7200rpm laptop drives in RAID 5 (NAS)?

[themaidenmaniac]

Hey guys, so it happens that i have a bunch of 1tb Hitachi 7200rpm drives lying around. I'm building a mini itx home server at the moment and potentially don't need too much space over the next year or 2 (famous last words!) so i'm thinking that i might be able to save chunk on buying my favoured Western Digi Red 4tb drives as prices fall.

A little worried about performance, but what do you reckon? It's going to be running some light vm's, but mainly backup storage and media server. I have heard that these are noisy blighters but I doubt they will be that bad.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitachi-Hds7.../dp/B002U22U6S

If I start to have a bit of a space ordeal, i'll bite the bullet and abandon them i expect. The only issue would be budging 5 terras of data to a new array but that's doable.

[Bonebreaker777]

Performance using 7200RPM drivers shouldn't be a problem. Specially with a home built mini ITX home server. How many of there drivers you plan to use?

[themaidenmaniac]

I was thinking about filling it up, so all six over 6 sata connectors (6gbps connectors). I have no idea what sort of performance I'd get from an on board controller these days mind?!

[Bonebreaker777]

In RAID 5? Pretty fast I would say. Write speeds will be that of one drive but read speeds should climb nicely (if I remember correctly).

Well you van have RAID 5 or 6 with different number of redundancy drives. For RAID 10 you need multiples of 4x and such.

What MoBo you would be using?

[themaidenmaniac]

Well that's good news! Be nice to RAID 10 but not really worth the loss of space i guess.

Haha, interesting question Bonbreaker. My plan is to create a mini itx build in a fractal node 304 case.

The asrock Z87E-ITX board looks like a gem, http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z87E-ITX/

But i was initially going with it's server relative AsRock E3C226D2I http://www.asrockrack.com/general/pr...odel=E3C226D2I

The dilemma currently is all down to feature.

Server board wins:

- I already have ecc ram
- I really want IPMI as the machine will probably end up in the attic.

Consumer board wins:

- lots of onboard goodies such as wireless ac, oc potential further down the track which im keen to have for flexibility just in case.


Im really peeved that z87 has no Vpro, it wouldve been a beautiful system

I have a feeling i am going to can the server board in favour of the consumer. Maybe theres another cool board out there somewhere, but I'm yet to find it lol.

[shaithis]

If your going with 6 drives, then use RAID6 or RAID5+hotspare. The performance will be better as your stripes and blocks will align naturally.

[scaryjim]

If your going with 6 drives, then use RAID6 or RAID5+hotspare. The performance will be better as your stripes and blocks will align naturally.

iirc correctly that means you'd get the storage capacity of 4/6 drives? At that point you almost may as well go RAID 10 (make sure you create 3 mirrored pairs then stripe, rather than vice-versa - better fault tolerance ) or even RAID 5+1. All sorts of esoteric combinations are available when you're only messing with 6 drives and don't care too much about overall storage space (after all, is the difference moving between ~ 3TB and ~ 5TB really going to make a huge difference? If so, 1TB drives probably aren't what you want anyway....).

[Bonebreaker777]

iirc correctly that means you'd get the storage capacity of 4/6 drives? At that point you almost may as well go RAID 10 (make sure you create 3 mirrored pairs then stripe, rather than vice-versa - better fault tolerance ) or even RAID 5+1. All sorts of esoteric combinations are available when you're only messing with 6 drives and don't care too much about overall storage space (after all, is the difference moving between ~ 3TB and ~ 5TB really going to make a huge difference? If so, 1TB drives probably aren't what you want anyway....).

Agree what Jim says, If RAID 10 then mirror > stripe, or RAID 5 (I would say RAID 5 is just fine, what are the chances two drive would go to silicone heaven at the same time).

I would wonder about (out of pure curiosity) the performance difference with such setup and drives between RAID5, RAID6 and RAID10 (plus the CPU usage during).

[Splash]

Agree what Jim says, If RAID 10 then mirror > stripe, or RAID 5 (I would say RAID 5 is just fine, what are the chances two drive would go to silicone heaven at the same time).

It really depends on the disk size: I personally won't run RAID5 with disks larger than 900Gb due to the risk of a second disk failing during the potentially considerable (and stressful for the remaining disks) rebuild.

I would wonder about (out of pure curiosity) the performance difference with such setup and drives between RAID5, RAID6 and RAID10 (plus the CPU usage during).

Again, it depends on the disks but the write penalty for RAID5 is considered to be 4 iops, RAID6 being 6 iops and RAID1/10 being 2 iops (parity RAID variants obviously having this extra overhead due to parity calculations and write operations). Obviously you want the lower write penalties for best performance.