loading might be slow sometimes. I have decent hardware for transcoding, ssd, i5 4440, but if i have a few direct streams and a few transcoding stream it starts to go slow. Also the disk´s are making ugly noises.

I was considering buying 5 4tb western digital red nas drives and put 5 of them in raid 5. I know raid is not a backup, since its a risk anyway. But raid 1 i lose way to much storage, raid 0 is way to dangerous, so i feel raid 5 fit my needs. As i have been reading it seems like if one disk dies in raid 5, the raid goes to raid 0 and you still have all your data. Is that correct?

But what is the best way for me to go for? raid card (which is expensive) windows storage raid (seems very interesting), my motherboard does not support raid. Or should i go with unraid?

Short summary: I want good read speed, without loosing all my data if one disk dies, and also i want maximum storage.
 
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elbert

elbert

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The CPU is probably more important. This is to say you would be better off with 2 plex servers. Get another 8tb and copy everything Split your users between the 2. Tip number 5 is best solution to the problem.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/plex-tricks-tips-need-know/
 
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drtweak

drtweak

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Yea sounds like most of your load is all being taxed off one or two hard drives.

My server is setup like this.

6 2TB Reds. 4 of which are in a RAID 0 (I have backups so not a huge deal) and then 2 1TB drives. The 4TB is Movies and then TV's. Then i have other programs, anime, music etc on others.

Me i would use RAID. You can find cheap raid cards used. I have a LSI Mega RAID 8888ELP. Does 8 drives, SATA or SAS and does RAID ALL the RAID.

Now if you go RAID 5 or 6 you WILL want a RAID card. Doing any kind of software RAID will tax your CPU. Plus trying to rebuild or recover or move a Software RAID is a PITA!!!!! Make sure you get a RAID card with Cashe (any amount will do really. It is mainly for Writing not reading) and a BBU on the RAID card.

Also a RAID 5 does not convert to a RAID 0. Every RAID ALWAYS stays what ever kind of RAID it is. Just with a RAID 5 it puts parity data on all the drives (So if one drive failes it can use that to reconstruct the lost files or rebuild the RAID when the drive is replaced)

Running a RAID 5 or 6 i HIGHLY suggest you guy an extra drive and make it a dedicated Hot Spare. This way if one drive failes, and you don't know, it will use that extra drive and rebuilt on its own.

Also with ANY LSI/Dell PERC Raid card (Dell PERCS are LSI Card) install the LSI MegaRAID Storage software. It will be able to alert you if a drive failes, rebuild, make, delete RAID while in windows as well. otherwise you have to reboot, go into the RAID bios with some can be confusing, and possible mess things up.
 
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tennbrikket

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haven´t thought about it this way, but as you said, i have no idea if like 4 people are watching 4 different movies, which are located on the same disk, that may cause some hiccups.

I tried raidcalculator, and if i went with raid 5 parity, i got like 16TB with 5 4tb drives, which will be pretty nice, i currently have 11 tb filled up now, so raid 5 with parity and spare would be a expensive raid. Of course its better for backup etc, but i kinda just want good read speed and be able to lose one drive, without loosing the whole raid. I do understand that raid is not a good way to take backup, but the speed its giving is pretty nice.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LSI-SAS-9210-8i-8-port-6Gb-s-PCIe-HBA-RAID-SATA-Controller-card-M1015-9211-8I-/171972993154?hash=item280a63a082:g:fEwAAOSwbdpWZTce

how is this card? I have also been reading that software raid is more secure, since you can almost recover from it each time, but if a raid card dies or motherboard you are pretty much screwed.
 
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tennbrikket

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Really don´t think the CPU is the hiccup, it should manage 3 1080p streams. Plex says that you should have around 2000 score in passmark for 1080p stream, and also add another 2000 score if your going to two 1080 streams,
 
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tennbrikket

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Also will i be able to expand the raid, if i chose raid 5? Kinda hard to be a engineer student regarding the money, so this will be a future project. Let´s say i buy 3 drives, can i expand the raid/drive pool with 2 more, without formatting the drives and making a new raid.If so can i just keep doing this till i have maxed my raid card? If that is possible, it might be a smart investment to buy a raid card. And its no problem removing the raid card with the drives into a new motherboard, or do i lose everything?

 
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drtweak

drtweak

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That card does do RAID 5. You want something with a Battery backup and a RAM Cashe onboard the RAID card. YOU MUST HAVE THAT if you go RAID 5 or it will be SLOOW.

Also in my expereince, it is the oppsite. I have had more issues recovering software RAIDs over Hardware RAIDs.

Now i NEVER do onboard RAID. Too many issues. people will update their bios and BAM it resets everything back to default and shit is gone.

On addin cards they are the way to go. Why? If your RAID card bombs, buy the same one or a similar one, connect your drives, import the config, and back you are back. Your motherboard dies? Well with windows, depending on the version, that is a wipe and reinstall and then the hassel of importing the software RAID. If it was a RAID card you just toss in your RAID card, connect drives, back in bussiness. want to upgrade to a new motherboard? Just remove the RAID card and drives and toss it in the new one and BAM back in business. I just don't do software or onboard raid for quite a few reasons.
 
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tennbrikket

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Do you have any recommendation for a raid card that does raid 5, has battery backup aswell as ram? If possible i would probably buy a used enterprise card from ebay. Also i am considering switching to debian now, so a card that would be compitable with debian is also a preference :)
 
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drtweak

drtweak

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That is a good card but no battery backup or Cashe which will crimple the RAID 5 performance.

You can get something like this. This is what I have and it works great for me

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-LSI-MegaRAID-SATA-SAS-8888ELP-PCIExpress-512MB-RAM-RAID-/272396420834?hash=item3f6c1786e2:g:VUMAAOSwLF1X7pYD

and then buy a battery for it....Ooooorrrr not. Looks like these guys use the Smart Battery which are expensive as hell! like 150+!

Ok so after looking around looks like for a good proper RAID 5 RAID Card you will be shelling out 100$ US with one with Cashe and a BBU.

Also just FYI with the Plex server, if your files are .MP4 it won't have to transcode them. That is how i get away with having a low end 1.8Ghz Dual Core Celeron running my Plex server. Everything i get i convert on my main machine.
 
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tennbrikket

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http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/raid-controller-rs2bl080-brief.pdf

found a really cheap raid card online, I also have changed my plans a bit. For now I only want to connect all the drives to one controller, and not run raid. I have so much different hard drives at the moment, and the money I have left is not enough to change all the drives. But is it possible to connect all my drives to the raid card without setting up a raid array. I have having some issues with speed on my sata controller on my motherboard, some drives are only getting 60mbs read/write, and if I plug out one drive, I will get 130mbs read/write on the same drive. It´s a very cheap motherboard, so I dont really expect that much from it.

Short explained: Can I connect all of my drives to a raid card without setting up a raid array?
 
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drtweak

drtweak

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That is a nice raid card. If you can afford it or get it cheap get it. IT is a LSI chip which is great. now it is NOT a JBOD which is Just a Bunch Of Disk in otherwords you can just toss them in and be done. You do have to go in and make each drive its own RAID 0 with just the one drive. Now since it is just the one drive having it a RAID 0 is not a big deal. It is the same as a single drive. So if you had 8 drive you would just setup 8 RAID 0 drives. If you were to make other RAIDs later on it would be no different than if they were non RAID drives. You still have to backup all the data off, then remove the drives from the RAID 0, then make a new RAID with them on how you want.

great thing with LSI is you can use the LSI MegaRAID Storage manager and do everything within windows and not the Controller BIOS which makes it a bit easier.

As far as the onboard SATA speed it all depends on the controller and hard drive.
 
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tennbrikket

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well, the good was to good. It was like 50 dollars. It got sold right before me, need to be faster next time, probably going to be a long time until next time there will be such a good deal. But next time, I will be the first one, I have made a active search on the Norwegian version of craigslist, so each time there´s a new raid card, I get a notification on my phone.

Thanks for the answer, I will just run raid0 on each drive until I can afford to get 4-6 WD red drives.
 
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tennbrikket

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last but not least, I do not have to format the drives when setting them into raid0 on the raid card. As long as it is a single raid0 array. I do understand that the drives will get formatted if I create a raid0 array with more than 1 drive.
 
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