RAID 6: a sensible solution for home use?

[Belfaborac]

Being a movie buff, a music lover and generally a lazy git, I have a huge number of movies, TV series and music stored on a number of drives in my PC, from which I stream it all to my TV and stereo in the living room. Currently I use 8 x 2TB single drives, but these are now close to filling up and I have to either simply buy larger drives and continue in the same manner, or go for a RAID array. The latter seems more sensible for reasons of data security, but I have zero experience with large RAID arrays so I need some input from people who do.

Initially I'm thinking 10 x 4TB drives, including 2 hot-spares, for an effective size of 22+ TB. However, I have no idea how long it will take to expand an array of this size later on. Are we talking hours or days (or weeks) here? Should I instead just buy more drives right away, so that I'm covered (hopefully) until I need to upgrade the drives once again?

Also on the subject of time, how long should I expect a rebuild to take in the case of a drive failure? Hours, days or even longer?

And finally: is this a sensible strategy for home use and non-critical files, or should I just continue using separate drives? Losing a drive and the data on it would currently be a huge hassle, but not a disaster since all the DVDs, CDs and BR discs can be re-ripped and stored on a new drive. What I'm unsure of is whether a RAID 6 array will be more hassle or less in the long run.

Thoughts anyone?

 

[MarkThompson2001]

You might consider a solution like FreeNAS. It does have some specific hardware requirements such as 8GB ECC RAM minimum, it does not use a RAID controller, and if your computer dies (minus the hard drives) you can relocate it into any system and power it on and watch it run. You can run it without ECC RAM however there are risks you must accept. Drive redundancy come in the factor call ZFS and RAIDZ. A RAIDZ1 is one drive failure is okay, RAIDZ2 means 2 drives can fail and all is okay, and lastly we have RAIDZ3 which is a bit overkill for a home system. Most of us use RAIDZ2. Hot spares are not needed with this type of solution, also you do get email status updates if you set up your system properly. Test it out in a VM first if this sounds like a solution for you. We also have Plex built in.

To address your question on rebuilding a drive, well that depends on how much data is on it. A full 4TB drive could take over a day.

 

[Belfaborac]

FreeNAS must run on a separate entity such as a NAS or other drive enclosure though, or do I have that wrong? If it does it's really not an option for me, as I want to keep everything in the case that I have. It's why I bought this specific case, after all. 😀

 

[Kewlx25]

Given large amounts of data, corruption happens a lot. And no, RAID does not protect your from corruption, but ZFS can.

 

[Belfaborac]

Being a relative n00b to this RAID malarkey, I'll need a little more of an explanation than that in order to understand what you're referring to.

 

[giantbucket]

raid is great for speed and uptime (hot swap & rebuild stuff), but kinda silly for home use. easier and safer to have separate drives, and if you have that many movies then group them A-F, G-L, etc on the drives. not as fast and not as "fancy" but simpler to implement.

for the love of god and all that is holy, avoid JBOD like the plague if you ever see it or think about it.