Un-RAID?

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sholling

sholling

Audioholic Ninja
I need to add some storage. I currently have one of the Intel 4200s with 4TB of storage (4x1.5TB WD Green in RAID5) but it's a bit temperamental. It's been reliable but since I use non-officially-supported drives I have to trick into booting up which fails to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Once up it works great. I was just about to pull the trigger on a Synology DiskStation 4-Bay NAS box when I ran across word of the LimeTech RB-1200 12 bay NAS server. That would let me retire the Intel and utilize 4 other 1.5TB WD Green drives that I have on hand (plus a 2TB parity dive) for a total of almost 11TB of usable storage and have room to add another 5.5 (3x2TB) or so of usable storage down the road.

I'm an old semi-retired network admin but my experience is in robust RAID5 arrays. Even my desktop PC has hardware RAID5 (4x1TB WD Black). The problem (besides saving enough money) is that other than what I've googled I know next to nothing about LimeTech, un-RAID, or RAID4. My goal is a reliable and reasonably green place to back up to and of course fast enough to serve video AV media storage. I have a ton of old mid-tower PCs laying around but it looks like it would cost me almost as much to convert one (new MB/CPU, 3x 4-drive SATA controllers, 3x 4in3 drive trays, and un-RAID license) as it would to just buy the ready to rock RB-1200. They're currently out of stock but I can wait.

My questions:
  • RAID5 is often very unfriendly to consumer drives, especially "green" drives. Sleep mode and spin up delays can cause the controller will falsely assume a drive died. Have you heard of any such issues with this technology?
  • Has anybody heard good or bad about LimeTech? About un-RAID?
  • Other affordable, low power drain, not horribly loud options that might be better?
 
krzywica

krzywica

Audioholic Samurai
You have several options. I would chose an option that has ZFS support such as FreeNAS. Other "out of the box" options include Open FIler, Un-RAID, and several others. These are all unix/linux based so having at least some knowledge of Linux systems is strongly suggested even though each one of these has a web based management system built in from the get go. I would install a virtual server application such as VMware Server or VirtualBox on your PC and play around with different options so you can test them out easily. All this is of course free. If you really want to do it right get your hands dirty with FreeBSD and use ZFS, I plan on migrating to this configuration next year sometime if budget allows.
 
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BoredSysAdmin

BoredSysAdmin

Audioholic Slumlord
I'm running OpenFiler file server on old HP DL380 with 6 drives with hardware raid controller.
I don't think OpenFiler runs without some sort of Ldap or AD central authentication server - so might not be good choice for home.
I didn't tested FreeNAS but I heard it pretty good choice.

Regarding Unraid and LimeTech products in general:
Pros: Some ready servers actually much cheaper from them than building them from same parts yourself (ie: http://www.lime-technology.com/products/rb-1200-server)
Unraid tech in general - Well, it's slow - slow as single drive is.
Reliability - they claim loss of one drive is designed in, however It's not clear to me what if the parity drive goes - what happens then and how long this drive rebuild will go for?
I think in general software Raid-5 is what you should go for. Celeron processors would be good choice for that as you don't need much cpu cache to process xor fast. Software Raid-5 will allow you use of green WD drives.

Option b:
Acer Aspire Easystore - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859321014&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Server+-+Systems-_-Acer+America-_-59321014

It comes with 2tb WD green drive - all you need to do is to add 3 more to maximize it's capacity at RAW 8tb - Not mind blowing, but for near silent low powered NAS - it's not bad, considering on sale you can get wd 2tb green for $100 or even less.
 
its phillip

its phillip

Audioholic Ninja
Yes, windows home server is definitely an option. The acer that BSA linked to is great, and lenovo offers one as well. Alternatively you could build your own WHS - I'd take a look at the data storage subforum at the hardforum if you want to see some of the insane builds people there have done.
 
sholling

sholling

Audioholic Ninja
I had thought about WHS but really wanted to wait for the 64bit version. To the best of my knowledge WHS was limited to 2TB. That it couldn't even do a SW RAID5 array over 2TB. That would pretty much limit me to RAID1. It really ticked me off when I discovered that M$ did not include SW RAID5 in Windows 7 Premium (or Pro) 64bit. Supposedly because they felt SW arrays over 2TB were too unreliable. I don't know if that's true or not.
 
jinjuku

jinjuku

Moderator
sholling said:
I had thought about WHS but really wanted to wait for the 64bit version. To the best of my knowledge WHS was limited to 2TB. That it couldn't even do a SW RAID5 array over 2TB. That would pretty much limit me to RAID1. It really ticked me off when I discovered that M$ did not include SW RAID5 in Windows 7 Premium (or Pro) 64bit. Supposedly because they felt SW arrays over 2TB were too unreliable. I don't know if that's true or not.
Click to expand...
Maybe I am getting long in the tooth but MS never included RAID 5 option in any of the Desktop Profesional Products. Just RAID 0 and 1.
 
sholling

sholling

Audioholic Ninja
jinjuku said:
Maybe I am getting long in the tooth but MS never included RAID 5 option in any of the Desktop Profesional Products. Just RAID 0 and 1.
Click to expand...
I could swear that at least one version of Windows offered striped with parity but maybe it's just been too many years. Even getting 3rd party products to do software RAID with Win7/64 is problematic. I played with a couple of esata port multiplier "solutions" and no-joy.
 
its phillip

its phillip

Audioholic Ninja
WHS doesn't do raid - it's got it's own proprietary system. You just select what folders to duplicate and it will do that across multiple drives.
 
BoredSysAdmin

BoredSysAdmin

Audioholic Slumlord
:eek: You guys right, WHS doesn't have software raid 5 - my bad, however
if you build home built nas without fancy hot-swap trays and freenas it'll save you lots of green.
i'll try to cool a hardware ingredients list today
 
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N

Nugu

Audioholic
RAID5 is often very unfriendly to consumer drives, especially "green" drives. Sleep mode and spin up delays can cause the controller will falsely assume a drive died. Have you heard of any such issues with this technology?
Click to expand...
Yes, and they will also excessively park and un-park the heads unless you use WDIDLE3 to increase the idle time before parking. The excessive parking causes "hitching" as it spins up in single drive setup and can cause a RAID drop out as well. Along with excessive wear on the drive if it's accessed frequently. (Never use a green drive as a boot drive without changing this setting) I'm serious in saying you need to use WDIDLE ASAP because the green drives park the read head in ridiculously short periods of time. Like less then a minute short.

The other setting you need to fix is TLER (amount of time given to go back and retry/fix a read error). Sadly WD removed this unadvertised setting from their green drives sometime after the 1 TB (not sure if 1.5 TB drives have the setting, I know the 2 TB don't) green. Without lowering this setting to ~7 you will experience drives dropping from the array. The tool to change it is called WDTLER, you can find guides and info on google.




Another thing to consider is I ran a software RAID5 on a nvidia chipset for a couple years with 4 of Seagates "enterprise" hard drives, rebuild time for a 760gb array (4x250gb) was around 12-14 hours. It did perform well enough though (read wise) at 160 MB/s avg sustained read.



I honestly don't know what to recommend other than to just using software to clone/backup drives for the safety of redundancy because using the green drives will cause you problems if you can't change the 2 settings I mentioned above.
 
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sholling

sholling

Audioholic Ninja
Nugu said:
Yes, and they will also excessively park and un-park the heads unless you use WDIDLE3 to increase the idle time before parking. The excessive parking causes "hitching" as it spins up in single drive setup and can cause a RAID drop out as well. Along with excessive wear on the drive if it's accessed frequently. (Never use a green drive as a boot drive without changing this setting) I'm serious in saying you need to use WDIDLE ASAP because the green drives park the read head in ridiculously short periods of time. Like less then a minute short.

The other setting you need to fix is TLER (amount of time given to go back and retry/fix a read error). Sadly WD removed this unadvertised setting from their green drives sometime after the 1 TB (not sure if 1.5 TB drives have the setting, I know the 2 TB don't) green. Without lowering this setting to ~7 you will experience drives dropping from the array. The tool to change it is called WDTLER, you can find guides and info on google.
Click to expand...
Thank you. I don't know what WD was thinking of. I used to use the RAID controller on my MB but after the 3rd or 4th time it rebuilt for no reason I gave up. I tried hardware RAID and had the same problem until I went with Black drives. I am really tempted to try un-RAID. I don't need faster than single drive reads at home and the main goal is decent single drive speeds and as close to bullet-proof data safety as I can afford. Unfortunately un-RAID doesn't span drives. Anyway I'll keep reading and ponder on this for a few weeks.

As a FYI the way I snuck around the problem with my Intel 4200 NAS was I set the box's sleep delay to 30 minutes which just happens to be the same as the WD 1.5TP green drives I used. Anytime the drives are asleep so is the box and it's expecting a spin-up delay.
 
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