Hey everyone,
So i currently have 32TB of raided drive space (RAID 5), that i am needing to replace. Combination of just old failing equipment and needing to upgrade. I am running it under windows server 2008 R2, and an LSI MegaRAID card plugged into a SAS expander. It acts as both media and business storage for my small business, but i've generally moved all my business stuff to cloud storage like one drive. So my home server is mainly used as a plex media server/storage.
Since i still get pretty good read/write performance out of it, i would like my next server to have that as well, what i'm now questioning is what kind of software i might run it all on. I have been looking at FreeNAS for quite a while and was planning on building the next server out of that, but the initial investment is really high and might not be feasible for me for a little while. You need server grade hardware (ECC-RAM, and therefore server motherboards and such), and you need to get your entire drive pool immediately as you cannot extend or change volume size once the drive is created. But all i need is SAS or SATA ports, no RAID cards are needed. That simplifies the setup a bit.
I also was looking at just building a windows 10 box with a HBA card and running Storage Spaces. But i've never used it, and all i've found online is that in parity mode the write performance is dismal. It also has stated that you can only do RAID 5 type parity, which i am not very keen on as its causing me potential headaches with my current setup (since the LSI MegaRAID setup is quite particular about what drives i can use, it takes me weeks to get replacement drives as they are all 3TB entry level enterprise drives and i can't get those easily in my city, during those few weeks, the potential for another drive failure is quite high). But this solution very much simplifies the hardware i need, as i can just use any decent spec hardware. I also like that it allows me to spec the logical drive size to any size want up to 64TB and then just add drives as i need the space.
My plan is to use 10 8TB WD RED drives in my next server, in a RAID 6 configuration. So i would really be interested in anyone that has used either FreeNAS or windows 10 storage spaces, or really anyone that has built servers out of other solutions (like unraid or anything else) that might be able to help me make a decision.
So i currently have 32TB of raided drive space (RAID 5), that i am needing to replace. Combination of just old failing equipment and needing to upgrade. I am running it under windows server 2008 R2, and an LSI MegaRAID card plugged into a SAS expander. It acts as both media and business storage for my small business, but i've generally moved all my business stuff to cloud storage like one drive. So my home server is mainly used as a plex media server/storage.
Since i still get pretty good read/write performance out of it, i would like my next server to have that as well, what i'm now questioning is what kind of software i might run it all on. I have been looking at FreeNAS for quite a while and was planning on building the next server out of that, but the initial investment is really high and might not be feasible for me for a little while. You need server grade hardware (ECC-RAM, and therefore server motherboards and such), and you need to get your entire drive pool immediately as you cannot extend or change volume size once the drive is created. But all i need is SAS or SATA ports, no RAID cards are needed. That simplifies the setup a bit.
I also was looking at just building a windows 10 box with a HBA card and running Storage Spaces. But i've never used it, and all i've found online is that in parity mode the write performance is dismal. It also has stated that you can only do RAID 5 type parity, which i am not very keen on as its causing me potential headaches with my current setup (since the LSI MegaRAID setup is quite particular about what drives i can use, it takes me weeks to get replacement drives as they are all 3TB entry level enterprise drives and i can't get those easily in my city, during those few weeks, the potential for another drive failure is quite high). But this solution very much simplifies the hardware i need, as i can just use any decent spec hardware. I also like that it allows me to spec the logical drive size to any size want up to 64TB and then just add drives as i need the space.
My plan is to use 10 8TB WD RED drives in my next server, in a RAID 6 configuration. So i would really be interested in anyone that has used either FreeNAS or windows 10 storage spaces, or really anyone that has built servers out of other solutions (like unraid or anything else) that might be able to help me make a decision.
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