After doing much reading and asking questions, I think I'm going to go with FlexRAID for the new system (see my other thread). And I might run it on top of WHS.
The primary advantages of FlexRAID as I see them: - data is not striped across drives, it exists on a single drive - FlexRAID works on top of the host filesystem, and can be installed on Windows or Linux - no need to build a RAID out of clean drives - they can have data on them and building the RAID and parity doesn't affect the data - the data volumes can be pulled from the RAID and mounted/read in other machines - the new Tx engine can handle an infinite number of protected drives and an infinite number of parity drives, with the only real downside being long RAID creation times Currently, the only real downside to FlexRAID that I can see is that it is a snapshot system - you have to schedule a refresh of the parity. That is fine with me since I would be mainly protecting media files that don't change very often, and a nightly parity refresh is fine. The developer does have a new RAID engine in the alpha stage that does realtime protection. The appear to be a significant number of people who run FlexRAID on top of WHS. The idea is that you can have a couple of drives in the WHS protected pool which house your really critical data that needs to be protected in real time, then you have all your other drives with the media under FlexRAID. That way you don't need to have double the storage capacity like you would if they were under the WHS protected pool. So, now the big question remaining is on the hardware side. I am taking a good hard look at the 20 HD hot-swappable build on this thread: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=19553212#post19553212 However, we will be renting a house for the next 4-5 years so I won't be able to build myself a server closet, or probably run cables everywhere. That could prove challenging for move data around the home network. --- Brian On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 8:39 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > You might also look into Greyhole, some software like amahi is exploring it > Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T > > -----Original Message----- > From: "Alex" <[email protected]> > Sender: [email protected] > Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2011 17:38:23 > To: <[email protected]> > Reply-To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [H] unRAID vs FlexRAID > > I use unRAID because I'm lazy. > > Good points about unRAID - never have to use the command line, seriously. > There's quite a few user-maintained GUIs and tools (scripts) that help out, > but the standard unRAID UI is self explanatory. > > Some of the features like a cache drive took a bit of reading to understand > (as in, how to enable the darn thing). > > The only time where I've had to use the linux command line is to prepare a > drive prior to use - unRAID takes a *very* long time to initialize a drive > (2 TB is approx. 20-24 hrs). When I first built my array, I did it via a > shell script (again, a user-submitted tool) to help speed this disk > initializing process. > > Bad points about unRAID ? I'm impatient, so I dislike having to wait for my > drives to spin up after they have been powered down due to lack of use. > > Tips: you only need to put in enough drives as you need to, unless you want > to outfit yourself with 2 TB drives across the board. I still have 3 drive > slots empty out of 9, with 50% free so I overbuilt for my needs at the > moment. > > Speed-wise, not great, reading off a single drive but fast enough over > gigabit for most media needs (30-40 mb/s) with modern drives. > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brian > Weeden > Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 2:10 PM > To: hwg > Subject: [H] unRAID vs FlexRAID > > So now that I'm going down the path of building a new media storage server, > I need to look at options for preserving the data. I think I'm going to > not > go with a traditional RAID system because your data is striped across > multiple drives - any one drive essentially has gibberish on it. > > The two other options are unRAID and FlexRAID. Both are similar in that > the > data is stored on individual drives and then a parity is made on another > device. So if you have multiple drive failures, at worst your data on the > remaining drives is ok. And they are also much more flexible with regard > to > adding drives, configuring the number of parity drives, and using drives of > multiple sizes. > > The difference is that unRAID is Linux-based and boots from a USB stick, > while FlexRAID is basically software running on a host OS. I am leaning > towards FlexRAID, mainly because I am not very familiar with Linux and I > need this box to do more than just store media. > > Has anyone used either unRAID or FlexRAID? Your experiences? > > --- > Brian > >
