Storage Rig

morkhans said:
What other raid system other than unraid allows you to mix disk sizes?

You should be able to build arrays out of different collections of drive sizes. Eg 4x2tb and 4x1tb.
Click to expand...
Windows Storgage Spaces does. And it's so simple to use.
Had a 2TB drive of the 6 drive array fail a few months back. Only had a 3TB in my drawer so I stuck it in. Was seamless.
Just adding space to the array is just as easy.

I used to use FreeNAS. Until WSP came along. Am sold.
 
Before Storage Spaces came along with Win 8/Server 2012 I built a Windows box with Drive Bender which does the same thing. Only MS quietly largely deprecated the need for this class of software with Storage Spaces. And this stuff is just dead easy to use. That said, some comparative reading. Also a few (appear to be reasonably qualified) talking heads chattering among themselves, as hosted by Home Server Show. Jump to ~ 17 min in to get past the worst of the irrelevant chatter.
 
Rather condense the number of drives you are operating. Buy larger capacity drives if possible and donate/throw-out your older smaller capacity drives.

If you do want to run in the nether regions of 16+ drives, your best bet may be to buy a standard motherboard with PCI-E (Like a Gigabyte P85), and grab a RAID card for additional slots. Unfortunately a decent RAID card will cost a fair whack. Depends on how much you are willing to spend.

Also, are you going to be putting these into RAID? or is this just a JBOD/Storage spaces type setup? Btrfs/Zfs might be a better solution file system wise, otherwise a standard Windows storage space will do fine, and is a lot easier to setup/manage.
 
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Mike Smit said:
Windows Storgage Spaces does. And it's so simple to use.
Had a 2TB drive of the 6 drive array fail a few months back. Only had a 3TB in my drawer so I stuck it in. Was seamless.
Just adding space to the array is just as easy.

I used to use FreeNAS. Until WSP came along. Am sold.
Click to expand...

Replacing a failed disk with a bigger disk in a raid pack is a different story. You'll probably find that you've "lost" that 1tb worth of extra space.
 
Mike Smit said:
Nope. It increased. But not by the full 1TB. Can't remember exactly.
Click to expand...

Ok, so I guess you went with mirror spaces then rather than parity?

Simple spaces are designed for increased performance, but don't protect your files from drive failure by keeping multiple copies. They're best for temporary data (such as video rendering files), image editor scratch files, and intermediary compiler object files. Simple spaces require at least one drive.

Mirror spaces are designed for increased performance and protect your files from drive failure by keeping more than one copy. Two-way mirror spaces make two copies of your files and can tolerate one drive failure, while three-way mirror spaces can tolerate two drive failures. They're good for storing a broad range of data, from a general-purpose file share to a VHD library. When a mirror space is formatted with the Resilient File System (ReFS), Windows will automatically maintain your data integrity, which makes your files even more resilient to drive failure. Two-way mirror spaces require at least two drives, and three-way mirror spaces require at least five.

Parity spaces are designed for storage efficiency and protect your files from drive failure by keeping more than one copy. Parity spaces are best for archival data and streaming media, like music and videos. This storage layout requires at least three drives to protect you from a single drive failure and at least seven drives to protect you from two drive failures.
Click to expand...
 
You will need a 2nd PSU.
HDD uses 2A on 12V, 0.5A on 5V during startup.
So for 10 HDD's you will need 20A @ 12V and 5A @ 5V
Also remember most PSU's are only 80% efficient, o you cant get the full 800w out of it.
 
ponder said:
ReFS/Storage Spaces from what I have read is nowhere near as good as ZFS.
Click to expand...

ReFS has nothing to do with Storage Spaces. They are 2 seperate technologies. ReFS is not really complete or ready for most commercial uses.
Also ReFS does not currently support data deduplication whereas standard NTFS does.
I would recommend Storage Spaces with NTFS.

NTFS is not as good as ZFS either. ZFS is probably the best file system out there, but Storage Spaces is far simpler to manage.
 
morkhans said:
What other raid system other than unraid allows you to mix disk sizes?

You should be able to build arrays out of different collections of drive sizes. Eg 4x2tb and 4x1tb.
Click to expand...


I stumbled onto three or four - I'll see if I can find them again...

The problem with different collections of disk sizes will be loosing a lot of space to redundancy, instead of just the largest drive (or two drives)
 
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