RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
I've now received my Synology DS410J thanks to Hexus and Synology :D But while I wait for payday so I can load it up with some disks..i've been looking into how to configure it.
It supports Raid 0, 1, 5, and 10..and i'm leaning towards configuring it as a raid5 array to get the most space while still keeping some redundancy.
I'll be setting it up with 4 drives, but the question is..will it be fast enough in a raid 5 configuration? I know you want to avoid it for write intensive operations, but when i'm going to be reading 99% of the time, will the extra overhead be an issue?
It may be a case of "try it and see" but I wondered if any hexites had the experience to answer the question first :)
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
the networks the weakest link no matter what raid you go with, plenty will go on about raid 5 not being as good as some hope for redundancy as the drives "may", if your really really unlucky have another drive pack up during the rebuild.
i'm quite happy with raid 5 on my nas box and can quite happily stream 1080p to 2 sources at the same time.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
If you stuff it with disks, would you be crossing your fingers while you're waiting for a new disk, and then crossing your fingers some more while the disks thrash themselves silly for half a day or so while the array is rebuilt? Then consider RAID 6.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
800Mhz CPU and 128MB of RAM?
You're looking at DAYS to migrate/swap a single HDD out.
Specs of DS410J are shocking really...
Like already mentioned above if drives packs up, array goes to degraded mode, you order a new drive and replace the dead one, week at very least? If during that time another drive packs up you're stuffed.
To offload the CPU/RAM from XOR calculations you might be better off with RAID10 [which DS410J supports], its similar to RAID6 in the way you can have 2 dead drives but offers MUCHHHH faster rebuild time as its mirrored stripe.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
spoon_
To offload the CPU/RAM from XOR calculations you might be better off with RAID10 [which DS410J supports], its similar to RAID6 in the way you can have 2 dead drives but offers MUCHHHH faster rebuild time as its mirrored stripe.
You can have 2 dead drives with RAID 10, however it is equally likely that 2 dead drives means you've lost your data. RAID 10 is used purely for performance with a bit of reduadancy rather than better redundancy.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
mm some things to think about then. I'm not going to be storing any mission critical stuff on it as i'll have hard copies of 90% of it, but I was looking at raid5 so that in the worst case when a drive did go, I could rebuild and get it all back if I wanted to..even if it takes a week.
I've not had a drive go pop on me for years now but that means I am due one soon ;D Even considering just running them in JBOD mode to maximise space so that I only risk losing 1 drive of data..mm
Despite the slow rebuilding using raid 5 - am I likely to see performance issues on this nas if I run them that way? Thats the key thing for me I think, not got a big issue with leaving it running for a few days or a week to get the array back online if the worst did happen.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
badass
You can have 2 dead drives with RAID 10, however it is equally likely that 2 dead drives means you've lost your data. RAID 10 is used purely for performance with a bit of reduadancy rather than better redundancy.
Isn't that what I said?
I know what RAID10 is used for lmao
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
a 4tb rebuild took 20 hours on my 800mhz thecus, i have upgraded the ram to 1gb though,
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
I run RAID5 for my NAS with a JBOD as backup, so I periodically mirror the RAID5 to the JBOD drive. The overhead of RAID5 is minimal given the redundancy it gives, especially when you’re predominantly in read mode as you’ve stated.
The file system is more likely to have an impact. For large media files, using XFS can yield notable improvements over EXT3 and probably EXT4 (haven’t personally tested the latter). This is assuming you have the option to choose.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
GoNz0
a 4tb rebuild took 20 hours on my 800mhz thecus, i have upgraded the ram to 1gb though,
Really depends, I had a Promise NS4300N that took like 8 hours to rebuild a 4x300G RAID5, while my proper DELL raid card only take 8 hours to rebuild 8x2TB RAID6.
However with 4 disks the chance of 2 failing is so low that the only time I ever saw it happen is purely user fault.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
only reason it happened to me was the fact i pulled a drive out to see what would happen :(
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
At work we have found that its more likley than you would expect to have multiple drives failing at the same time. The conclusion we came up to was that when you buy a lot of disks at the same time, they can be drives which are one after the other in the production line and may well have similar flaws/faults (or whatever you want to call it) in the hardware. This is more to do with huge NAS and SAN systems than a small home NAS but thought i would throw it in there anyway :)
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
Have a read of my review of my own DS410j, and the hiccups I had (see my sig).
It's true that the CPU, and especially RAM seem to limit its abilities, however I am still happy with mine, and I'm confident you will be too.
I use mine for media streaming (to my WD TV Live), mostly films of various sources & sizes, and havent once had a cause for complaint. I can also simultaneously stream other media to other destinations (eg laptops).
Echo'ing what others have said above, I also bought my drives from different sources and at different times specifically to avoid the 'multiple failure' chances. I'm glad I did this, although 2 months in and (thankfully) all 4 drives remain healthy and well (and the NAS will give you lots of data about SMART and temps etc - all very nice).
I set the volume build to 'auto', which allowed me to initially start with 2 drives, and then upgrade to 4 when the time came. This did however take AN AGE (ie over 24 hours). My strong, strong advice is that if you can be patient, wait to get all of your hard disks before building it.
As for the issue about if one drive fails, yes, you are then vulnerable. For me, since my data is non-critical, i would simply switch the synology off and wait for a new drive to be posted. I'll be sure to post here if and when that happens.
Finally, as I stated in my review, I had alot of annoyance connecting over a 10/100 ethernet network (my PC was Gigabit but router wasnt), as moving files from PC to NAS literally choked my system, causing severe slowdown everywhere. Make sure that you have gigabit all the way through. FYI see my Netgear Gigabit switch review also.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
spoon_
Isn't that what I said?
No, it isn't. I clarified your misleading at best, wrong at worst answer.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Biscuit
At work we have found that its more likley than you would expect to have multiple drives failing at the same time. The conclusion we came up to was that when you buy a lot of disks at the same time, they can be drives which are one after the other in the production line and may well have similar flaws/faults (or whatever you want to call it) in the hardware. This is more to do with huge NAS and SAN systems than a small home NAS but thought i would throw it in there anyway :)
Yes - there is a school of thought that says that disks in an array should be from different batches and/or different mfrs.
Re: RAID 5 suitable for media NAS?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
peterb
Yes - there is a school of thought that says that disks in an array should be from different batches and/or different mfrs.
OH, and FYI I have 2 x Western Dig's and 2 x Samsungs all running nicely in my DS410J.