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Raid
#31
I have a Zotac behind my TV running Eden Beta 3 and a homebuilt tower in a separate room hosting the files, both on Windows 7 x64. The server is running RAID 10 4x 2TB drives as 1 GPT partition on an AMD 990FX motherboard (onboard RAID).
Server: Synology Diskstation 1511+ with 8x WD Red NAS 3TB drives, DSM 5.2
Main HTPC: Home Built i3, 8GB RAM, Corsair 128GB SSD, nVidia 630GTX, Harmony Home Control, Pioneer VSX-53, Panasonic VT30 65" 3D TV, Windows 10, Isengard
Bedroom HTPC: Zotac-ID 41 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Rii micro keyboard remote, Samsung HW-E550, Sony 32" Google TV, OpenElec 6.0 beta 4
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#32
OK here's a question. If I want to switch to ZFS, can I break my RAID 10 and not lose data since the same data is on 2 drives or doesn't it work that way? That way, I could format 2 of the drives ZFS, move the data over, and format the other 2. Too much to hope for?
Server: Synology Diskstation 1511+ with 8x WD Red NAS 3TB drives, DSM 5.2
Main HTPC: Home Built i3, 8GB RAM, Corsair 128GB SSD, nVidia 630GTX, Harmony Home Control, Pioneer VSX-53, Panasonic VT30 65" 3D TV, Windows 10, Isengard
Bedroom HTPC: Zotac-ID 41 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Rii micro keyboard remote, Samsung HW-E550, Sony 32" Google TV, OpenElec 6.0 beta 4
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#33
I'd guess in theory, and most likely practice, yes.

Rebuilding the array may take a lot of time though, wouldn't surprise me if we're talking 10-20 hours or so.
HTPC: LibreELEC 7 on Shuttle XS35GTv2 & Raspberry Pi 3
NAS: NAS4Free 2x 3TB Raid1
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#34
Is ZFS that much of a big deal that it's worth my time to tackle this?
Server: Synology Diskstation 1511+ with 8x WD Red NAS 3TB drives, DSM 5.2
Main HTPC: Home Built i3, 8GB RAM, Corsair 128GB SSD, nVidia 630GTX, Harmony Home Control, Pioneer VSX-53, Panasonic VT30 65" 3D TV, Windows 10, Isengard
Bedroom HTPC: Zotac-ID 41 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Rii micro keyboard remote, Samsung HW-E550, Sony 32" Google TV, OpenElec 6.0 beta 4
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#35
OK I'm reading about ZFS on Wikipedia and it looks like there is no Windows variant, so guess I would be installing Ubuntu on the server...
Server: Synology Diskstation 1511+ with 8x WD Red NAS 3TB drives, DSM 5.2
Main HTPC: Home Built i3, 8GB RAM, Corsair 128GB SSD, nVidia 630GTX, Harmony Home Control, Pioneer VSX-53, Panasonic VT30 65" 3D TV, Windows 10, Isengard
Bedroom HTPC: Zotac-ID 41 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Rii micro keyboard remote, Samsung HW-E550, Sony 32" Google TV, OpenElec 6.0 beta 4
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#36
Well I downloaded FreeNAS so here's what I'm going to do. Backup all my media yo my main PC across the network, probably fastest. Then go into BIOS and break up by hardware RAID. Then take a deep breath and install FreeNAS and see where it takes me. Should I do a RAID5 for my 4 2TB drives?
Server: Synology Diskstation 1511+ with 8x WD Red NAS 3TB drives, DSM 5.2
Main HTPC: Home Built i3, 8GB RAM, Corsair 128GB SSD, nVidia 630GTX, Harmony Home Control, Pioneer VSX-53, Panasonic VT30 65" 3D TV, Windows 10, Isengard
Bedroom HTPC: Zotac-ID 41 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Rii micro keyboard remote, Samsung HW-E550, Sony 32" Google TV, OpenElec 6.0 beta 4
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#37
Normally your LSI controller is the fastest and best choice IF you have drives that support raid5. Your drives do not, so in that case softraid is a better choice.
The onboard raid you have on the mainboard is the worst choice in ANY scenario. It works, but slow as hell.
WIndows Softraid is more mature than it was before, but still I wouldn't want my data relying on windows softraid...

FreeNAS is a very good choice if you start using ZFS. It's very easy to understand, has an intuitive interface and gives you most advantages of ZFS. It however uses quite an old version of ZFS, but you shouldn'r really experience too much of that in normal use.

If you go for ZFS make sure to use version 8.x of FreeNAS. Version 7 has more features but uses a buggy version of ZFS.

ZFS raidz works basically indentical to raid5, zo 2 drives won't work.. at least 3...
for your 4 drives i'd use raidz so that will give you 6TB of space...

For ideal ZFS i recommend buying another drive. The "sweetspot" in numbers of drives for ZFS are 4 and 8 drives plus the parity drives,
so that would mean 4+1=5 drives for raidz (raid5) or 4+2=6 drives for Raidz2 (raid6)....
or 8+1, 8+2 (9 and 10 drives) for raidz and raidz2....
This has to do with stripe sizes being cut... quite technical....
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#38
Thanks for everything Gollum. I downloaded unRAID last night and it booted it and itgoes to a command prompt. The last thing I want to do is manage my array with command prompts. So, I upgraded my drives to 4x 3TB drives and you say 1 more would hit the "sweet spot"?. I suppose if I do it now, I'll have 9TB available, if I buy another drive then 12, correct?

Does the raid system follow conventional limitation in that they all need to identical sized drives? I'll now have 4 extra 2TB drives so could I use 2 of those for my pairty or doesn't it work that way?
Server: Synology Diskstation 1511+ with 8x WD Red NAS 3TB drives, DSM 5.2
Main HTPC: Home Built i3, 8GB RAM, Corsair 128GB SSD, nVidia 630GTX, Harmony Home Control, Pioneer VSX-53, Panasonic VT30 65" 3D TV, Windows 10, Isengard
Bedroom HTPC: Zotac-ID 41 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Rii micro keyboard remote, Samsung HW-E550, Sony 32" Google TV, OpenElec 6.0 beta 4
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#39
patseguin Wrote:Thanks for everything Gollum. I downloaded unRAID last night and it booted it and itgoes to a command prompt.

Dude, you're really wasting time by not taking time to think and look for information.

Sure, unRAID probably boots into a command line environment, but so does FreeNAS. If you'd just taken the time to go to the Wiki or forums you would have noticed that there is a web based GUI from which you perform most settings after some minor initial command prompt things, such as setting the host name of the build and/or just figuring out the IP of the host so that you know what to type into you browser for further config.

When I installed my FreeNAS, I just sat down with an install guide, followed it to the letter during the short command line process needed and then it was all via the browser based GUI. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
HTPC: LibreELEC 7 on Shuttle XS35GTv2 & Raspberry Pi 3
NAS: NAS4Free 2x 3TB Raid1
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#40
Well that was the thing with unRAID (which is my 1st choice) was that there was no installation documentation. I put everything on the flash drive and made it bootable and then was at a command prompt. I found some forum posts but is that really the way I should go about it, especially if I purchase the product? I expected that it would boot into a GUI which would allow me to set up and configure my drives.
Server: Synology Diskstation 1511+ with 8x WD Red NAS 3TB drives, DSM 5.2
Main HTPC: Home Built i3, 8GB RAM, Corsair 128GB SSD, nVidia 630GTX, Harmony Home Control, Pioneer VSX-53, Panasonic VT30 65" 3D TV, Windows 10, Isengard
Bedroom HTPC: Zotac-ID 41 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Rii micro keyboard remote, Samsung HW-E550, Sony 32" Google TV, OpenElec 6.0 beta 4
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#41
Google search: "install guide unraid"

First hit: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.ph...n_Tutorial

It can really be that simple.
HTPC: LibreELEC 7 on Shuttle XS35GTv2 & Raspberry Pi 3
NAS: NAS4Free 2x 3TB Raid1
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#42
Thanks for all the help. I have unRAID up now and am formatting the drives. Should have working shares in a few hours!

EDIT: I purchased the upgrade so I can use all my drives. Do they email a new key? I'm used to getting more or less instant keys when I buy something online and it's been like 2 hours.
Server: Synology Diskstation 1511+ with 8x WD Red NAS 3TB drives, DSM 5.2
Main HTPC: Home Built i3, 8GB RAM, Corsair 128GB SSD, nVidia 630GTX, Harmony Home Control, Pioneer VSX-53, Panasonic VT30 65" 3D TV, Windows 10, Isengard
Bedroom HTPC: Zotac-ID 41 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Rii micro keyboard remote, Samsung HW-E550, Sony 32" Google TV, OpenElec 6.0 beta 4
Reply
#43
FWIW I can confirm the drive can make all the difference in a hardware array and the disks the OP has are no good for this.

It's not just TLER but that's a big contributor.

I had 4xWD 2TB "GE's" in mine and swapped them out with equivalent "RE's" and the difference in performance is night and day.
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#44
Well, here's what I did. I copied everything from my Windows 7 media server running hardware RAID10 to my main PC as a backup (which took just a couple hours btw). I then replaced all the Seagate "Green" drives with 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives. I then downloaded unRAID and followed the instructions and built an array (after it took about 15 hours to build the parity drive). I then made my shares for HD Video, TV Shows, Etc. I began by dragging my blu ray rips to the new HD Video share (about 1.8TB of data). The copy was going across my gigabyte network at a dismal 33MB/s. It was estimating around 2 days to complete. I read the manual some more and it said that the fastest way to do it was to copy the data to a spare drive and then mount it in unRAID and copy the files using Midnight Commander. So, I cancelled the network copy and transferred my videos to a spare drive. I put the spare drive in the server and followed the instructions and hard drive to hard drive copy was going about 25MB/s, WTF. It was estimating 18 hours so I said screw it and went to bed. I got up this morning and there was some message in the console about "lost connection to host". My web link to the tower no longer worked and I switched to it's input on my monitor and it was black. It appeared it halted halfway through copying Star Trek Nemesis. I had no choice but to hard reboot the server. Once everything was back up, I tried copying Nemesis to make sure I had the full file and it said "you need permission to do that". That made no sense so I decided to delete it and re-copy the one file to see how fast it went. Well, when I went to delete it, it said "that file is open in another program". On top of all that, unRAID initiated another parity build which is estimated at about 1800 minutes. This has been a nightmare to say the very least. I went with unRAID because of the expandability. However, it appears to take days upon days to copy data. Can I expect better results if I say screw unRAID and go to FreeNAS? I'm picking up another 3TB drive today, so I'll have 5 of them total. All file operations were magnitudes faster when I had my hardware RAID10 under Windows 7. I can't even remember why I decided to try unRAID or any software RAID for that matter. If I go with FreeNAS and 5 3TB drives, should I do raidz1? How much usable space would that give me?
Server: Synology Diskstation 1511+ with 8x WD Red NAS 3TB drives, DSM 5.2
Main HTPC: Home Built i3, 8GB RAM, Corsair 128GB SSD, nVidia 630GTX, Harmony Home Control, Pioneer VSX-53, Panasonic VT30 65" 3D TV, Windows 10, Isengard
Bedroom HTPC: Zotac-ID 41 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Rii micro keyboard remote, Samsung HW-E550, Sony 32" Google TV, OpenElec 6.0 beta 4
Reply
#45
patseguin Wrote:Well, here's what I did. I copied everything from my Windows 7 media server running hardware RAID10 to my main PC as a backup (which took just a couple hours btw). I then replaced all the Seagate "Green" drives with 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives. I then downloaded unRAID and followed the instructions and built an array (after it took about 15 hours to build the parity drive). I then made my shares for HD Video, TV Shows, Etc. I began by dragging my blu ray rips to the new HD Video share (about 1.8TB of data). The copy was going across my gigabyte network at a dismal 33MB/s. It was estimating around 2 days to complete. I read the manual some more and it said that the fastest way to do it was to copy the data to a spare drive and then mount it in unRAID and copy the files using Midnight Commander. So, I cancelled the network copy and transferred my videos to a spare drive. I put the spare drive in the server and followed the instructions and hard drive to hard drive copy was going about 25MB/s, WTF. It was estimating 18 hours so I said screw it and went to bed. I got up this morning and there was some message in the console about "lost connection to host". My web link to the tower no longer worked and I switched to it's input on my monitor and it was black. It appeared it halted halfway through copying Star Trek Nemesis. I had no choice but to hard reboot the server. Once everything was back up, I tried copying Nemesis to make sure I had the full file and it said "you need permission to do that". That made no sense so I decided to delete it and re-copy the one file to see how fast it went. Well, when I went to delete it, it said "that file is open in another program". On top of all that, unRAID initiated another parity build which is estimated at about 1800 minutes. This has been a nightmare to say the very least. I went with unRAID because of the expandability. However, it appears to take days upon days to copy data. Can I expect better results if I say screw unRAID and go to FreeNAS? I'm picking up another 3TB drive today, so I'll have 5 of them total. All file operations were magnitudes faster when I had my hardware RAID10 under Windows 7. I can't even remember why I decided to try unRAID or any software RAID for that matter. If I go with FreeNAS and 5 3TB drives, should I do raidz1? How much usable space would that give me?

My recollection of why you tried software was that you received (correct) advice that you had the wrong drives for hardware. As others point out hardware also creates a fixed dependency on the controller which some people don't like.

The performance gap between the two is reducing.

But if you have raid-capable drives now (check the specs) then I'd revert to hardware if I were you and give it another go.

Build a small array to test would be my recommendation... that way the array itself will only take an hour or so to build. Yes you'll need to start over after testing unless your array is dynamic (unlikely) but it will be way,way faster!
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