RAID Spin Down?

[phenixdragon]

Let few days I have been looking to replace my WHS server with either a NAS (Drobo, Synology) or a RAID setup because something like unRAID or using a hardware RAID with WHS. Spend hours and hours on this and decided the way I want to go is a hardware RAID controller with WHS.

I was pretty set on trying to pick up a couple of different cards off of eBay that support 8 internal SATA connections and that also support being able to expand the RAID array along with being a true hardware RAID card, or at least having it's own CPU. Memory I'm not so concerned about. However, the cards I was looking at don't support spin down and to get one that does costs more.

So I am wondering, does anyone know the base models from LSI, 3ware (owned by LSI but still some different cards, Highpoint, Adaptec, and Accera that support spin down? Basically I am trying to compare the cheapest card each have that support it, but it has to be hardware RAID.

Essentially my goal is to have a hardware RAID card that supports spin down and 8 internal SAS/SATA connectors, or 2 x SFF-8087 mini-SAS, and RAID 5.

[jerryt]

Areca ARC-1210, 1220, 1230 all support spin down.

And I can comfirm they work fine with Sage.

[PiX64]

I used to use a Perc 5/i card which you can pick up on ebay for around $100. I have since moved to a unRaid for the following reasons:

1) almost unlimited expansion
2) when accessing content such as a movie there is no need in my opinion to spin up 4 drives in a raid 5 array. unRaid will only spin up the disk that contains the content.
3) with the perc 5/i card in ubuntu server 9.10 i was never able to get it to spin down the array. So i had 8 disk spinning 24/7/365
4) if you lose a disk in a raid 5 array your good. if you lose more, your screwed. with unraid if i lose mutliple disks you will potentially not lose any data. it depends on which disks actually fail. worst case scenario you will lose the data that is contained on the disk which fails. my opinion is this is much better redundancy for a home media setup
5) Hardware raid is without a doubt much faster than something like unraid, however i have been able to successfully upload to my unraid server, and stream different blurays to mutliple end points in the house without so much as a stutter.
6) It is rather difficult to expand a hardware raid array without moving data around. For me this was pretty frustrating at times.

With that said im not sure what you are going to use your raid setup for. I use unraid for streaming media/file server. I DO NOT use it to record to. I have read many posts that say this is doable and works really well, but as i said i have no experience with this.

hope that helps a little:

Pix64

[phenixdragon]

I was look at those but it looks like the Areca ARC-1210 only has 4 SATA connections and 1220 is more then what I was look to spend.

This is actually my first box I am looking to do a RAID and want at least 8 2 TB drives in there. However, I do want to add to that at some point. Looking at expanders, I'm not really understanding how they work in regards to adding them to your system and where to really even buy them. Looking online isn't helping much. I'd like to be able to add to my storage at some point. Maybe 16 2 TB drives.

[phenixdragon]

Originally Posted by PiX64

I used to use a Perc 5/i card which you can pick up on ebay for around $100. I have since moved to a unRaid for the following reasons:

1) almost unlimited expansion
2) when accessing content such as a movie there is no need in my opinion to spin up 4 drives in a raid 5 array. unRaid will only spin up the disk that contains the content.
3) with the perc 5/i card in ubuntu server 9.10 i was never able to get it to spin down the array. So i had 8 disk spinning 24/7/365
4) if you lose a disk in a raid 5 array your good. if you lose more, your screwed. with unraid if i lose mutliple disks you will potentially not lose any data. it depends on which disks actually fail. worst case scenario you will lose the data that is contained on the disk which fails. my opinion is this is much better redundancy for a home media setup
5) Hardware raid is without a doubt much faster than something like unraid, however i have been able to successfully upload to my unraid server, and stream different blurays to mutliple end points in the house without so much as a stutter.
6) It is rather difficult to expand a hardware raid array without moving data around. For me this was pretty frustrating at times.

With that said im not sure what you are going to use your raid setup for. I use unraid for streaming media/file server. I DO NOT use it to record to. I have read many posts that say this is doable and works really well, but as i said i have no experience with this.

hope that helps a little:

Pix64

I was looking into unRAID. Basically I am looking into replacing my WHS box. It just sits there with data just to mostly stream movies, store other data like photos. I don't use it to record or anything else. I do like the idea that basically you have unlimited amount of storage you can add to but I was leaning to continue to use WHS. I looked at the perc 5/i and 6/i but not having spin down is a fail for me. Having a lot of disks costs a lot in power. I figure even if I save $100 a year in power with spin down spending more money on a higher RAID card is going to cost the same, plus less usage on the disks.

But with unRAID. My concern is being able to do more then then just store. At least FTP but also setup Time Machine for OS X. I'm not a UNIX/Linux guy so I'm not really sure how to get those done.

[phenixdragon]

Just setup a drive with unRAID, testing it out and I kind of like it. I think I will end up going with it as reading about version 5.0 it seems like it has a lot of promise. I am seeing it will allow for user apps which be a big plus. Getting 60 meg reads and write which is enough for me.

[phenixdragon]

I am configuring everything now for unRAID. I think this will work out much better. This and using SageTV HD Theater 300 should be pretty sweet on streaming my DVDs and Blu-rays. Thanks for the feedback you had with your RAID setup and now using unRAID.

[Ericft]

phenixdragon,
did you jump right in and purchase the Pro version of unraid? i am literally in the same boat as you, scrapping my WHS server and now this second setting up unraid free version...still haven't seen the drive on my network via the win7 machine but i'll trouble shoot soon. did you consider esata external RAID boxes like sans digital trm-bp 4,5,8 bay devices? why did you go with unraid...was it the spin down issues?

[phenixdragon]

I haven't done a paid version yet, but should be in a day or two. I am still trying to transfer files off my drives so I can add them to the array and then copy the files over. Should have my 3rd drive added tonight or tomorrow morning. Taking forever moving data from a 1.5 TB drive via USB.

I was looking at enclosures but I wanted some type of RAID setup. Not for backing up but for redundancy. It still works the same with WHS, you still can only duplicate which is 50% drive space used up if you duplicate everything, which was what I want to do. I then was looking at an external RAID enclosure but they either were expensive for a true hardware RAID built into the enclosure or they included a software RAID card for a PCIe slot. The ones with the cards were about $150 for 4/5 bays and $500 or so for built-in. I could just buy a RAID card and skip the enclosure.

Then I was thinking of getting a few 4 bay Drobos. They are under $300 each on eBay/Amazon but because WHS is 32 bit it can see anything above 2 TBs so each Drobo would only show up as 2 TB drives. I think with Vail coming out maybe I will look into that again but who knows when Vail will be out.

So I was looking at a hardware RAID card again but the spin down was an issue for me. I'm not the type who really cares about saving power but I don't want my server eating up power all the time either. I think each drive uses about 10 watts spun up. I figure I am going to have around 10 drives in a few months which equates about $1 a day, which adds up over time.

Basically I am decided on unRAID because it gives me redundancy, no hardware cost, spin down, seems most flexible as for adding and removing drives and of various sizes, and I can always go back to WHS or something later on without taking really any loss. What I mean is if I bought a $500 RAID card and decided I didn't want to use it anymore, well then I may not be able to sell that for $500, or what other hardware I may end up buying.

[davephan]

I tried the 3 drive basic version for about a week before ordering the Pro version, pre-configured flash drive. The Basic version wasn't too hard to get working, I ran into some trouble, but the unRAID forum was very helpful. I have 1 data drive and 3 data drives, all 2 TB. The preclear_disk.sh script takes about 28 - 30 hours to run on a 2 TB drive. It takes several days to move over the files from each 2 TB RAID 1 drive pair to the unRAID computer.

When WHS Vail comes out, the boot drive may be possible to recover, if the Microsoft backup and recover work. However, I think you'll still only have 50% drive space efficiency. You could use the RAID adapter just as a drive controller, so you can add more drives? I saw an adaptec 4 drive sata contoller for less than $100. I could increase my system's 12 drive capacity to 20 drives with two of those controllers. I already a couple drive trays that would fit in my full tower case. You'll have some extra hardware cost since you need a separate computer for unRAID.

I'm still going to setup a RAID 1 drive pair on the SageTV computer for recordings. Then move the files to the unRAID computer if I want to keep them. I haven't heard anyone that is using unRAID for a recording drive. No one seems to think it is a good idea. It's great for the video library though, which is what consumes most of the disk space.

Dave

[Ericft]

do you folks think that the unraid needs anything more than an intel atom processor? what limitations will that have? i have a gigabyte ds3r mother board with q6600 cpu running the 3 drive version of unraid..just bought a coolor master 590, drive cages, powersupply and now thinking about whether I should just transfer the motherboard +/- the q6600(I have an e2180 somewhere that i could use) or buy a whole new low power/low speed processor and new mother board that supports sata and PCIex4??

[phenixdragon]

Originally Posted by Ericft

do you folks think that the unraid needs anything more than an intel atom processor? what limitations will that have? i have a gigabyte ds3r mother board with q6600 cpu running the 3 drive version of unraid..just bought a coolor master 590, drive cages, powersupply and now thinking about whether I should just transfer the motherboard +/- the q6600(I have an e2180 somewhere that i could use) or buy a whole new low power/low speed processor and new mother board that supports sata and PCIex4??

I'm not sure what the power consumer is while idle or doing light transfers. I wanted to use an Atom processor and I was looking at doing all new hardware throughout but my current setup works too along with giving me 8 SATA ports already. I am running a 65W Core 2 Duo which I know is overkill but selling it on eBay and buying a new CPU would cost more which I probably wouldn't save anything in power. But I'm not really sure what the lowest/weakest CPU is you could use. But beware of Gigabyte boards as I learned this week. The ones with DualBIOS (aka, HPA) will ruin your parity. Basically the HPA writes to your HDD (random) a backup of your BIOS which creates a hidden partition. If you had a drive that fails and it has this on the drive, that data probably will be lost. If it writes this HPA data to your parity drive, well then the parity drive is worthless. It is highly recommended to only use Gigabyte boards that have this if by default it is disabled. Mine wasn't but a simple BIOS update gave me the option and by default it is disabled. Reason why you want it disabled by default is if the battery on the board ever dies, then the default will be enabled if you power or reboot and then the HPA data will be written to the drive, ruining that drive.

**Edited***

Forgot to add. To get ride of the HPA partition it's not as simple as just doing a format. There are ways to get rid of it and it's really simple. There is a Linux command to do it but I don't think I got it to work. I mean it seemed like it did but I kept getting an error that it couldn't do the command, but when I checked the syslog the HPA line was missing meaning it was gone. Just to be safe I used Seagate tools for DOS to do an max partition which gets rid of that hidden partition. The hidden partition won't be on a new drive you put in if a drive fails so it won't read the drive capacity correctly so it will fail to rebuild that data, or at least that's why I think it fails. Basically you just have parity with that hidden partition and it can be on more then 1 drive, and like I said, if it gets written to the parity drive, then all drives have no redundancy.

[phenixdragon]

Originally Posted by davephan

I tried the 3 drive basic version for about a week before ordering the Pro version, pre-configured flash drive. The Basic version wasn't too hard to get working, I ran into some trouble, but the unRAID forum was very helpful. I have 1 data drive and 3 data drives, all 2 TB. The preclear_disk.sh script takes about 28 - 30 hours to run on a 2 TB drive. It takes several days to move over the files from each 2 TB RAID 1 drive pair to the unRAID computer.

When WHS Vail comes out, the boot drive may be possible to recover, if the Microsoft backup and recover work. However, I think you'll still only have 50% drive space efficiency. You could use the RAID adapter just as a drive controller, so you can add more drives? I saw an adaptec 4 drive sata contoller for less than $100. I could increase my system's 12 drive capacity to 20 drives with two of those controllers. I already a couple drive trays that would fit in my full tower case. You'll have some extra hardware cost since you need a separate computer for unRAID.

I'm still going to setup a RAID 1 drive pair on the SageTV computer for recordings. Then move the files to the unRAID computer if I want to keep them. I haven't heard anyone that is using unRAID for a recording drive. No one seems to think it is a good idea. It's great for the video library though, which is what consumes most of the disk space.

Dave

Well if you go with something that has a true hardware RAID enclosure then you don't need to use the file duplication, such as using Drobos. That will have it's own redundancy. I probably would have used that instead of unRAID if WHS can see larger then 2 TB drives. Even with a RAID card you can only do 2 TB LUNes, which is like a partition on the RAID.

I think recording to video will work just fine. Streaming Blu-rays have a much higher bit rate then even HDTV, or at least they can be depending on things. The bit rate is still much smaller then the write/read speeds on the unRAID. I am getting 30 MBs with the parity drive. There are ways to get that up, such as using a CACHE drive. But even Blu-ray has something like a 20 mb (not MB) bit rate which is much smaller then the write/read. I don't use a NAS to record my TV. I just have a 2 TB drive in the server for recordings. But...maybe in the future I could see using a NAS for recording TV to, but there really isn't a reason on why I should.

[phenixdragon]

FYI, the unRAID forums are good stuff. The people there are real friendly and answer pretty quickly. Even if it is a question that has been answered a billion times they really do help out. You don't get the typical trash talking for not reading the FAQs, wiki, search, etc...I mean still try to do that first before asking but even I have asked a billion questions on there and all nice people. Good stuff, just like Sage.