Might as well ask here. My 2TB Plex hard drive is getting full. What's the best solution if I want say 10TB to store my media for Plex but very hands off?
I don't want to weld any contraption just plug something in and have it be visible by Windows 10.
Generally I've gone to a archive first strategy for recovery though. I didn't want to buy a tape drive to back it up (10TB usable after dual parity protection), so I write media as I get it to BD-R's and put them on the NAS box for accessibility. I also backup individual projects on their own DVD-R or BD-R. That negatively impacts 'time to reconstruct' because each source will have to be located, loaded, then verified. But it essentially means nothing on the NAS box isn't already available on shelf-stable read only media. It also means the option for recovering from a ransomware attack is to re-format and re-load. The challenge is maintaining the discipline of making the restore media first.
In fact, as I speak I'm upgrading to 4x8TB Western Digital Red drives (I back up a number of computers, and have some large media files). Resilvering takes foreeeevveeerrr btw. (looks like about 36 hours per disk, times 4)
Edit: I guess I'm assuming the ransomware doesn't have access to the raw disks, which would be true if you were using a NAS (e.g. FreeNAS) and connecting to it via NFS, CIFS, etc.
On the storage? Nope.
Get backups.
Looks like a Supermicro reseller - at least their rack offerings.
However from the IRC channels I frequent - many people have had one or two die over the years. So I consider myself lucky.
Probably just bad luck, but I don't feel like buying another WD drive.
You probably need a NAS. To store 10TB securely you are looking at a bill of materials of about ~1200usd. This includes a NAS from synology and 3 6TD Western Digital Red drives. This will give you 12TB of storage space running in a RAID5 configuration.
Synology DS416 NAS diskless: 365USD WD Red 6TB: 253USD (x3) Total: 1124
For a little more you could pick up a HP Microserver for just under 400USD and run ZFS on a pool with SMBD and get about the same results but with more hands on fun.
Alternatively, just aim your requirements a bit lower (e.g. only 6TB) and pick up a 2 disk nas and 2 drives running as a mirror and it will be much cheaper (~700-800USD).
Resources: http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx
* A disk failure where some moderate number of sectors become unreadable is far more likely than a disk going completely toast.
* Even if I were running raidz2 or raidz3 I'd still want the offsite backups in case of some disaster befalling the entire array (or more likely, me accidentally rm'ing something)
* It's a home fileserver used mostly for archival purposes. Unlike a business scenario, the loss of availability while I restore from backup is not going to hurt too badly.
Did I miss something here or do you think this is sound?
All the striped modes will (in effect) limit write rates to the bandwidth of a single disk, but ZFS is good about this: So long as the writes are reasonably large, as they'll likely be for a media server, you'll usually get the maximum streaming bandwidth of the disk. So, 150-200 MB/s. Reads are much faster.
It's not something you'd want to use in a DC, but for mostly-idle storage at home it's perfectly fine. Add in an SSD cache, and it'll be downright speedy.
That gives an effective capacity of 64 TB, given 8TB disks, and the chance of four disks dying before you can replace even a single one is pretty low. The usual limitation of ZFS applies, however: You have to decide the number of disks up-front, as you can't expand the size of a RAIDZ vdev later on.
(Well, you can, but only by replacing all the disks with larger versions.)
IOPS aren't cheap, and you will find out just how much that matters the moment you have to replace a disk in a pool with a lot of data in it. Resilver times of days can be pretty agonizing in a home setting.
I won't build a pool without at least double redundancy per rotating-drive vdev, meaning at least 3-way mirrors (zpool create foo mirror disk0 disk1 disk2 mirror disk3 disk4 disk5) or raidz2, as I have had to go to backups for failures during resilvers of raidz (never again!) and 2-way mirrors.
3-way mirrors conveniently provide high read IOPS. OpenZFS does a good job aggregating and scheduling writes to the point that writes are mainly choked by random reads. (Very full pools induce quasi-random reads while hunting for space in metaslabs, which is the main reason writes to very full pools perform poorly).
2-way mirrors are only really fine for vdevs that have negligible random-access penalty (and thus likely high IOPS), or where rebuilding an entire pool from backups takes time comparable to resilver and scrub times when dealing with a replacement leaf device that might fail during resilvering (you cannot know the data on the replacment device is OK until you have read it, which generally means scrub-after-resilver), or errors reading the surviving leaf device(s).
There is an article somewhere calculating the probability of two drives failing during resilvering and how this gets worse with the ever increasing capacities, which increases the resilvering times.
But I guess you already account for this by using a Raid 6 with +2.
Triple parity can give you pretty good integrity, but at a certain point it's wasted effort. Disk failures cluster too much for any single array to be safe; you need backups.
For just 10TB, I would recommend that most home users stay away from RAID and buy 3 Seagate 10TB drives (street price currently $399 each) for total of ~$1200. Use 1 drive as primary copy and the 2 others as backups. With 3 drives, you could even rotate the 2 backups to an offsite location.
I quit using RAID in 2007. All of them FreeNAS/drobo/Synology/etc required more troubleshooting and babysitting than I wanted to deal with. It didn't matter if it was Linux software or dedicated hardware (NAS appliance).
And how do you plan to detect if your data is silently corrupted? Unless you're using some archive file format that includes checksums/hashes, you have no way of knowing whether your backups are any good until it's too late.
If you meant that a filesystem like ZFS with checksum blocks is designed to protect itself agains corruption errors, one can use that without RAID. A single-disk ZFS is orthogonal to RAID.
To point back to the OP's question, he's running Windows with Plex. In that case, a 10TB NTFS filesystem with periodic binary comparisons/checksums (or format the disk with the newer ReFS[2] that stores checksums similar to ZFS) is simpler than RAID5/6. He also gets the extra benefit of an offsite backup without paying for cloud storage.
I'm not against RAID for all cases but a home media computer with just 10TB doesn't meet the threshold of dealing with its extra complexity. However, if one is wanting to consolidate 25TB+ of disk space -- or running a business -- or need aggregated io bandwidth, the cost/benefit drivers for RAID over JBOD would make more sense.
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=raid+data+corruption+synolog...
[2]http://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-resilient-file-system-...
You may not need that feature, but it's a very useful option to have.
The downside for media storage is that a straight NAS is often incredibly slow compared to USB3. For decent speed you need iSCSI, which adds cost and complication.
* zfs for snapshots (and send my inc snapshots from my laptop) * zfs fs with snapshots to rsync non-zfs enabled devices (read: wife's mbp && imac) * rpi3 as brain (slow, but works) * 2x2Tb drives on a zraid
It took me a while to get it to where I wanted, but it was cheap (~230), low power and safe enough for home. I recently did a full reinstall from scratch and it took me less than 15 min to get my system back (I have my /home as a zfs fs backed up).
This comment should not be understood as offensive. I am just interested where one draws the line.
[1] https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...
You always want 3 copies: one on your computer, one onsite and one offsite. If there is a fire or everything electronic is stolen from your house, you still have the offsite.
The only hassle so far has been backups. The built-in backup apps can't span media (external USB drives). Something I used to do decades ago with 3.5" floppies... So I have to do a file-copy "backup" across the network.
Is the data very expensive to replace or one of a kind? Photographs and home movies would fall into this category. First you should have a backup. Crashplan and backblaze are good options for consumers. On a smaller scale cloud based backups like google drive or dropbox work for this. These will protect you not just hardware failure but malware like cryptolocker, accidental deletion, and total computer failure. If you have a large amount of data like professional photography or video production a NAS with RAID 6 is advised. You can lose 2 drives without losing any data, but you lose 2 drives of usable space for parity, and you have to deal with the overhead of setting it up.
Not high perf, but my entire family can stream off of it fine so that's about all I care about.
I had some drive failures at some point (a bad WD batch) and even though I messed up and removed the wrong drive at some point, was able to get everything back. Normal drive replacement is painless (barring stupid human syndrome).
It has Plex built-in and loads of other apps. I use it to automatically get a full and synched version of my dropbox account, it does my automated torrent download for me, and a host of other ready to use functions. Has data dcrubbing, drive health monitoring etc, with email notifications.
Put 3 or 4 of these in a Synology enclosure or attach directly in a uATX case. I use btrfs "raid1" which protects against any one drive failing and has filesystem-level checksums and compression, but people also say good things about ZFS in a similar mode. Just use either one of those with scrubbing.
This would have sounded like science fiction to 12 year old me. Still kinda sounds ridiculous.
I should see if I still have the program somewhere in storage.
I had one, it died, I went through all of that, decided to never make this mistake again. Got myself a nice FreeNAS box, if anything fails there, I can just pop the drives into any FreeBSD system to recover my data and migrate it to new home.
Now, back to dreaming about slapping four 12Tb drives in that thing...
But the tape drive itself? Oh yeah. You can pay for Backblaze for a long time before you've made up that cost.
Eg something like: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-ST...
Or something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-Bay-Dock-2-5-SATA/dp/B0078...
With a couple of: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Ironwolf-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST...
(Note that 8 and 6 are ~equal/gb, the 10tb version is at a bit of a premium).
Benefit of these docks is it's easy to just have a "backup" disk that you drop in from time to time and sync to, and then you can keep that drive in a fireproof box, or off-site. The down side is that I'm sure the odds of physical drive failure goes up when it's so easy to move the drives around all the time...
If you want "high performance", it's going to be a bit more expensive -- I'd try and pick up a cheap HP Gen8 mini server[1] or something similar from Dell - anything that supports ECC ram and a few 3.5 drives. Install a ~512GB SSD, and set up freeNas/openSolaris/Ubuntu with zfs for linux - and use the disks in mirroring or raidz, with journaling on the ssd.
I've yet to build one myself, but it's what I've been mulling over lately. In the short term 6 tb drives might be a bit more affordable, but I'd probably prefer 2x8tb in mirror right now (to be expanded as 10tb drives comes out or with two more 8tb drives as prices come down a bit) - rather than some kind of parity-based raid setup with 3+ 6tb drives.
This still leaves the issue of backup of that 8-16tb of data though.
It might very well be that two 8tb usb 3.1 drives are better - one for "data" one for "backup" with the option of keeping the "backup" drive in a different physical location (say, the office) -- to avoid a single fire eating both drives.
[1] https://www.hpe.com/us/en/product-catalog/servers/proliant-s...
I've seen a series of these being sold off cheap (not sure if it's as a campaign, or as new models are phased in) - and I've basically seen then at ~the price of a "dedicated" nas cabinet for devices with 8gb of ecc ram and no disks.