Completed My Mediaportal Server Setup (2 Viewers)

[Shurik]

^^^
You're forgetting he has a 1:1 backup going on with a second server. That's pretty damn secure.

What would be even more secure is to have a third system that backs up the second system. The money spent on the second system would be better spent of a card capable of RAID6 with twice as much storage space. But that is me - trying to be more efficient with my money and using enterprise-level proven technologies is something than appeals to me more than having a second mirror system.

 

[drealit]

You missed the point of that though... we were talking about reliability/avoiding lost data not money spent.

 

[ryan20021982]

Hrmm.. That's weird... So you're saying that chance of RAID5 failing is higher than a single drive? The purpose of RAIDs (1, 5, 6, etc) are to be more stable and less failure prone than single drives. If one of your drives fails - you lost 1.5TB of data. In my case I just need to replace one drive and auto-rebuild will restore the data. I do not have 30-40 drives in my array so chances of two drives going down are almost a non issue (whoever says that chances of drives failing is higher doesn't know what he's talking about). Once I go beyond 8 drives I will go to RAID6 and that is way better.

Your argument is very weak at best. And I don't understand why you're scared of RAIDs.

Raid fails I dont care if its raid5 raid6 whatever it can fail, the odds of my drive in my server and the backup drive that is sitting a shelf now with the rest failing is pretty damn slim, since the backup drives are not even plugged into anything anymore.

^^^
You're forgetting he has a 1:1 backup going on with a second server, that's pretty damn safe. If he only had a single server and was composed of just a bunch of drives with no redundancy I'd agree with you... but he doesn't as was described in the OP.

Thank you drealit, I see someone understands.

What would be even more secure is to have a third system that backs up the second system. The money spent on the second system would be better spent of a card capable of RAID6 with twice as much storage space. But that is me - trying to be more efficient with my money and using enterprise-level proven technologies is something than appeals to me more than having a second mirror system.

Ok you take your money and use it for a nice fancy raid card and I'll use mine for backup hdds, when your raid fails or your psu fries all your drives we'll talk. And your nice raid6 can handle 2 drive failures at 1 time, and my system can handle all of the main drives failing at once and still have all the data.

 

[drealit]

Not to mention I hope you realize on an enterprise level... companies have multiple arrays of their data. Now that's a lot of money spent.

If it came down to it, I'd trust my UnRaid array with a backup array over your single RAID 5 or RAID 6 array any day of the week. There's no question in my mind and it would cost less.

 

[Shurik]

ryan20021982:

Wow! Man, there is no reason to sound so offended and angry! I wasn't personally attacking you or anything - just tried to show another side of the coin, that's it. If it sounded otherwise - I'm sorry. Whatever you feel is right is the best thing for you - as long as you're happy with your setup and feel comfortable - that's what counts. I personally prefer RAIDs, but you guessed that already.

Btw, if you ever plan to move to 10-15-20 drives (for some reason), do you think that having JBOD in two systems is still cost-effective? Systems that would support this configuration will start getting pretty expensive very quick and having mirroring between 2 such systems will hit any wallet pretty hard.

drealit:

Maybe, I never looked into unRAID, so I'm not sure how good it is. The only issue there, as I understand, is that it's a software RAID, so there is a chance of it failing due to power issues or bugs in the software, which is a little more probable than firmware of good RAID cards and such. Of course you can mitigate that by using a UPS (which is a smart idea to have for your server anyway) and hoping for no bugs in the software. Performance issue could be another concern for some - hardware designed for a particular task is always faster than any software. So far I didn't have any issues with my HighPoint RAID card, so I'm happy with that.

 

[drealit]

Power issues would most likely be an issue with a lot of RAID setups. You should definitely have some form of an APC with any setup haha at least for safe and clean shutdowns. I have an APC hooked up to mine and there's actually a nice linux package that works extremely well with it. It monitors how much power is left in the battery and how much the computer is actually using... if it needs to it will do a clean shut down and wake back up when power is regained. One thing I didn't know about until 2 days ago was that the Linux package also has support for notifying other computers when it's time to shut down... aka the UnRaid server will be directly hooked up with the APC with the other computers just using its power. In the event of a power outage the UnRaid server will do its normal thing with talking to the APC then when it comes time to shut down, it will inform the other PC's in the network that you choose (they will shut down), and it will shut itself down.

As for software corruption, I haven't experienced any (going on well over a year now of 24/7 up time with occasional reboots/maintenance/updates) and I haven't found any recent issues on the lime-technology forums so it seems rather (make that extremely) safe. Anything that seemed to be data corruption turned up to be a faulty or loose cable/connection. Parity checks are easy enough and are recommended.

Yes the main flaw of UnRaid is performance. Since the data isn't striped you lose that tasty benefit of a true RAID solution in the form of fantastic performance. For a file server I can handle not having that. With a proper UnRaid setup and gigabit all around you'll be able to stream full 1080p materials with no issues whatsoever. That was my main gripe and have been pleasantly surprised in how nice the performance has turned out to be. I think the trade off is definitely worth it though... no constraints to the same exact drives for the array... no need for an expensive hardware RAID card or any expensive hardware for that matter... no worries about any hardware failing and destroying your array (barring multiple simultaneous drive failures or a catastrophic PSU incident that would more than likely take out any array haha).

 

[NLS]

The main flaw of unRAID is it's developer.

Anyway, look other free alternatives first.

Note I am using unRAID for years (and paid for it) - will be uninstalling it soon.

Note also that unRAID works fine as is, as I said the main flaw what I mentioned. Plus since we are talking about media, maybe something doing much more than just serving files (or hacking it to do more, just as long as you know what you do or someone does it for you) is the way to go.

 

[drealit]

I don't understand what the problem is what so ever. If he has personal issues and won't be putting any effort in for an indefinite time he should come out and say it rather than ignore the requests for a status update.

 

[captainjack]

Holy Crap

Ryan

Are you thinking now that you should not have posted anything at all?
It's amazing what people feel they have to say when something does not go along with their way of thinking.

Nice setup by the way.

 

[NLS]

Ryan

Are you thinking now that you should not have posted anything at all?
It's amazing what people feel they have to say when something does not go along with their way of thinking.

Nice setup by the way.

Sorry to brake the news to you but, you see... this is a forum.

Not a blog.

People do this in forums and guess what? It's ok.