What do I need Install 4 drives

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#1570212 11-Jun-2016 21:45

I personally would stay away from a hardware RAID solution for home, if the card fails there is a good chance you'll find it hard to import the RAID set into another card (if you can find the same brand, model and firmware version again). At least with software RAID you can move the disks to another computer install the right OS/software and import the RAID set.

Guessing you are Windows 8.1 or above ? You can create a storage pool with a type of resiliency .. which is RAID-5.

Linux it is just as easy to create a RAID-5 volume.

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#1570217 11-Jun-2016 22:04

Also I would pass on any card with a silicon image chipset on it. I have had so many drive corruption problems on a couple of 4 port PCIe cards with that chip on it. I might still have a couple of PCI 4 port cards around if you want one to try with, I think they were problem free from memory.

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#1570296 12-Jun-2016 07:50

I have no idea where you'd find a 2-4GB HDD. Even my SD card has 64 times more space ....

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#1570400 12-Jun-2016 12:10

Lastly how many watts left in your power supply with the other consumption. Almost certainly not an issue but if you are pushing a limit already then better known about.

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#1570438 12-Jun-2016 13:04

You could buy a NAS box I rekon synology d-link or qnap. The pci card will work.
The pci-e one won't work unless you remove the video card and use the onboard graphics. If it's a server which won't be running any games or apps that need decent video the onboard should be fine.

Have you thought about the type of raid you want to do? Do you need performance or do you want to maximize storage. For performance you would do striped mirrors or mirrored stripes. For maximizing your storage you would want to go for raid 5. Raid 5 will give you faster IO reads than a single drive but may slow the writes down as it will have to calculate parity bits when writing to the drive.

As people have said before if you want to use the on board raid then check what the motherboard chipset actually supports. Some are limited.

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#1570493 12-Jun-2016 15:01

richms:

Messing around with old small drives just gets you a louder less reliable hotter more power using storage solution than buying a current model drive of the size you need.

I was just thinking you may have a point but if i bought just one 8tb drive would i not risk the possibility of losing everything if it failed. My layman's thinking was at least with the 4 x 2tb drives setup the chances of all four failing was remote.

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#1570496 12-Jun-2016 15:08

darylblake: You could buy a NAS box I rekon synology d-link or qnap. The pci card will work.
The pci-e one won't work unless you remove the video card and use the onboard graphics. If it's a server which won't be running any games or apps that need decent video the onboard should be fine.

Have you thought about the type of raid you want to do? Do you need performance or do you want to maximize storage. For performance you would do striped mirrors or mirrored stripes. For maximizing your storage you would want to go for raid 5. Raid 5 will give you faster IO reads than a single drive but may slow the writes down as it will have to calculate parity bits when writing to the drive.

As people have said before if you want to use the on board raid then check what the motherboard chipset actually supports. Some are limited.

I was waiting for someone to mention that . Ok so I have the 4 drives in a ready nas box. About 3 months ago the box failed completely. Fortunately it was within 1 month of the warranty expiring. Netgear replaced the box with a brand new model of the same type. Due to the date of the original warranty this brand new unit has no warranty.

My thinking I might just as well sell the box for $350 (average going price it seems) and just stick the drives in the box without the expensive touchy unreliable ready nas.

Hence my current concept of just having them as straight storage as they are only movies and tv shows, not critical (they are in the cloud).

Is an English Man living in New Zealand. Not a writer, an Observer he says. Graham is a seasoned 'traveler" with his sometimes arrogant, but honest opinion on life. He loves the Internet!.

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#1570498 12-Jun-2016 15:11

richms:

Also I would pass on any card with a silicon image chipset on it. I have had so many drive corruption problems on a couple of 4 port PCIe cards with that chip on it. I might still have a couple of PCI 4 port cards around if you want one to try with, I think they were problem free from memory.

With cards you have theoretically I can stick them in connect the correct wires and power and use them as straight storage?

If so I would defiantly like to give that a try.

Is an English Man living in New Zealand. Not a writer, an Observer he says. Graham is a seasoned 'traveler" with his sometimes arrogant, but honest opinion on life. He loves the Internet!.

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#1570500 12-Jun-2016 15:12

Gordy7:

Just trying to follow the hard drive installation.

2GB drives seem quite small.

Guess you must have them lying around and want to make use of them.

However, do the 2GB drives even have SATA interface?

Maybe you would have to use an IDE cable (flat ribbon) on the larger MB socket (blue socket) and daisy chain the drives.

I'm sorry of course i mean 4 x 2tb drives

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#1570510 12-Jun-2016 15:39

gnfb:

richms:

Messing around with old small drives just gets you a louder less reliable hotter more power using storage solution than buying a current model drive of the size you need.

I was just thinking you may have a point but if i bought just one 8tb drive would i not risk the possibility of losing everything if it failed. My layman's thinking was at least with the 4 x 2tb drives setup the chances of all four failing was remote.

That is why you have 2 of them and have a backup strategy. You still need to back up the raid 5 of old drives to protect against human error, malware, operating system being stupid, theft and other things that cause data loss. If you stripe the drives which is the easiest way to get the space consolodated into one drive letter, than a failure of any drive renders them all gone. If you extend them then data recovery might get some files off a remaining drive in event of a failure of one of them, but it is not certain that you would get anything useful back as files could be split across multiple drives.

Also with raid-5 and mirrors there is a slow resync process if the machine is not cleanly shut down. On my old media storage machine with 4 3TBs in a 2 mirrors of 2 drives, that was a 1.5-2 day process that I couldn't shut the computer down or it would restart from the beginning next boot up. Really annoying if you want to move it or something. Hibernate would at least let it keep going where it left off but it was hammering the CPU and drives while doing it and something as low spec as your motherboard would probably really suffer while resyncing a software or fakeraid array.

Richard rich.ms

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#1570511 12-Jun-2016 15:40

gnfb:

richms:

Also I would pass on any card with a silicon image chipset on it. I have had so many drive corruption problems on a couple of 4 port PCIe cards with that chip on it. I might still have a couple of PCI 4 port cards around if you want one to try with, I think they were problem free from memory.

With cards you have theoretically I can stick them in connect the correct wires and power and use them as straight storage?

If so I would defiantly like to give that a try.

I will have a look around inside and see if I can see them or if they have gone into a box in the shed of despair later tonight, if they are in the shed it will be weather dependent if I can have a look for them.

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#1570562 12-Jun-2016 16:41

richms:

gnfb:

richms:

Also I would pass on any card with a silicon image chipset on it. I have had so many drive corruption problems on a couple of 4 port PCIe cards with that chip on it. I might still have a couple of PCI 4 port cards around if you want one to try with, I think they were problem free from memory.

With cards you have theoretically I can stick them in connect the correct wires and power and use them as straight storage?

If so I would defiantly like to give that a try.

I will have a look around inside and see if I can see them or if they have gone into a box in the shed of despair later tonight, if they are in the shed it will be weather dependent if I can have a look for them.

No rush cheers for looking and advice

Is an English Man living in New Zealand. Not a writer, an Observer he says. Graham is a seasoned 'traveler" with his sometimes arrogant, but honest opinion on life. He loves the Internet!.

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darylblake

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#1570563 12-Jun-2016 16:44

gnfb:
darylblake: You could buy a NAS box I rekon synology d-link or qnap. The pci card will work.
The pci-e one won't work unless you remove the video card and use the onboard graphics. If it's a server which won't be running any games or apps that need decent video the onboard should be fine.

Have you thought about the type of raid you want to do? Do you need performance or do you want to maximize storage. For performance you would do striped mirrors or mirrored stripes. For maximizing your storage you would want to go for raid 5. Raid 5 will give you faster IO reads than a single drive but may slow the writes down as it will have to calculate parity bits when writing to the drive.

As people have said before if you want to use the on board raid then check what the motherboard chipset actually supports. Some are limited.

I was waiting for someone to mention that . Ok so I have the 4 drives in a ready nas box. About 3 months ago the box failed completely. Fortunately it was within 1 month of the warranty expiring. Netgear replaced the box with a brand new model of the same type. Due to the date of the original warranty this brand new unit has no warranty.

My thinking I might just as well sell the box for $350 (average going price it seems) and just stick the drives in the box without the expensive touchy unreliable ready nas.

Hence my current concept of just having them as straight storage as they are only movies and tv shows, not critical (they are in the cloud).

Ah ok. Well in any system reducing a single point of failure will be expensive.
So in this system you are planning to build you need to ask yourself will the power supply fail? Will the motherboard fail? Will any core component fail?

What's the real difference between using a PC and a nas box?
A PC will allow you to do a bit more in regards to applications. It will consume more electricity and generate more heat heat.
It's unfortunate that the replacement unit you have has no warranty. If the warranty is something you value then I wold sell that unit as well. As others have mentioned you will need a backup solution I think a lot of people here use crash plan pro.

Nothing wrong with a pci or pci-e raid solution but make sure you read reviews on the raid cards. Also some raid cards or motherboards won't do raid 5 or 6.

Yoban

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#1570583 12-Jun-2016 17:46

Interesting your readynas experience. I am running a 314 with no issues at all for 3 years now. I would throw your disks in the replacement nas and then setup sync to Amazon cloud drive which can de setup natively with firmware 6.5.

This works a treat for me at only usd60 per annum for all I can eat.

1101

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#1570871 13-Jun-2016 10:34

NAS may just be the easiest.
Get a good one. Buy Good, designed for NAS HD's. It will cost $.

Otherwise, you'll be mucking about with PCI cards, software, firmware, time involved in getting it all to work on that old motherboard
And then... IT IS NOT A SYSTEM WITH A BACKUP .RAID is not a backup. A backup has to be on a separate device, another PC, a NAS, external HD etc.
If the PC goes poof, all your data on that PC can go poof as well.

Plus , as mentioned, if the RAID card fails you may need to replace it with the same exact model to things working again.
The other option is to use Windows software RAID (with a SATA card), if its only a cheapy RAID card, RAID via windows may be the better option anyway .

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