Best arrangement of 5 HDDs plus 1 SSD

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Imacflier

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Jan 19, 2014
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Morning, All,

I have an Home Theater P C.

Attached to the PC is an Orinco 5 bay usb3 drive cage.

The drive cage contains 5 independent 3 TB drives containing 13.6 TB of media files.. These files are organized alphabetically: Drive 1 contains movies 00 thru C; Drive 2 contains movies D thru G; Drive 3 contains H thru Q; Drive 4 contains R thru S; and Drive 5 contains T thru Z. (This reasonably balances usage across the drives and movies can be found by selecting the drive containing the alphabetic range, then the title within the drive.)

Everything is backed up on another set of drives.

There MUST be a better way....

I am using Win10. What about using Storages Spaces to build a mirrored drive pool?

Your suggestions and advice are heartily solicited!

TIA,
Larry
 
Solution
velocityg4
I've wrestled with this on my media server. Ultimately I kept it as multiple separate drives. All RAID really adds to a private media computer is ease of file management.

You still need a backup. RAID, Storage Spaces, &c are not a replacement. Fire, theft, lightning strike or other disaster will still wipe out all your data. I keep backups in a safe and only take it out occasionally to do a backup. Sure a single backup isn't perfect. But you have to draw the line somewhere.

Cost is higher with RAID. There is at least one drive which is not adding to storage space. If backups weren't necessary RAID (parity/dual-parity) would be a much cheaper method of course. I've though of doing this and doubling my storage. Odds are very low...
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stdragon

stdragon

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Apr 5, 2018
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Short of throwing hardware at the problem (say, a Synology or DROBO NAS device in RAID5), I think Storage Spaces with Parity would be your best choice is this regard. It would help provides some fault tolerance against a single drive failure. You could go mirrored, but that would consume a lot more drive space.

In ether case, performance would be improved as all drives are used in unison to read from when accessing any single file. What you have is basically a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) in which only a single drive is utilized. IMHO, performance is a moot point anyways. You don't need that much throughput to stream a movie anyways.
 
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velocityg4

velocityg4

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Nov 21, 2006
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I've wrestled with this on my media server. Ultimately I kept it as multiple separate drives. All RAID really adds to a private media computer is ease of file management.

You still need a backup. RAID, Storage Spaces, &c are not a replacement. Fire, theft, lightning strike or other disaster will still wipe out all your data. I keep backups in a safe and only take it out occasionally to do a backup. Sure a single backup isn't perfect. But you have to draw the line somewhere.

Cost is higher with RAID. There is at least one drive which is not adding to storage space. If backups weren't necessary RAID (parity/dual-parity) would be a much cheaper method of course. I've though of doing this and doubling my storage. Odds are very low of a total RAID failure.

Performance doesn't matter much. Hard drives are very effective still for linear reads/writes. A hard drive can easily handle a few 4K streams. It's unlikely more than two streams will occur simultaneously on a home server.
 
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Solution
stdragon

stdragon

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Apr 5, 2018
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RAID serves two primary functions (in no particular order).

1. Fault Tolerance - depending on the RAID method, (with the exception of RAID-0) you can lose one or more drives in the volume/array and not incur any downtime. Though it's recommended to replace the failed drive as quickly as possible so as to maintain fault tolerance. If you lose FT, then you're resorting to the backup set and time it takes to restore all data.

2. Performance - Unlike a JBOD setup, striped/mirrored volume has the added benefit of binding all drives to work together in unison to access one volume. Performance is cumulative. The more drives assigned to a single volume, the faster the volume will be.
 
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