I've never combined sans digital with flexraid.. Aren't they creating their own raid5 internally?
I currently keep 70TB online in flexraid with no issues, I know I had mentioned it before. -----Original Message----- From: "Brian Weeden" <brian.wee...@gmail.com> Sent: 2/23/2014 8:07 AM To: "hardware" <hardw...@lists.hardwaregroup.com> Cc: "hwg" <hardware@hardwaregroup.com> 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 On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 8:00 PM, James Maki <jwm_maill...@comcast.net>wrote: > I have beating my head against the wall trying to install FlexRAID on > Windows Home Server 2011 since the beginning of the year. I spent the first > month trying to install using several Sans Digital port expanding towers. I > kept having errors/crashes when the system tried to calculate parity on the > initial install. I thought it might be the slow access to the > port-multiplier set-up, but I finally ran scan disk on all the drives and > found one parity drive (out of 4) had disk errors that were probably > causing > the problem. Then, the initial install was taking over 4 days. I found this > unacceptable and kept looking for a reason and whether this was typical. I > upgraded to a hardware RAID care (?), with multiple SAS ports. The Create > process was still very slow. The Parity Update took a similar length of > time. As did the Validate Parity procedure. And I assume the Verify > procedure would take a similar period of time. The suggestion is to run the > Update every night, the Validate weekly, and the Verify monthly. With the > length of time for an Update, it would be impossible to keep up with this > schedule. > > The program seems to be in a period of flux, with the developer not sure of > its direction. There is no firm documentation, just the wiki, forums, and > some how-tos. It is easy to find the how to do the general set-up, but I > believe most are going with small RAID sizes. Now, my storage needs are > more > for convenience and video access rather than any important, can't be > replaced files (for the most part). My business and personal files are > saved > to a different system. The attraction of FlexRAID is its ability to combine > multiple hard drives into a "single pool" to the user. This is what > attracted me to the software. Also, removing FlexRAID gave you access to > the > individual drives and contents, unlike most traditional RAID setups. Its > T(infinity) parity was an added bonus. With multiple parity drives, it was > reported that you could lose multiple drives and still be able to > reconstruct the missing drives from the parity drives. It is just that the > time involved in parity creation and checking, as well as the amount of > time > it would take to reconstruct 1 missing, let alone multiple missing, drives > just seems to great. The RAID would wear out the drives creating, > validating > and checking the RAID contents! > > Right now I am using the software for drive pooling only, and am fairly > happy with the results. Are there any FlexRAID users, experts or fan bois > out there in HardwareGroup land? I have several questions I have not been > able to answer by reading the forums, wikis and how-tos. The most pressing > is that it seems that you cannot create more than a single pool? I wanted > to > make several pools which would allow parity validation to be more easily > managed. TRUE? > > Although I paid for FlexRAID with Parity, I am not married to the software. > Other suggestions and why would be appreciated. > > So, what have you been working on that you have neglected the > HardwareGroup? > I always find the discussions interesting and useful. > > Jim Maki > jwm_maill...@comcast.net > >
