Advice for my server storage

[chris mallia]

Hi I just build a server and I have windows server 2012 installed, and I am thinking what is the best way to go for storage for example should I user multiple drives with raid 0 ( but will have to buy the same amount of hdd to keep a backup )? should I use hardware raid 5 and ? should I use windows storage spaces. Any advice suggestions is welcome I do not know whats the best way to start and the best choice

 

[mbreslin1954]

It depends on how much storage you need. If 3 TB will suffice, just buy a 3 TB HDD and another 3 TB HDD for backup. That's what I did, in addition to the 60 GB SSD I use for the "C" drive. You need to give thought to how you will recover from a HDD failure. Windows Server Backup works well, I use it and have used it to restore my system ("bare metal recovery"). Using RAID will just complicate whatever kind of backup/restore you are planning to use.

 

[chris mallia]

It depends on how much storage you need. If 3 TB will suffice, just buy a 3 TB HDD and another 3 TB HDD for backup. That's what I did, in addition to the 60 GB SSD I use for the "C" drive. You need to give thought to how you will recover from a HDD failure. Windows Server Backup works well, I use it and have used it to restore my system ("bare metal recovery"). Using RAID will just complicate whatever kind of backup/restore you are planning to use.

Thank you for your reply I was thinking of going with 8 to 12 tb coz alot will be stored and you are right it is the failure thats warring me

 

[mbreslin1954]

You should probably go with Storage Spaces, then. Windows Backup Server allows you to do the same with backup media: pool backup disks into a storage pool and not have to worry exactly where the data is stored. You can also mirror disks with Storage Spaces if you want software mirroring that is similar to what you would get with RAID hardware mirroring (hardware fault tolerance). I just think if you stick with built-in Windows technologies then it will be easier to recover from disk failures. If you have RAID then you have to worry about RAID controller drivers when trying to boot into a recovery situation where the system drive has failed (not an issue if just one of the RAID controller data drives has failed).

Also, I was once involved in a RAID situation where a 7-year-old server failed, it was old enough that the PCI-X RAID controller could not be used on the new server (no PCI-X slot on the new server, only PCI-e), and the exact same RAID controller was no longer available. The same manufacturer's newer RAID controller was NOT backward compatible even though it was supposed to be (at least we could not get it to work). That left a bad taste in my mouth for hardware RAID controllers.

 

[choucove]

The primary benefits of going with a RAID storage system is for high-availability, but it is NOT a backup solution. How much redundancy do you need to protect from hard drive failures causing unnecessary downtime and difficulties? How much performance and throughput do you need? Will you be accessing mainly a lot of small files, or will your storage be primarily very large files such as videos or large images? Will you be running virtual machines, databases, etc? Before we can make a good recommendation on how you should configure your storage, we should first know what type of usage you expect with your server storage and your needs.

A total of 8 TB to 12 TB will require a set of multiple hard drives, either in a software RAID (Storage Spaces) or a hardware RAID. Due to the performance benefits and compatibility I personally prefer a true hardware RAID controller, but again that's not a backup solution. You should always have your critical data stored on a completely separate storage system than your RAID arrays or controllers so it is independent and can be moved to any computer for accessibility.

 

[chris mallia]

thanks for all your help I will be having 1080p movies and streaming via dlna to multiple devices, backing up hdd images and restoring them. and also normal excel and word documents,ftp server. I am getting more interested in the storage pool as the other user said if it is best to use a separate hdd for backup I I could use multiple hdd in storage spaces as raid 0 (which should not have write reed speeds slow down) and use windows backup to backup to the other hdd. but 1 question if I have 3 4tb drives in storage pool raid 0 I would have to put another 3 4tb also in a storage pool on a different pc for backup right?

 

[choucove]

Raid 0 will have absolutely no fault tolerance. If a single drive fails, all of your information is gone. Unless you have a specific reason for high throughput I would not recommend this level of RAID, hardware or software. And your needs will not really justify high throughput RAID levels either. A single decent desktop class hard drive will be able to saturate the throughput of a single gigabit ethernet connection. So unless you have all of the necessary software and hardware to set up link aggregation to multiple workstations and your server, then there's pretty much no benefit to greatly improved throughput. For your needs I would suggest looking into a RAID 5 array. The capacity of a RAID 5 array is (capacity X [N]) - capacity, where [N] is the number of hard drives. For example if you went with four 3 TB hard drives in RAID 5, you would have 3 X 3 TB of storage space, with one additional hard drive capacity taken up in the parity.

However, RAID 5 is much more processor-intensive due to the calculations of parity, meaning it is recommended to use a hardware RAID controller to offload the processing to the storage controller instead of the server CPU. There are many other things to take into consideration with RAID 5, including the extended period of time it can take to rebuild the array in the event of a single hard drive failure.

 

[mbreslin1954]

Well, that's a lot of hard drives for one system, but yes, you're pretty much going to need at least as much storage for backup as you have for data storage, preferably more so you can have, say, a week's worth of incremental backups along with the first full image. For instance, I have about 2.2 TB of data (much of it videos) out of 3 TB of data storage, and I have 3 TB of backup. This allows me from eight to 12 daily backups before it gets close to the 2.7 TB usable (formatted) backup storage available. At that point Windows Backup Server starts over with a new, full backup (then incrementals after).

You might not be willing to invest in it, but it sounds like choucove is advising a completely separate storage for your data, such as a NAS box (network attached storage). It's basically a low-end PC (like an Atom CPU) managing a storage array, using the network for all data transmission/access. It'll put a load on your network and probably slow down your disk access compared to internal SATA speeds, but it IS safer. If you want to go to the trouble.

 

[choucove]

Not necessarily a separate system. If you want to contain all of your backup system within the same physical server it's possible. After all, a backup doesn't necessarily need high availability and can just e a set of independent drives. However, that's a LOT of hard drives to be putting into a single server system, and you're going to probably need at least one add-in RAID controller anyways just to connect and view that many drives.

That being said, a decent NAS with the capacity to store all of your server storage separate from your physical system would be an ideal route. This basically offloads the backup storage from your primary storage array and controllers, However, if you have tons of data in use that is changing regularly, then that is a lot of incremental data having to be pushed off to a NAS device through a network which can be very slow unless utilizing specialized network equipment such as link aggregation or 10 GbE.

 

[chris mallia]

You should probably go with Storage Spaces, then. Windows Backup Server allows you to do the same with backup media: pool backup disks into a storage pool and not have to worry exactly where the data is stored. You can also mirror disks with Storage Spaces if you want software mirroring that is similar to what you would get with RAID hardware mirroring (hardware fault tolerance). I just think if you stick with built-in Windows technologies then it will be easier to recover from disk failures. If you have RAID then you have to worry about RAID controller drivers when trying to boot into a recovery situation where the system drive has failed (not an issue if just one of the RAID controller data drives has failed).

Also, I was once involved in a RAID situation where a 7-year-old server failed, it was old enough that the PCI-X RAID controller could not be used on the new server (no PCI-X slot on the new server, only PCI-e), and the exact same RAID controller was no longer available. The same manufacturer's newer RAID controller was NOT backward compatible even though it was supposed to be (at least we could not get it to work). That left a bad taste in my mouth for hardware RAID controllers.

Thats what I am going with storage spaces it looks easier to import if anything happens, and why buy a controller when the os can do it I am going with a raid 0 or 10 and backup to external drives