2014-05-16, 20:43
Ah yes, hadn't thought of that… :-)
It is indeed a fun topic !
It is indeed a fun topic !
(2014-05-16, 04:25)thrak76 Wrote: I'll try to tackle some of your questions...
1. Yes, there is a parity drive, or drives. You can have (i think) as many parity drives as you want. However, the parity drive must be at least as large as the largest data drive. So, an array with 2TB, 3TB and 4TB drives must have a parity drive of at least 4TB.
2. JBOD arrays are not a problem, assuming that you also use the pooling function.
3. Expansion is easy. Add the drive. Assign it to the pool. That's it.
4. As your data increases, you may add more than one parity drive. Multiple parity drives protect against multiple drive failure. One parity drive; one drive can fail without data loss. Two parity drives; two drives can fail simultaneously without data loss. Etc.. How many parity drives is a preference of how much risk you are willing to take. Currently in my setup I have 6 data drives and 1 4TB parity drive. When I get to 8 data drives I'll probably add another parity drive.
5. Don't know about hot spares (or really what a hot spare is?).
6. Restoring a failed drive looks pretty straight forward from the GUI - i have not had to do it yet. I believe your RAID can be online while restoring a failed drive as well.
(2014-05-17, 01:25)DJ_Izumi Wrote: See? THESE are the questions I wanted answered by the website. I just have a couple of follow up questions.
This SnapShot RIAD thusly only updates the parity information on an interval? Like daily? That I'm cool with, hey lose ONE day's worth of additions to the server, no biggy. Does this snapshot generation time use up a lot of CPU or take up a lot of time? It sorta sounds like the time needed depends on how much new content it adds. So it'd be epic on first run, after you dumped gigs upon gigs upon gigs into it, but a piece of cake if only several gigs per day are new.
Secondly, this parity disk, you can have (Effectively) unlimited other disks and there only needs to be ONE parity disk? Like, in a 10 drive system, 9 could be storage and just one has to be parity? The only catch is that the parity drive must be as large as the largest disks in the pool?
(2014-05-17, 02:54)nickr Wrote: You could try snapraid which is free.
(2014-05-17, 02:56)thrak76 Wrote: FWIW, I migrated from DriveBender too. Wasn't too bad, but it definitely has a learning curve.