Raid

I got home last night and my WHS/Stablebit Drivepool setup reported a "drive missing". I had a feeling that my hardware was quirky given issues I had even installing Windows. So, I decided to keep my Synology Diskstation and am copying my media to it right now. the UI is super nice and I never have to use remote desktop. I put all my drives in and it automatically selected the best raid setup which was called hybrid something. I have 5x 3TB drives and it reports a little over 10Tb of usable space so I'm guessing it chose RAID5 although I thought that would have given me 12TB of space.

patseguin Wrote:I got home last night and my WHS/Stablebit Drivepool setup reported a "drive missing". I had a feeling that my hardware was quirky given issues I had even installing Windows. So, I decided to keep my Synology Diskstation and am copying my media to it right now. the UI is super nice and I never have to use remote desktop. I put all my drives in and it automatically selected the best raid setup which was called hybrid something. I have 5x 3TB drives and it reports a little over 10Tb of usable space so I'm guessing it chose RAID5 although I thought that would have given me 12TB of space.

You've been working at this RAID issue this long and still haven't learned the difference between an actual gigabyte and what a hard drive manufacturer uses?

Real GB: 1073741824 bytes
Hard drive manufacture GB: 1000000000 bytes

A single kilobyte is 1024, or 2^10 bytes, and it goes on from there, 1TB is 1024GB. Hard drive manufacturers report this differently, instead they stick with base 10, and as the drives grow in size, the difference gets far more significant .

Pat, the issue that you ran into is what i warned you about in the beginning...
You use your non supported disks on a raid setup... So the software had a read error on one of your drives and tries to re-read the data... The time-out for this from your card is different than the timeout in the drive firmware, and therefor your raid card kicks out the drive from your array... Your os reports a drive missing... it will quickly find it again and starts a rebuild of your array which can take days, and in the meantime it can fault again, starting from scratch...

You however already decided to go for your synology, disregarding anything that we have opted in this thread so far...
The synology is 800 USD, with 5x 3Tbyte drives that are xpensive as well... YOu are spending WAY too much money on a scenario that could be achieved spending nothing with the same results...

You will run into other issues with your diskstation within a week, and probably buy more hardware then. I like your enthousiasm, just wish you would do more research and trial and error yourself before running to the hardware store. Cheap hardware and problems is the best way to learn understand your hardware and software. If i remember correctly earlier on you said you had 20 years of experience as a system builder? I sincerely don't understand your question about your available space in your raid array...
Difference between Gb and GB or GiB...

Probably a typo Gollum. I have 5x 3TB drives and the diskstation reports 10TB of space, which isn't a huge issue. I just thought that RAID 5 would give me close to 12TB.

Again, I have 20 years building experience but nearly nothing with this kind of stuff. I only disregarded what was in this thread because I fear that my hardware in my server has a problem. I didn't want to entrust my data to a software RAID on possibly faulty hardware. I would have had no problem going the FreeNAS route if I didn't believe that I had a hardware issue. I had errors even installing Windows off the DVD. I eventually disconnected the DVD and installed from a USB stick and it seemed fine. I think the motherboard might be faulty which is why I had it laying around and that would explain my USB issues, DVD drive issues, and HD issues.

I don't know why you said I'd have a problem in the future with the diskstation. The drives I have are listed in Synology's compatible drives. It built the array last night and did a consistency check which went over night and it reported no problems.

I'm glad that everything works for you now. The difference in size is that you are unaware of the difference between a gigabyte and a gibibyte..
A 2Terabyte harddisk is NOT 2000 gigabyte in size but 2000 gibibyte. When you connect a 2TB drive you have about 1.83 left (if I recall correctly). If you do that 5x, you'll notice that you already lost 1 TB due to incorrect assumption that your drive is 2TB. (and I do agree that 2TB should be 2000 Gigabyte)...
I have no clue how much real space there is on a 3TB drive, assume it will be something around 2.7 TB, and you have 4 drives cause you lose one in your raid5 array... so 4x2.7 is 10.8 TB...

The reason i said you will have a problem in the future with the diskstation is not because of the product. It's a great machine. The problem you will encounter is that now your interest in this matter has gotten your attention to other option that are more versatile. You probably still wonder how ZFS would be, and how FreeNAS would perform, if it could run on your old hardware, if it would save money to have various programs (SabNZBD, sickbeard, couchpotato, headphones, transmission, virtualbox, phpMyAdmin, MySQL, etc etc) running on the same machine that holds your storage, so that you don't need to have multiple machines powered on 24/7, or adding a drive which is obviously impossible on a 5-bay machine...

The diskstation is a great great machine. I have read about them a lot and lots of people are really happy with it, and it also allows for some other programs to run in the background, just not to the extend of a machine running linux or freebsd. To put things into perspective, you have bough a computer based on a mini-itx board with a very slow cpu, no graphics card, little memory, no storage devices, for 800 USD... for that kind of money you could have assembled quite a phat machine...