RAIDs, home NAS Questions

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Aside from just a file server running regular windows, I am also looking into the possibility of assembling a freeNAS machine.
Is the redundant array created through freeNAS considered to be a fakeRAID or a software RAID? Some of the DIY NAS builds I've seen don't bother with a dedicated RAID controller card, so they can't be a hardware RAID. Also, how is freeNAS able to recover your RAID if some or all parts of your NAS and even the drive hosting freeNAS (except for the storage drives themselves) die? Or is it even possible, without again having to buy the exact same motherboard that the drives were originally plugged into?

My old PC I am planning to convert to a file server/NAS is a full tower Antec 900 with a M4A79XTD EVO motherboard (7 SATAII 3Gb/s slots). It already has a spare W7 license though if I go with freeNAS this won't be necessary. I'm planning to install an SSD hosting the operating system or a thumb drive hosting freeNAS, then install 6 WD Reds for storage. Even though the drives will be SATA III (6Gb/s) I'm told using SATA II slots won't matter as in home network limited to 1GbE the theoretical transfer speed limits won't even get close to being reached.

My last question is, if I wanted to increase my storage capacity and install a dedicated SATA or RAID controller card to the PCI-E slot on top, will I be able to merge both the drives plugged directly into my motherboard and the ones plugged into the dedicated card into a single RAID? Something tells me this isn't possible as they will be using two different controllers/drivers, or that even if it is possible it just increases the likelihood the RAID will fail from fault from either the mobo or the card.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

>>57821720
Hardware RAID once was faster than software RAID, back when CPUs and I/O buses were much slower. The difference is negligible now.

The drive-transplant advantage goes to software RAID, actually. With hardware RAID you generally have to find a controller of the exact same model (and possibly the exact same firmware revision) to be able to rebuild the array in another machine if the controller fails. With software RAID you can rebuild the array on any computer running a similar OS that has enough SATA ports to talk to all the drives. Regardless of what controllers or kinds of controllers those ports come from.

Software RAID is also better in the event of actually needing the RAID's redundancy. Will your hardware RAID card notify you when a drive dies and needs to be replaced? If so, how? Do you have documentation on how to direct it to replace a drive and resilver onto it? These are all much simpler for software RAID.

Software RAID also makes expandability easier. Plug more drives in, using any available SATA ports, and you can add them to the array. (If you use ZFS there are some gotchas, since ZFS can't remove a vdev once you've added it, but Linux mdadm can handle this fine. As does btrfs, but btrfs RAID6 is still broken, you're limited to RAID1)

tldr, no, you don't want hardware RAID.

with 7200rpm harddrives is raid10 needed or would raid1 suffice for torrenting with 1 Gbps (125MB/s) download?
obviously torrenting free as in freedom linux distros

for personal use? just buy a synology or wd my cloud

>>57822113
vanilla RAID1 will almost certainly be fast enough.

If you use ZFS you'll get RAID10 anyway, since ZFS makes a stripe (RAID0) over all the vdevs in a pool. A pool with two mirror vdevs is essentially a RAID10.

I found a dell r510 with a h200 raid controller for 300 on ebay flashed the h200 raid controller to it mode and filled it full of 2 and 3 tb disks and installed FreeNAS on it, this is the best and most cost-effective solution.

Is something like managing spanned volumes in Windows disk management considered to be a type of software RAID?

For example, what they do here:
https://www.winhelp.us/storage-spaces-in-windows-8.html

And if disks are managed in this way, is the data volume recoverable if the motherboard dies and is replaced with another model, or if the drive storing the OS dies and the OS is reinstalled on a different drive (if you plug back in all the unaffected storage drives)?

>>57821720
hardware raid;
- historically faster, its speed advantage has more or less gone away with modern cpus, if the machine is using the cpu heavily for other things though, then taking the RAID load off is still beneficial. probably not worth getting a RAID card for home use
- often proprietary, if your RAID card dies, you probably have to get the same or compatible to keep using your RAID
- expensive, for good ones

fake raid:
- "fake" in the sense that they still use the main cpu to do its thing, in that sense there's no speed advantage over software raid
- often proprietary also
- convenient, transparent to the OS, which means you can use any OS

software raid:
- hardware independant, you can move your raid between any hardware and it will keep working
- software dependant, not transparent to the OS, so choices are limited by your OS

>>57821731
>if I wanted to increase my storage capacity and install a dedicated SATA or RAID controller card to the PCI-E slot on top, will I be able to merge both the drives plugged directly into my motherboard and the ones plugged into the dedicated card into a single RAID?
yes, you can have multiple controllers of any kind in a software raid

you could even raid together a usb drive, an iscsi network drive, a sata drive, and a loop mounted file... if you wanted to

being a data hoarder and having a raid?
what for?
no no and did i mention? NO

a nas is all about security not fancy speed screw raids and fill the shit with wd reds and one or two ssds

also if the system on the pic is yours you are asking the wrong questions buddy...

>>57822113
I've been running Linux mdadm RAID1 at home and RAID10 on my colocated server since 2013. It's stable, fast, and reliable. For any volume over 2TB I recommend using XFS with 64 bit inodes (look up the arguments to mkfs.xfs to get that working) since performance is better.

>>57823209
Literally everything in this post is wrong.

>>57823209

raid is a must for music and funny pictures, i dont mention important docs and childhood photos because thats a given you should have multiple copies of that stuff and it fits on a flash drive / dvd / sdcard / spare folder on sinblings computers / freeclouds (pre encrypted perhaps)

so a raid with 2x 7TB hdd is enough for music and hobby internet pictures collection.

films, series, cartoons, ISOs, musicclips, and 8K porn i just store without copies, if its gone its gone, no tears shed, i even have mirror dir structures for these in a watched-delete, watched-keep, and to-watch parent dirs so i know what to prune in an instant.

>>57823209

Repeat after me, RAID is not backup; It's redundancy.

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>>57823475
raid for his system will be a catastrophe we had a similiar thread about zoneminder when i showed my setup
well not everything but a portion of it..
the only thing i have use for the raid is for the zone minder and that is a decision based on the fact that i wanted to have more than 24h of data on it
other than thatits best to have 1-2 more subsystems on the backbone than everything on one place..especially if he is going to run zoneminder on an hd resolution..

>tfw you sync one filesystem onto a brand new one
>tfw no fragmentation
'tis the life bois

For your data you want to keep backups are important. Now the tricky part is figuring out how much data is critical that must survive intact for say till your dead and the data that if a hdd dies oh well your not crying about it. If say you only got 2TB of core data, then buying three 2TB drives (2 for raid 1 mirror, and 1 for backup) ain't that big a deal or expense. But add 8TB+ and the cost factor goes up quickly as does the hardware/setup headaches. These days there is really only 3 raid levels worth using and they are R0,R1, and R10. Raid 0 is useful when you have backups of the data and you want a large single volume say 6TB from 3 x 2TB drives. Raid 1 is a mirror of drives, so two 3TB drives equals 3TB usable space with the other drive ready to go if one fails. Raid 10 combines R0 & R1 for both large volumes and redundancy. But you need 4 drives of the same size. Raid 5 is out. The R5 array rebuild times can and will cause other drives in the array to die, taking your data with it. Plus performance of R5 is way way lower than other raid levels. No mater which raid level you use, backups are a must. Power failures can and does lead to data loss/corruption not to mention a failing raid card or hdd. Raid cannot protect from all things so backups are mandatory.

>>57823637
Of course but if you look at your system you are mainly streaming stuff in a way. If you want to watch a movie, you download it from usenet every time or keep it around if you want to watch it again. To you, if a hard drive dies, who gives a flip, just download it again.

If I wanted to watch a not-well-known movie from 1974, I don't think I could find it on usenet or torrent sites. You probably don't consume those type of shows, but I do.

The other issue is that if you watch a lot of shows, your bandwidth won't matter because there are people living under a cap. They can't download the same movie again and again because then they would have to have to pay 20 bucks per extra gig or some bullshit.

There is nothing wrong with what you do and there is nothing a data horder like myself is doing wrong. I find value in keeping hard to find digital movies that I just have the roughest time finding again.

If I was you, btw, I would put your configuration or your apps (not the media, just the application) on the same system as the tapes. With those apps you diagrammed, it should only take like an extra gig of space if you move all temporary or media files to an unraided place. You probably don't care about re configuring everything, but I would value the time saved not doing it by simply moving it to raid so you don't have to be concerned about bad configurations due to bit rot.


For all those that run NAS, I am running a Raidz2.