Building a Home RAID Server

[Hello man]

Hello,

I recently ended up with a spare socket AM3+ motherboard on my hands, and I want to build a home RAID array for backup. I am thinking of using RAID 1, and want the drives to be hot swappable so I can remove one of the redundant drives when I leave the house on vacation and place it in my safe deposit box so I don't have any risk of losing files were something to happen to my house (break in etc.). I was thinking of just using a Sempron or something cheap like that for the CPU, I have the spare parts for everything else. Anyone have a good case idea? Also I need a good gigabit capable NIC card with demand based switching. Thanks guys.

 

[Eggz]

Sounds fun!

CPU: Don't need anything fancy. Getting a quad core on that socket would be more than enough.

Raid card: Do you need one? What's on your motherboard?

How many drives are you looking to put on there? You can do RAID 10 so that up to two drives can go out. That would allow one drive to fail while you have one of the drives in your safe deposit box during travel. The only caveat is that you could still lose data if the wrong drive fails, but the odds are in your favor.

 

[Hello man]

Sounds fun!

CPU: Don't need anything fancy. Getting a quad core on that socket would be more than enough.

Raid card: Do you need one? What's on your motherboard?

How many drives are you looking to put on there? You can do RAID 10 so that up to two drives can go out. That would allow one drive to fail while you have one of the drives in your safe deposit box during travel. The only caveat is that you could still lose data if the wrong drive fails, but the odds are in your favor.

A raid card could be nice, the motherboard is MSI and not great, I think it has 2 SATA 6GBPS ports lol. But seeing as I only really need RAID 1 (I have about 6 1TB external hard drives, one 3TB hard drive in my 5th gen TimeCapsule and one 500GB HDD in my other older TimeCapsule that holds a backup of my entire music library). I just want an easier way to put drives in the safe deposit box without confusion about which ones have recent backups on them and which ones don't.

EDIT:Quick question-what happens if I have say 6 HDDs in a RAID 1 array and I leave town. Which ones would I remove? Would I only have the capacity of one drive? I want to know exactly which drives are mirrors of which so I could remove them without much confusion.

 

[Eggz]

Well, if it's RAID 1, I am pretty certain you could lose up to five drives without data loss. They are all mirrors in RAID 1.

The "right drive" thing I mentioned was in the context of RAID 10. There, assuming you use the minimum of four drives, two drives would be mirrored and two drives would be striped. So, in RAID 10, you can lose the mirrored drives but not the stripped drives. That allows failure of any single drive, but tolerance of a second failure depends on which drives die.

If they are striped across drives 1 and 2 and mirrored on drives 1A and 2A, here's how it can work.

If drive 1 fails first, you can still tolerate loss of any drive besides 1A (the mirror of drive 1). And visa-versa.

If drive 2 fails first, you can still tolerate loss of any drive besides 2A (the mirror of drive 2). And visa-versa.

That help?

 

[boosted1g]

CPU: even an fx-4300 would be fine for this, might see if you can get a good price on a used phenom quad core though.

How many drives you need will determine needs for gpu and case.

I use a fractal design define r4 case for my file server. Originally I was thinking like you and wanting all hot-swap bays but in reality you don't pull them out enough to justify the cost of it. The R4 has 8 tool-less 3.5 bays, so you can just pull the drives out very easy if you need to replace anything.

 

[ss202sl]

Why not just keep the raid running(don't remove a drive) and backup to 2 external drives, and rotate the external drive at home with the one in the safe deposit box every couple of weeks. This will provide a long-term solution not only for when you're away, but also if you have a catastrophic event(fire, flood, etc).

 

[Hello man]

CPU: even an fx-4300 would be fine for this, might see if you can get a good price on a used phenom quad core though.

How many drives you need will determine needs for gpu and case.

I use a fractal design define r4 case for my file server. Originally I was thinking like you and wanting all hot-swap bays but in reality you don't pull them out enough to justify the cost of it. The R4 has 8 tool-less 3.5 bays, so you can just pull the drives out very easy if you need to replace anything.

The idea behind the RAID was basically doing away with external hard drives which we kept loosing, getting mixed up or forgetting to back up to. In my house we have one desktop, 4 laptops and soon to be another notebook. It just gets too confusing when you have that many external hard drives! Also, if at all possible I want this server to be able to host my own eMail. Its something I have wanted to do for a long time but have never had a server that consumed a small enough amount of power to do it (my old server was a Precision 490 with 2 Xeon 5080 130W CPUs and FBDIMM that consumed 11W per stick).

 

[Hello man]

Most of the parts in this thing will be used or recycled. Living where I do (Seattle area) there are a lot of computer parts up for sale. I have the option of these CPUs:
1.PHENOM II X2 B555 CPU AND ASUS M4A87TD/USB 3 AM3 Socket Motherboard - $75
2.AMD Sempron 145 Processor - $13
3.AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 220 DDR3 320GB - $100 (this one is a complete system)
4.AMD Athlon II 245e - $15
5.AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8GHz Triple-Core Black Edition CPU Retail - $75
6.AMD FX 4130 For Sale - $50

Correct me if I am wrong but those are all AM3-AM3+ CPUs. Which one makes the most sense? If I am running eMail through it as well as backing up to it as a RAID array should I opt for the FX? The case I will probably use will be an old Proliant case from the awesome recycling place about 6 blocks from my house.

 

[ss202sl]

I'm not suggesting to not do the raid--it's a good idea. Put all of your important stuff in 1 place(1 drive or set of drives). But take a backup of that single storage location(don't break the raid), and keep it safe and off-site. It's much easier if all your data is one place because you only need to back up 1 place, and restore to 1 place.

 

[Alabalcho]

Many people thing that RAID == Backup, and it is not. These are separate applications, one for storing data (on the server), one for backup up the data (off the server).
RAID will help your server to keep running in case a drive fails.
Backup will help you if your server blows up / gets stolen / you format the RAID while replacing a drive / your RAID controller goes belly up.

 

[Hello man]

Many people thing that RAID == Backup, and it is not. These are separate applications, one for storing data (on the server), one for backup up the data (off the server).
RAID will help your server to keep running in case a drive fails.
Backup will help you if your server blows up / gets stolen / you format the RAID while replacing a drive / your RAID controller goes belly up.

But could you back up from the computers to the server, and remove one of the mirrored drives?

 

[Alabalcho]

Why you want to remove a mirrored drive?

 

[Eggz]

Go for the quad-core AMD FX 4130.

You'll need to backup your RAID.

Get together however many drives you'll have, and then check back for which RAID makes sense.

 

[Hello man]

Why you want to remove a mirrored drive?

So I can put it in the safe deposit box when I go on vacation for longer periods.

 

[Alabalcho]

Why you want to remove a mirrored drive?

So I can put it in the safe deposit box when I go on vacation for longer periods.

You do this with Backups, not with RAIDs.
Having a backup strategy (full, incremental, differential) will allow you to "go back in time". You cannot do that with RAID.
Backups let you optimize backup space (e.g. you might skip backing up your movie library if you can re-rip it in case it is lost).

 

[Hello man]

Why you want to remove a mirrored drive?

So I can put it in the safe deposit box when I go on vacation for longer periods.

You do this with Backups, not with RAIDs.
Having a backup strategy (full, incremental, differential) will allow you to "go back in time". You cannot do that with RAID.
Backups let you optimize backup space (e.g. you might skip backing up your movie library if you can re-rip it in case it is lost).

So you are saying I should just build a NAS and a separate server for eMail hosting?

 

[Eggz]

I think what we're doing is just pointing out the distinction between redundancy and backup.

RAID gives you redundancy only, and that prevents data loss when SOME of the drives in your system die (not not when all die).

Backup prevents data loss when ALL of the drives in your system die.

The best thing to do is have both redundancy and backup, which is why I suggested to backup your RAID.

Don't even both taking any drives out when you go on vacation.

For instance, if you do a RAID 1 with two drives that hold 4 TB each, you should buy three 4 TB drives. Use two for the RAID 1. The third one will be for keeping a copy of the entire RAID array, and you'll keep it in your safe deposit box unless you're actually transferring a backup to it.

That's the simplest way to put it I know of, without getting into jargon (which doesn't help much anyway).

Basic point: RAID + BACKUP = SAFE DATA