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What's your media storage like?

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beefkabob

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I'm super excited to be, for the first time, resilvering a hard driver in a RAID. That Seagate bit the dust after 7 years of spinning, so I bought a 3TB HGST SAS pull off ebay and stuck it into my 36-bay Supermicro server case. I wasn't sweating, though. It's a RAIDZ3, so two more drives could die without trouble. Now I'm back up to 3 levels of redundancy, or will be in 15 hours when it's done resilvering. 13 3TB drives. Instructions say to split the RAID, but I think statistics are on my side this way. And with pulled HGST drives around $22 each shipped, I could build a whole new RAID for not much money. Plus it keeps the house a bit warmer.

What's your storage?
 
Synology NAS, 4 x 3 TB drives in their RAID version. And several shelves filled with CDs, DVDs, BDs...
 
I don't have the bandwidth at home for online backup, and my shelves are filled with more books than CDs and other discs.
 
6x8TB drives in RAID5 NAS mirrored by 2 other similar NAS drives, one off-site.
 
FreeBSD fileserver running ZFS in a 10 disk mirror configuration (RAID10) using LSI SAS controller with HP SAS expander (can connect 24 SATA drives) in a Lian Li D8000 enclosure. I backup some of the stuff (like music) to a WD MyCloud 8Gbyte as well as to Blackblaze B2.

Currently have 33TB in that, plus some other drives.
 
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Synology VM (on Dell Xeon sever running ESXi 6.7) with 6TB + 4TB drives. Nightly backup to 2 bay Synology NAS with the same drives and infrequent off-line backups to 4 bay USB enclosure full of 3TB drives.,

I do question why any of you run RAID at home. RAID provides availability, it's not a substitute for proper backups. Do you really need that level of availability at home when you could have more storage instead?

I have run RAID myself for many years, my first home array consisted of 4x 1GB SCSI II disks pulled new from a Compaq Proliant 1000 that I installed or a client (with larger disks :) ). So I had a professional interest in playing with RAID, but more recently I've stopped bothering at home.

The other factor to consider is the emergence of SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) disks. These are usually the cheapest, large capacity consumer drives to buy (I normally shuck them from a USB enclosure). SMR does not work well with RAID due to latencies introduced by the SHR writing algorithm which can lead to frequent whole array re-syncs.
 
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RAID is cheaper if you start out. If you backup everything anyways, then yeah, you could just double your storage, double your compute and have full backups. I don't have full backups. Too much data. Only the important stuff.
 
For some things, the RAID is the backup. For other things, I don't really need a backup.
 
A pair of mirrored 3TB WD Red drives in a 2-bay Qnap NAS appliance. Music is mostly CD-quality, 2-channel PCM and does not take up much room, photos take up somewhat more.
 
Still resilvering. 28.73 MiB/s. I suppose I could up the priority somehow.

Also I did put a bunch of super quiet nocturne fans into the case. At full blast, they're noticeable background white noise. At low speed, they're not quite silent. The stock fans were far louder at any speed.
 
beefkabob said:
For some things, the RAID is the backup. For other things, I don't really need a backup.
Click to expand...

RAID is not a backup. If you have a drive fail and get a URE (Urecoverable Read Event) during the rebuild, you loose everything. The size of modern drives means that this has become a fairly likely scenario... https://standalone-sysadmin.com/recalculating-odds-of-raid5-ure-failure-b06d9b01ddb3

I was unlucky enough to encounter a URE during a rebuild of a 4x 750GB array 13 years ago. I didn't have a full backup and lost a large proportion of my media.
 
beefkabob said:
Still resilvering. 28.73 MiB/s. I suppose I could up the priority somehow.

Also I did put a bunch of super quiet nocturne fans into the case. At full blast, they're noticeable background white noise. At low speed, they're not quite silent. The stock fans were far louder at any speed.
Click to expand...

You mean Noctua?
 
Right now, I manually do a backup about once a week to a WD Easystore 8TB on my network from my main computer. Also do a backup to portable WD Passports about once a month.

Got a Synology DS918+ off that Amazon deal in December, and looking forward to getting it set up and configured in the next couple of weeks.
 
beefkabob said:
And with pulled HGST drives around $22 each shipped
Click to expand...

Do you check the runtime and erros on these drives before using them?

My last home array was 4x 3TB drives which all had 45,000+ hours (>5 years) on them when I decide to forgo RAID for my current setup. BTW, all of the 3TB drives were shucked from the cheapest USB external drives I could find (mixture of Seagate and Toshiba), so I think they did pretty well and I was happy to demote them to tertiary backup duties.
 
Berwhale said:
You mean Noctua?
Click to expand...

Yeah, that.

I should run scrubs more often to avoid URE.

ZFS checks for errors on every read and, i think, write. Plus when scrubbing. I scrubbed a week ago. I should scrub weekly. :)

But the odds of a real issue are slight.
 
Kingston Data Traveler Locker+ G3 Encrypted 64 GB USB Flash Drive with nightly My Docs backup using Fbackup.
https://www.kingston.com/en/usb-flash-drives/datatraveler-locker-plus-g3-encrypted-usb-flash-drive
Kingston1.jpg
 
scrub repaired 0 in 15h34m with 0 errors on Wed Jan 22 17:45:16 2020

This is why I like ZFS.
 
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