Need affordable SATA RAID supporting 2 TB drives

For 1/3 of $1200 you could use this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

here's the more current version,

http://www.netgear.com/Products/St [...] ifications

I expect a USB 3/ SATA III version is in the works.

I would love to snag that Netgear ReadyNAS NVX Pioneer Edition, but I don't want to spend that much ($750). I've been eyeing the Synology DS410 for a while and even that's more than I want to spend. That NAS plus 4 x 2 TB drives puts me at around $1100 (NAS = $500, drives = $600).

I did pick up a really good RAID card for really cheap (Adaptec RAID 3405 for $150), but after playing with FreeNAS and Openfiler in preliminary testing (they're cumbersome) I'm starting to like dedicated NAS server solutions (Netgear and Synology). now I'm going back and forth

Anywho, I found my affordable SATA RAID supporting 2 TB drives so I guess my question has been answered

Good to hear it. I recently picked up an Areca 1680ix-8 and some 2TB WD RE4 drives to go with it. I haven't been motivated to hook it up yet, but I'll soon have an 8 TB RAID6 setup. An LTO drive to back it all up is the next step. I'm spending a lot more $$$ than I want to, but I have 10+ years of downloads to preserve.

The New Number Two

I want to warn you that if your problem loosing data was due to chipset-based RAID and you think that a hardware RAID card will solve the issue, then think again. These kinds of issues aren't really hardware vs. software RAID, they're more about the kinds of drives you buy and the RAID organization you use.

If you want a reliable RAID system, the first thing to do is to buy RAID-ready drives that support TLER. A lot of drive "failures" are really due to the drive timing out when trying to recover data from a dodgy sector. This is true of hardware or software RAID.

The next thing to do is to avoid RAID-5 for very large arrays. With the unrecoverable read error rates being what they are, the chances of not being able to recover your data after a RAID-5 drive failure are fairly high. This is why people are recommending RAID-6, it's able to recover data even if you have bad sectors on the non-failed drives. The overhead for RAID-6 is two drives - in other words if you have 4 x 2TB in RAID-6 you'll have 4TB of usable space.

Lastly, remember that RAID is not a backup. When the thieves break into your house and steal your computer or a short in your power supply fries your disks, your data isn't going to be saved just because it's on RAID. If the files are important then you need to back them up to external media that's stored separately from your computer, preferably offsite. I realize this is difficult if you have a lot of data, but if it's important stuff then that really is what you need to do. Better to back up a few files you can't be without than to ignore the problem because you can't back all of it up.

If you had a backup of your data when you did your RAID migration then you wouldn't have lost it.

I've got my OS up and running on the Areca in a 2TB RAID 1 partition. The remaining six slots are for a RAID 6 data partition, which will be 8TB of storage.

Sminlal's reply is right on target and explains my choices quite accurately. The 2TB WD RE4-GP drives that I'm using are TLER- enabled, and RAID 6 was chosen for the same reason that he mentioned.

After I recover from the shock of spending $2700 on HDD's and the Areca, I plan on picking up an LTO-4 drive to back it all up. It will probably set me back another $3K, or so, but my data collection is irreplaceable.

The New Number Two (eagerly looking forward to holographic storage!)

I hope you've explained to them the scenarios that could occur in which they would loose their data with no hope of recovery, or which scenarios would require them wait for recovery and then have to re-key transactions entered since the last backup. It's really important that they understand this (I'd go so far as to get a signature) so that (a) they can make an intelligent decision on backup costs vs. business risk, and (b) they don't come after you for damages after some sort of failure.

My drives have come in (4 x 2 TB Hitachi HD32000) and I'm installing them in the caddy and now I'm re-thinking my RAID set up since there are high failure rates with high capacity drives these days (and I've had more drives fail on clients lately) and since RAID array builds and/or re-builds and re-copying 6 to 8 TB of data take FOREVER. Even installing the drives into the caddies is taking too long.

Anywho... I'm storing mainly downloaded tv shows and movies, some software... all in all I don't care too much about losing everything, but I dread the recovery and restore process and time... RAID 6 or RAID 0 + 1 ??

It's the winner for reliability, but not for performance. RAID 6 has much worse write performance than RAID 0+1. Just something to be aware of...

So I took the noob way out and choose the default RAID 5 I initially went with RAID 1+0/10 but canceled that build because I couldn't stomach the fact I shelled out $560 and only have half that purchase usable (measly 3.6 TB with RAID 10 or 6 vs. somewhat acceptable 5.4 TB with RAID 5). Hopefully this won't come back to bite me, though it probably will

Oh BTW, for extra speed, you can add an SSD as a cache drive. It will act just like the 64MB of cache does on normal drives, but you can get a 32GB hard drive for less than $100. I believe a single cache drive can be used for the entire storage pool, so multiple file systems can benefit from the same cache drive.
http://www.markround.com/archives/ [...] mance.html

TN No. 2's right - no RAID system is a backup. The purpose of redundant RAID is to reduce downtime due drive failure, but it can't protect against many other risks to your data such as accidental deletion, corruption, equipment theft, power hits, disasters, etc. etc.

If your data is really important to you then it needs to be backed up to OFFLINE media, and ideally at least one copy of the backup should be stored OFFSITE.

> accidental deletion: snap shots, deletes can be rolled back. Takes minimal extra space.
This is fine if you want to restore the entire volume to a previous point. But if you discover you accidentally deleted a file a month ago then you're in a bit of a quandary.

> corruption: silent data corruption over time is impossible with zfs (google it)
You're talking about the disk corrupting data, I'm talking about the computer itself. If a program screws up while writing data, or if you have a memory error that corrupts data before it's written to the RAID subsystem (more common than it should be since most desktops have no protection for memory), ZFS can't do anything to help you other than rolling back to a previous, uncorrupted version. But see above.

power hits: transactional filesystem so this is not a problem.
> You're talking about power FAILURES, I'm talking about power SURGES that physically destroy equipment.

ZFS is certainly an improvement over conventional RAID systems, but there's only so much it can do - there are certain things it simply can't protect against. Therefore, if your data is really important to you, then you need external backup.

You don't need to be an "Enterprise" to have data that you really, really don't want to loose.

> but with proper surge equipment I'm not sure how this can happen.

As an example, lightning strikes have been known to blast right through the kind of simple UPS / isolation units that a typical desktop user might employ. Sure, the UPS company's guarantee may pay to replace your hardware, but they can't replace your data.


> From a technical standpoint, it should be possible to roll back just a single file.

I was a bit skeptical of this, but after reading Sun's "ZFS How-to Guide" it appears you're right. That's pretty cool!

Wow! In this one thread, you've just answered most of my questions about a WHS RAID I'm wanting to set-up! How do you follow someones threads on Toms?