[SOLVED] stripe size for RAID 5 with 8TB drives?

[mac_angel]

almost all video files, mostly over 10GB each. Connected to an LSI 9260-8i.
Previous RAID I made was eight 3TB drives in RAID 5, 256kB stripe size. I'm leaning towards 512kB, or even 1MB.

 

[jeremyj_83]

almost all video files, mostly over 10GB each. Connected to an LSI 9260-8i.
Previous RAID I made was eight 3TB drives in RAID 5, 256kB stripe size. I'm leaning towards 512kB, or even 1MB.

While this article is old, it does give some basic information on stripe sizing. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/RAID-SCALING-CHARTS,1735-4.html
For myself I have a RAID 50 NAS used for Veeam Backups with a 512KB stripe size. If you are sure that nothing will be smaller than 1MB, the using a 1MB stripe size is OK. If some files will be smaller then going with a 512KB stripe would work.

 

[mac_angel]

While this article is old, it does give some basic information on stripe sizing. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/RAID-SCALING-CHARTS,1735-4.html
For myself I have a RAID 50 NAS used for Veeam Backups with a 512KB stripe size. If you are sure that nothing will be smaller than 1MB, the using a 1MB stripe size is OK. If some files will be smaller then going with a 512KB stripe would work.

Thanks. When I went through and left default settings, it selected 128kB. I went back to 256kB and created it, though I'm considering trashing it and going to the 512kB since it does seem like a better size for 99% of the files being over 10GB. It's all my movies that I digitized and the server is a personal Plex server. Mostly played within the home, but I do have a couple of friends that I've given access to as well.
I'll actually be running two RAID 5 groups, but each on their own controller. An LSI 9260-8i, and an IBM ServeRAID M5015, which is basically a rebranded LSI 9260-8i that I just bought on Amazon for $50. I thought my LSI card was dying, so I bought a new card. Turns out that it was just overheating, which seems to be a common problem. I hooked up a 40mm fan to each of them, put on better TIM and haven't had any problems since. And for $50, having a second card is definitely worth it.
It is saying it will take over 2 days to initialize, which I expected. I'm trying to find out if I can format and use it in the mean time, or if I need to wait for it to finish initializing. So far Google turns up that since it's a controller card and a hardware RAID, it doesn't even need to be initialized. But same with the stripe search, all the hits are really old.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Thanks. When I went through and left default settings, it selected 128kB. I went back to 256kB and created it, though I'm considering trashing it and going to the 512kB since it does seem like a better size for 99% of the files being over 10GB. It's all my movies that I digitized and the server is a personal Plex server. Mostly played within the home, but I do have a couple of friends that I've given access to as well.
I'll actually be running two RAID 5 groups, but each on their own controller. An LSI 9260-8i, and an IBM ServeRAID M5015, which is basically a rebranded LSI 9260-8i that I just bought on Amazon for $50. I thought my LSI card was dying, so I bought a new card. Turns out that it was just overheating, which seems to be a common problem. I hooked up a 40mm fan to each of them, put on better TIM and haven't had any problems since. And for $50, having a second card is definitely worth it.
It is saying it will take over 2 days to initialize, which I expected. I'm trying to find out if I can format and use it in the mean time, or if I need to wait for it to finish initializing. So far Google turns up that since it's a controller card and a hardware RAID, it doesn't even need to be initialized. But same with the stripe search, all the hits are really old.

I believe it can be used right away, it is just doing a RAID Sync I believe. Even though there isn't any data that still takes a while. However, in the long run what is 2 days to wait.

 

[mac_angel]

I believe it can be used right away, it is just doing a RAID Sync I believe. Even though there isn't any data that still takes a while. However, in the long run what is 2 days to wait.

yea, I wasn't shocked by how long it was going to take. And the great thing about it being a HW RAID on a card is I can turn the computer off and on and it picks up from where it left off, not restarts.

 

[USAFRet]

You need to wait for it to fully build. Can't use it in the meantime.

And RAID 5 is more and more contraindicated for large drives like this. In the event of a needed rebuild, a 3 drive array with 8TB drives (16GB array size) and, say, 10TB total data will take most of a day to rebuild. Continual 100% hammering on all the drives.