Hi Brian,
I switched to FlexRAID to combine a total of 23 2tb drives spread over 5
Sans Digital port multiplier towers plus extra drives on several PCs used
as
HTPCs. I have ripped all my Blu-ray, DVDs and recorded TV to the various
arrays and over time had just gotten too large to easily manage. I wanted
to
centralize everything on one system. The system I started with utilized a
AMD FM2 motherboard with 8 onboard SATA ports, 2 SAS ports on an add-on
card
(for a total of 8 additional SATA ports, and 3 of the Sans Digital towers
(5
disks each) for a total of 31 drives distributed as 1 OS drive, 4 parity
drives and 26 data drives (several were empty). When this continued to
fail
on creation, I moved the Sans Digital based drives to a 6 port SAS
controller card.
When I still had problems, I found that several drives were bad (scan
disk),
including the 1st parity drive. Replacing the drives gave me a successful
creation but it took 4 days. The Update took another 4 days. That's when I
started having second thoughts on using the Parity backup option. I guess
I
am just expected too much from the software. That's when I thought
creating
several pools would reduce the strain for each update/validate.
I am using a modestly powered AMD dual core 3.2 GHz processor and mostly
consumer drives (mixed with a few WD reds). I went with Windows Home
Server
for economy reasons ($50 vs. $90-130 for Windows 7 Home
Premium/Professional). I utilized a HighPoint RocketRAID 2760A SAS RAID
controller card. I am using RAID over File System 2.0u12, SnapRAID 1.4
Stable and Storage Pool 1.0 Stable (although not using the SnapRAID at
this
point).
Overall, I am happy with the pooling facility of the software. I just wish
my large setup would not choke the parity option. Thanks for all the
input.
Not sure if there is an answer to my problem. More powerful hardware?
Reading the forums seems to indicate that hardware should NOT be the
bottleneck. There seems to be the option of Updating/Validating only
portions of the RAID each night. More research is needed on that front. My
current plan at this point is to fill the RAID in the pooling only mode,
make sure all names and organization is correct, then commit to a stable,
unchanging file system that I will then commit to the SnapRAID parity
option. That way I will only need to Validate/Verify periodically.
Thanks,
Jim
-----Original Message-----
From: hardware-boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com [mailto:hardware-
boun...@lists.hardwaregroup.com] On Behalf Of Brian Weeden
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:06 AM
To: hardware
Cc: hwg
Subject: Re: [H] What are we up to (Was-Are we alive?)
Hi Jim. Sorry to hear you're having such troubles, especially since I
think I'm
the one who introduced FlexRAID to the list.
I've been running it on my HTPC for several years now and (knock on
wood)
it's been running fine. Not sure how big your setup is, I'm running 7
DRUs
and
2 PRUs of 2 TB each. I have them mounted as a single pool that is shared
on
my LAN. I run nightly parity updates.
Initilaizing my setup did take several hours, but my updates don't take
very
long. Sometimes when I add several ripped HD movies at once it might
take
a
few hours but that's it. How much data are you calcluating parity for at
the
initialization? Do you have a lot of little files (like thousand of
pictures) or lots
of files that change often? Either of those could greatly increase the
time it
takes to calcluate parity.
I'm running it under Win7, and unfortunately I don't have any experience
with Server 2011 or any of the Windows Server builds.
From what I've gathered you can only have one pool per system. I think
that's a limit of how things work. But I've never needed more than one
pool,
so it hasn't bothered me.
For hardware, I'm running the following based largely on a HTPC hardware
guide I found online. It's based on a server chipset to maximize the
bandwidth to the drives.
Intel Xeon E3-1225
Asus P8B WS LGA 1155 Intel C206
8 GB DDR3 SDRAM
Corsair TX750 V2 750W
2x Intel RAID Controller Card SATA/SAS PCI-E x8 Antec 1200 V3 Case 3x
5in1
hot swap HDD cages
Part of the key is the controller cards. I'm not actually using the
on-board
RAID, just using it for the ports and the bandwidth. I've got two SAS
to
SATA
cables plugged into each card, which gives me a total of 16 SATA ports.
The
cards are each on an 8x PCIe bus that gives them a lot of bandwidth.
Boot
drive is an older SSD that is attached to one of the SATA ports on the
mobo.
Once trick I figured out early on was to initialize your array with the
biggest
number of DRUs you think you'll eventually have, even if you don't
actually
have that many drives at the start. That way you can add new DRUs and
not
have to reinitialize the array.
When I started using FlexRAID it was basically a part-time project being
run
by Brahim. He's now created a fully-fledged business out of it and has
gone
way beyond just FlexRAID. Apparently he now has two products. I think
the
classic FlexRAID system I'm still using has become RAID-F (RAID over
filesystem) and he's got a new Transparent RAID product as well:
http://www.flexraid.com/faq/
I'm still running 2.0u8 (snapshot 1.4 stable) so I guess at some point
I'll need
to move over to the commercial version. But for now it's working fine
so I
don't want to disturb it.
Hope all this helps, and happy to answer any other questions however I
can.
---------
Brian
