A RAID that just works!
I run an IT support company, so I talk to clients every day who are sobbing over broken hard drives. Kind of makes you paranoid about backing everything up. My own machines are always configured in at least a mirror (RAID 0 is evil) and I have been using RAID 5 on my personal main desktop to squeeze out more performance (I know, I know, I read the thread about how it does not make much difference, but I run a lot of VMs and move a lot of data around, so there are a lot of parallel disks accesses and so the performance does make a difference).
My question? I need to get off of using motherboard RAID and get a dedicated controller. I just had a problem which convinced me of that when I had a drive failure (I think the sata cable worked lose). I fixed that and the controller is talking to the drive again, but Windows crashes on start up (I assume the driver is crapping out), so Windows never starts fully and never rebuilds the RAID. Looks like I am going to have to reinstall it and I could do without the hassle.
I need a system that just works. I need to be able to laugh at a disk failure, slip out the drive and pop in another without breaking stride. Or if the controller breaks just buy another one (even from another manufacturer) and plug it in without having to go into recovery mode. But what should I buy? There are a lot of controllers out there and I do not know how to choose. Can you help?
For now I need something that will support 3 x 1Tb Samsungs (although I think I might need to add a fourth one) all in RAID 5. For the future I like the idea of adding 3 additional SDDs in RAID 5 and moving the boot partition onto them so that I get lighting fast software load times. All I am waiting for is the price of these units to drop from the upper atmosphere (which I am hoping will be by the end of the year).
Robustness is the key thing. I want a disk failure to be a non-event that just flags itself for attention. Great benchmarks are a fine thing, but that robustness is even more important to me. The reviews I have read of controllers all focus on the raw performance numbers, none of they say what would happen if they pull out a drive in the middle of the test. I had one machine last year on a motherboard RAID that will reconstruct the RAID, but the machine was unusable (way too slow) for a day or so whilst it did it. That’s the sort of thing I am interested in. Any of you guys had drives fail on this type of controller whilst in operation? What happened?
In a dream world I would like a Drobo like solution where I could notice I was running low on storage and bang in another 2Tb drive and the system would automatically and redundantly redistribute the load. I have not gone to a Drobo because I cannot boot off of it and I do not have any software that would recover from it if it did break (I use Runtime Software’s RAID Reconstructor when I need to fix recover a RAID, but I do not think there is anything out there for a Drobo). I add this note in case my lack of knowledge of the RAID world means there is a magic bullet solution that you can tell me about that will fix these issue. A long shot I know, but worth a try.
The rig is a Core i7 overclocked at 3.8Ghz with 12Gb of RAM and Windows 7 64 bit.
What words of wisdom can you offer?
I run an IT support company, so I talk to clients every day who are sobbing over broken hard drives. Kind of makes you paranoid about backing everything up. My own machines are always configured in at least a mirror (RAID 0 is evil) and I have been using RAID 5 on my personal main desktop to squeeze out more performance (I know, I know, I read the thread about how it does not make much difference, but I run a lot of VMs and move a lot of data around, so there are a lot of parallel disks accesses and so the performance does make a difference).
My question? I need to get off of using motherboard RAID and get a dedicated controller. I just had a problem which convinced me of that when I had a drive failure (I think the sata cable worked lose). I fixed that and the controller is talking to the drive again, but Windows crashes on start up (I assume the driver is crapping out), so Windows never starts fully and never rebuilds the RAID. Looks like I am going to have to reinstall it and I could do without the hassle.
I need a system that just works. I need to be able to laugh at a disk failure, slip out the drive and pop in another without breaking stride. Or if the controller breaks just buy another one (even from another manufacturer) and plug it in without having to go into recovery mode. But what should I buy? There are a lot of controllers out there and I do not know how to choose. Can you help?
For now I need something that will support 3 x 1Tb Samsungs (although I think I might need to add a fourth one) all in RAID 5. For the future I like the idea of adding 3 additional SDDs in RAID 5 and moving the boot partition onto them so that I get lighting fast software load times. All I am waiting for is the price of these units to drop from the upper atmosphere (which I am hoping will be by the end of the year).
Robustness is the key thing. I want a disk failure to be a non-event that just flags itself for attention. Great benchmarks are a fine thing, but that robustness is even more important to me. The reviews I have read of controllers all focus on the raw performance numbers, none of they say what would happen if they pull out a drive in the middle of the test. I had one machine last year on a motherboard RAID that will reconstruct the RAID, but the machine was unusable (way too slow) for a day or so whilst it did it. That’s the sort of thing I am interested in. Any of you guys had drives fail on this type of controller whilst in operation? What happened?
In a dream world I would like a Drobo like solution where I could notice I was running low on storage and bang in another 2Tb drive and the system would automatically and redundantly redistribute the load. I have not gone to a Drobo because I cannot boot off of it and I do not have any software that would recover from it if it did break (I use Runtime Software’s RAID Reconstructor when I need to fix recover a RAID, but I do not think there is anything out there for a Drobo). I add this note in case my lack of knowledge of the RAID world means there is a magic bullet solution that you can tell me about that will fix these issue. A long shot I know, but worth a try.
The rig is a Core i7 overclocked at 3.8Ghz with 12Gb of RAM and Windows 7 64 bit.
What words of wisdom can you offer?