[SOLVED] Help setting up Raid 6

[mwstephenson85]

Hello, I have an older system that sits in guest room.
i7-875k 3.8ghz 4 core / 8 thread (Noctua D-14)
p7p55d-e premium mobo
DDR3 2133mhz cl 10
RTX 2060 Super
Antec1200 case (stock fans replaced with Noctua 2000rpm except for 200mm stock big boy at top)

The Mother board Manual says this BIOS (non UEFI) supports RAID 0,1,5,10
While the onboard raid 5 controller does sound interesting, it only allows for 1 drive failure for a rebuild.
The size of the array I'm trying to build raid 5 is not sufficient enough.
So it seems I will have to get PCIe raid controller capable of RAID 6

I want to use 7 total 12TB 7200rpm 256MBcache HDD's drive (Enterprise)
With 2 of the drives protecting the array but not counting towards the total pool of the partition.
This will leave me a partition size just under 60TB

I have never setup a raid before and I was hoping people with experience and understanding of 2009-2012 legacy hardware could help me out.
Recommend a raid controller.

I would also like to know which OS I should use I have windows 7 ultimate at the moment but I could update to windows 10

The pc is also used as a guest gaming machine (it's in the guest room) so I would rather not put windows server or something on it.

I don't mind the rebuild time of the array. Even if it takes 2 days to rebuild the array if a drive fails thats fine it could take a week for all I care. I'm not a business, I just wana make sure all the data on the array is safe from drive failure.

I'm also wondering if the 12TB size of the drives or if the total size of the array is going to be a problem.

I found 2 additional HDD cages for the Antec 1200 back in 2016 because I knew eventually I wanted to load this system with HDD's for a raid setup.

With the 3 HDD's cages that will leave two of them full with 3 HDD's in each. The last cage will have 1HDD on the bottom and on top of it is a 512GB sata SSD which is the OS drive not part of the array.



Thank You for reading and I hope someone who understands all this stuff can help me figure this out and get a working 60TB raid 6 array in this system.

 

[mwstephenson85]

Would something like this work?

 

[DSzymborski]

What are you using the storage for? You say you're worried about drive failure but that you also don't care about how long it takes to rebuild, but that's the exact opposite of why you would want RAID. RAID is not a backup solution, it's an uptime solution.

 

[mwstephenson85]

What are you using the storage for? You say you're worried about drive failure but that you also don't care about how long it takes to rebuild, but that's the exact opposite of why you would want RAID. RAID is not a backup solution, it's an uptime solution.

Some of the games I have now are over 150GB in size for one game and it's only 2020 right now. I have 6K videos from vrporn.com that are over 32GB for 1 video file. What do you suggest is a better solution than Raid 6? If I were to do Raid 1 for example that's cuts my storage in 1/2. I'm also not interested in montly subscription based cloud storage backup or anything like that. The reason the array is 60TB is because I plan to use it for along time and to take a long time to fill.

I am interested to hear about better backup solutions.

 

[USAFRet]

Physical drive fail is only one of the was to incur data loss.
Ransomware, corruption, accidental deletion, accidental formatting, etc, etc....A RAID array does absolutely nothing for those.

A real backup routine protects against those as well as physical drive fail.

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[mwstephenson85]

I have decided I'm going to setup a raid 10 using 8 total 16TB drives. This will give me just under 64TB total which is still on target.
This will also make the plex server faster for reads from the drives, and make the writes faster when im writing to the partition.

 

[mwstephenson85]

Physical drive fail is only one of the was to incur data loss.
Ransomware, corruption, accidental deletion, accidental formatting, etc, etc....A RAID array does absolutely nothing for those.

A real backup routine protects against those as well as physical drive fail.

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

I appreciate your reply as much as I would like to setup something similar to what you have with automation I think its gonna be easier to just throw money at the problem setup raid 10 and get speed + backup and be done with it. If drive fails I just replace it no need to rewrite whole array just the 1 drive. Easy enough for me.

 

[USAFRet]

I have decided I'm going to setup a raid 10 using 8 total 16TB drives. This will give me just under 64TB total which is still on target.
This will also make the plex server faster for reads from the drives, and make the writes faster when im writing to the partition.

...which still does little for actual data protection.

Faster reads from the Plex? A 2 hour movie is still 2 hours.

 

[mwstephenson85]

My motherboard controller says it supports raid 10 but I'm thinking I should still get a pcie controller it said something about raid 10 with exception like its gonna hijack all my sata ports or something not sure if thats gonna mess with my SSD that runs the os if plug into mobo sata port.

 

[mwstephenson85]

...which still does little for actual data protection.

Faster reads from the Plex? A 2 hour movie is still 2 hours.

I will get some external drives plug them into the raid 10 pc and backup chunks of the data to the 14TB external or whatever and I'll leave those at a friends house. It will only take me like 2-3 14TB external drives to backup the meat of it at the start. Should my house catch fire or someone hijack my porn/games/movies then It will all be at a trusted friends in his closet. Does this qualify now? Also how much money do you think im wasting in this strategy? What would you do lol?

 

[mwstephenson85]

Actually im gonna install one of these

It will make internal drives hot swap from the front of my case. Then I can back up files with normal drives the same size as the array and they might even end up back in the array should a drive fail.

 

[USAFRet]

What would you do lol?

Dispel with the RAID 10 completely.

Have whatever drive space you need in the PC. Individual drives.
Backed up to a NAS or externals. Each physical drive gets its own folder for backups.
In the event of a drive fail, replace and simply recover that particular drive

I've done exactly this after a drive fail.

 

[mwstephenson85]

Dispel with the RAID 10 completely.

Have whatever drive space you need in the PC. Individual drives.
Backed up to a NAS or externals. Each physical drive gets its own folder for backups.
In the event of a drive fail, replace and simply recover that particular drive

I've done exactly this after a drive fail.

Well you see how much money I was already willing to spend on this raid stuff, how much does a NAS cost? I don't want to spend like $500 just to get the NAS thing that you still have to populate with drives. That was the point of my old pc and it's drive bays. The old pc is the nas, and the old pc is connected to the network.

 

[mwstephenson85]

Are your backups just an exact image copy of the drive using something like acronis image software?

So I should every week make a backup image and replace that image in a folder on the NAS for each individual drive something like that?

 

[USAFRet]

Well you see how much money I was already willing to spend on this raid stuff, how much does a NAS cost? I don't want to spend like $500 just to get the NAS thing that you still have to populate with drives. That was the point of my old pc and it's drive bays. The old pc is the nas, and the old pc is connected to the network.

It seems raid 1 raid 10 already solved this

And it doesn't have to be a dedicated NAS box.
The old system is just fine. Or a few external drives.

All we're saying is - Don't rely on a RAID array for actual data protection. It isn't.
And for basically a media server...the 'speed' of a RAID 0 or 10 is mostly wasted.

 

[USAFRet]

Are your backups just an exact image copy of the drive using something like acronis image software?

So I should every week make a backup image and replace that image in a folder on the NAS for each individual drive something like that?

Mine are Images with Macrium Reflect.
A Full image, and then an Incremental or Differential every night.
I can store a month of Full+Incremental in not much more than the space of the original copy.

Recovering 600GB data from a failed 1TB drive takes maybe 90 minutes across the LAN.
And I could recover that drive in any condition it was in the last 30 days.

Something weird happened and I didn't notice for a couple days? Recover the image from the day before that.

 

[mwstephenson85]

And it doesn't have to be a dedicated NAS box.
The old system is just fine. Or a few external drives.

All we're saying is - Don't rely on a RAID array for actual data protection. It isn't.
And for basically a media server...the 'speed' of a RAID 0 or 10 is mostly wasted.

The speed of 10 just seemed like a bonus was mainly looking for the raid 1 properties of it.
I guess the network speed will be much more important than read/writes though.

The real purpose of the raid 1 part of it is I write a 50 gigabyte file and it's written to 2 HDD's instead of 1 the first time I write it it's already backed up.
But with the way you're saying I have to manually back it up now.

 

[mwstephenson85]

I guess thats what im gonna do throw a bunch of drives in there and just backup the image every month or so to external drives and leave the external drives or nas even at a friends. Then im fully protected, I might lose what I put on recently but thats okay with how im doing this none if it is truly critical, it is but it isn't.

 

[mwstephenson85]

Insurance will replace my old pc my new pc and all the stuff in a fire or something but not the data and it will be at my friends house, because after building my new system and realizing that all that stuff is gone would really suck

 

[USAFRet]

But with the way you're saying I have to manually back it up now.

My setup is all automatic. All on whatever schedule you create.

 

[mwstephenson85]

My setup is all automatic. All on whatever schedule you create.

I don't know how to do that though.

Also if you were to take say 1 16 TB drive for example once it's full or almost full I will pretty much just be reading from it. So if I make an image of the drive there really isnt a reason to keep backing it up. I guess its possible some of the files could change or be added/removed, but for the most part an image I made 3 years back if the drive fails would still be valid. All this really is is non critical media storage movies/tv shows/video games/porn. I just need to store it all and have a backup. So I guess the manual backup route is okay for me I only wanted raid 1 so it would just all happen automatically without me having to make it happen automatically like you did. And raid 6 seemed to provide the same answer at the cost of only 2 drives where raid 1 wanted 1:1 drive ratio.

 

[mwstephenson85]

I don't wana keep pinging you to read my stuff but I do think you helped me dodge a bullet and I have decided to not raid 5 or 6 for sure. But I still think raid 1 or even raid 10 is a safe option, but I may still go with just making backup images on external drives because in my case thats actually viable and maybe my problem has already been solved all along and I was just trying to be lazy with raid auto writing to 2 drives instead of just 1. I will do some more research into auto backup stuff too maybe I can work a situation like you did thanks for the help.

 

[USAFRet]

Right.
Each setup and use has slightly different requirements and procedures. Whatever works for you.
As long as there is another copy on some other physical drive.

Again, we're just saying that RAID is not a method of data protection.

 

[USAFRet]

For the automation, Macrium does that natively.