Question 12x 8TB raid array, design suggestions please

[peka1977]

hello i volunteer as a youth worker and one of our projects is a video club with (usually) up to 10 young people.
The project is all about the young person creating a YT channel and uploading content.

Until now each one of our participants could use an external USB3 drive, they are all 8TB WD drives.
They can use a workstation PC to work on the videos and upload them.
As you can imagine one of the drives failed and a lot of work was lost.

So the plan is to create a redundant raid array, and each participant simply has a folder to store their work from now on.
we want to build a NAS and put all the 8TB drives in.

Please can I have some recommendations for system design? The hardware we have currently:
an old coolermaster case that can take all 12 HDDs, motherboard, CPU (an i5 and an i7) lots of RAM, decent PSU etc.

I would have thought we should get a good RAID card, and possibly run windows,
OR, perhaps use UNRAID, or TRUENAS? but is a RAID card even needed in that case?

We don't need the hypervisor functions that these OS's are offering, just a good old fashioned NAS capability

Any suggestions for RAID cards / OS recommendations would be appreciated!

 

[bill001g]

I suspect you are jumping into the deep end on this project. It is a extremely complex topic so you have people whose whole job is just working with storage systems.

So I will link you to a manual for a old card Adaptec 71605H that I have in my junk pile I got for free somewhere. The manual is pretty good at explaining basic stuff. I never did a lot with it since I don't have a need but you are likely looking for a card similar to this one. This exact card is so old I am unsure if it supports the newer windows so I would not buy this exact card. I think I ran it on windows 7. This is so old I can't even find the manual on a direct vendor site.

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/600031/Adaptec-Asr-6805q.html?#manual

The first choice you are going to have to make is what kind of raid you use. Most common is raid5. You could set it up with 11 drives and 1 parity. Just be aware that if you fail a drive when you replace the drive you get a massive performance hit while it rebuilds. There are other forms of raid that keep spares in addition to the parity . You trade more unusable disk space for faster and easier recovery. You might consider 2 raid5 groups with half your drives in each but you have more wasted space but if you fail a drive only one of the groups would be hurt and I suspect it takes less time to rebuild the array.

In addition there is some reason that it is recommended you buy drives designed for raid use rather than just any old drives. You can use any drive but I think there is both a performance as well as drive life issue when you are running drives.

Like I mentioned this topic is massive and I only the very basic stuff.

 

[peka1977]

I suspect you are jumping into the deep end on this project. It is a extremely complex topic so you have people whose whole job is just working with storage systems.

So I will link you to a manual for a old card Adaptec 71605H that I have in my junk pile I got for free somewhere. The manual is pretty good at explaining basic stuff. I never did a lot with it since I don't have a need but you are likely looking for a card similar to this one. This exact card is so old I am unsure if it supports the newer windows so I would not buy this exact card. I think I ran it on windows 7. This is so old I can't even find the manual on a direct vendor site.

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/600031/Adaptec-Asr-6805q.html?#manual

The first choice you are going to have to make is what kind of raid you use. Most common is raid5. You could set it up with 11 drives and 1 parity. Just be aware that if you fail a drive when you replace the drive you get a massive performance hit while it rebuilds. There are other forms of raid that keep spares in addition to the parity . You trade more unusable disk space for faster and easier recovery. You might consider 2 raid5 groups with half your drives in each but you have more wasted space but if you fail a drive only one of the groups would be hurt and I suspect it takes less time to rebuild the array.

In addition there is some reason that it is recommended you buy drives designed for raid use rather than just any old drives. You can use any drive but I think there is both a performance as well as drive life issue when you are running drives.

Like I mentioned this topic is massive and I only the very basic stuff.

Thank you for the reply. Hardware RAID may well be outside of the scope here. In terms of finding compatible cards, making sure everything works.
That's exactly why I have been considering unraid and truenas, am I correct in thinking that more of a software based raid system and much happier dealing with different individual disks?

 

[bill001g]

Your problem is getting something you can connect 12 disks to. Most motherboard are lucky if they have 6 connectors.

 

[peka1977]

getting a basic pcie sata card is not a problem, eg with 8 ports, but not a "real" raid card
might try truenas...

 

[fzabkar]

This is so old I can't even find the manual on a direct vendor site.

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/600031/Adaptec-Asr-6805q.html?#manual

This version is more recent:

http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/user_guides/adaptec_hba_iug_5_2013.pdf

 

[Ralston18]

My recommendation is to skip RAID completely.

Very much obsolete unless there are specific requirements for which a RAID would be beneficial.

RAID is quite likely to prove problematic without any real protections against data loss.

Set up a NAS and assign each participant a passworded folder for their individual use.

Ensure that all of the folders are regularly backed up.

Plus each participant should ensure that they also make their own video project backups. And test that the backups are recoverable and readable.

Ideally there would then be multiple project copies: one on the workstation they use (as passworded user), one on the NAS, one on the NAS backup, and one on their individual WD 8GB drives. Maybe elsewhere if each person has individual means to do so.

May appear to involve some extra work and effort - especially to keep track of project versions. However, backups can be automated and configured to always retain the most recent versions.

Likely there are a number of backup strategies you can use. Does not need to be complex.

Needing to go back a couple of versions likely to be worst case when compared to going back to no copies at all.....

Just my thoughts on the matter.

 

[USAFRet]

12 drives...
2 of these:
https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-PROBOX-3-5-inch-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B09V3TGDFW

Connected to any relevant PC.
Ignore the "RAID" thing.

Implement a true backup routine.

 

[USAFRet]

Or...a real 2-4 bay NAS box (Synology or QNAP), with 1 or 2 of those 8 bay enclosures connected.
Many workstations, all talking to that central data storage at once.

 

[USAFRet]

What is your overall budget for this, and what do you already have?

Knowing that, a full design might be suggested.