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I need some advice on how to best fix my current storage situation. Right now I've got a WHS, and I absolutely love all of the features, but I no longer trust it. I know back before PP1 they had data corruption issues, so I waited until they did a redesign to adopt and everything has gone swimmingly since then - until last week. Last week, I got a notification that about 15 files had become corrupt. I talked to the WHS guys and it seems that my data is lost. They think it might be due to a hard drive that's about to fail, but I've got redundancy enabled on the folder, and guess what - my files are still gone! I'm not sure what the point of redundancy is if when a single hard drive goes bad, you still lose files.  Because of this, I want to move away from WHS as the method of protecting my data.I've got two client PCs at home - my regular desktop and a HTPC running Windows Media Center (both Vista, upgrading to 7 soon). The WHS is my old desktop, so the specs on it are rather lackluster - it's got an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe mobo and a Barton 2800+. I've got 4 drives, 2x200GB IDE and 2x750GB SATA II (the board only has 2 SATA I connections). I use my WHS for a variety of functions, beyond just the out-of-box stuff. The server also: streams music to computers outside the network with Firefly Media Server, houses an FTP server, runs uTorrent, gets all of my recorded TV shows (from my HTPC) dumped onto it automatically, renames said episodes and converts the files to H.264, manages anti-virus on my two client PCs (Avast!), and a couple of other minor things. As I see it, I have a couple mix-and-match options if I want to move away from WHS as my backup solution. For the file storage itself, I think I'll either buy a Drobo or move to a RAID-5 configuration. For the computer / OS, I'd either build a brand new server and sell my current one, add a RAID controller card to my current box that can actually support more than 2 SATA drives, or get rid of the server altogether and move all of it's functionality to my desktop. For the OS itself, keeping WHS is tempting for it's other features (nightly backups of attached PCs, auto-zip when downloading files remotely) and just turn off duplication. This however, isn't supported, and the maximum size of an MBR drive is 2TB, so apparently I'd have to change the drive to GPT - I've never used GPT, so this makes me a bit nervous that there could be other issues. My other option would be to just put Win 2k8 on it. I don't want to move to Linux simply because of all of the Windows apps that I use to do the extra things I mentioned above. Does anyone have any recommendations on which route I should go? I'm leaning towards building a new server with RAID 5 and Win 2k8, but I wonder if that's really best. I also have no idea how easy it is to add drives to RAID 5 (either for more storage or for an extra redundancy) which I'm sure I'll want to do over time.
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Aug 21, 2009 17:47
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For those who read my earlier story of woe, I've decided to build a new server using RAID5. My only question now is what parts to get. I looked at a few of the system earlier people have built, and I noticed that no one here is using an Intel Atom board (or at least not of the recent builds). I thought that a lot of people were moving towards Atom because they still had great speed while vastly reducing the amount of power consumed - very important for always-on servers. Is there something I'm missing here?
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Aug 24, 2009 22:59
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Crossposting this in the PC building thread, but since I'm building a storage server, I thought I'd post here too. Boot drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3160813AS 160GB 7200RPM ($40) Storage: 3x Seagate Barracuda LP ST31500541AS 1.5TB 5900RPM ($110 each) Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX ($120) CPU: Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz LGA 775 95W ($190) RAM: OCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) ($50) PSU: Antec earthwatts EA430 430W Continuous Power ATX12V v2.0 80 PLUS ($50) Video Card: SPARKLE SFPX84GS256U2LF GeForce 8400 GS 256MB 64-bit DDR2 PCI Express x16 ($25) Total Cost: $804.91 I already have a case and a CDROM drive (that I'll probably end up removing right after I install the OS). This ended up being way pricier than I was hoping for, though I know I went overboard in a few places (specifically on the CPU). I picked the motherboard for the 8xSATA II slots. I ended up going with Quad Core because I decided I wanted hardware virtualization support - I'm going to run Win Server 2k8 on the box and it seemed like a good idea to get a chip that could support hardware virtualization. Once I made that decision, it was either the Quad Core 2.66 for $190 or a Dual Core 3GHz for $168 (assuming I want a 6MB L2 cache, otherwise it's as cheap as $145). The video card is the cheapest I could find. Ideally I'd get a motherboard with onboard video since I'm going to run this PC headless, but I couldn't find one that also had 8 onboard SATA ports and didn't suck or wasn't extremely expensive. Please rip this to shreds and suggest improvements.
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Aug 26, 2009 18:37
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IOwnCalculus posted:Boot drive: Do you not have an old drive laying around to use for that? Or pick one up on SA-Mart... Thanks for the suggestions. I'll look for a cheaper mobo with integrated video solution, but my thought was that mobo w/6 SATA + add-on SATA card would be more expensive than mobo w/8 SATA + add-on video card. As for the RAM, the board doesn't say it supprts DDR2 800, otherwise I'd definitely be using that. If I go with a different motherboard, I'll certainly take down the RAM. For the PSU, I know the 380W will likely be fine, but I went with the more powerful PSU because it has more SATA power connectors (4 vs. 2). I could just get a bunch of molex adapters, but that will clutter the case more and the price difference wasn't huge. As for the CPU, hardware virtualization should be faster than software virtualization, plus it enables select scenarios (hyper-V, Win 7 + Win XP, though I'm not planning on doing the latter).
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Aug 26, 2009 19:34
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IOwnCalculus posted:I have the Gigabyte EP45-DS3L in my main desktop, it supports DDR2 800 just fine. I am indeed planning on doing hardware RAID.
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Aug 27, 2009 01:15
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TheNothingNew posted:Hey, lookit that. I open this thread to ask a question, and someone's building a setup with the same motherboard. Cool. Wow, thanks for the heads up! Doesn't affect my board choice, though. As you saw, I've got 1 slot for a boot drive anyway, so I was only planning on 7 usable drives. I can live with 6.
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Aug 27, 2009 08:49
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I know this question pertains more to Haus of Tech Support, and I do have a thread there (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3387275&pagenumber=1&perpage=40#post388402910), but I'm kind of wondering if I even went about this RAID expansion in the right way. I had a RAID 5 array consisting of three 1.5 TB drives (total storage space ~3TB). It uses GPT & NTFS, and it's on a Windows 2008 Server x64 machine. I recently purchased two new 1.5TB drives and added one of them to the pool. I used Intel Matrix Storage Manager to expand the capacity of the raid array (which took a very, very long time - 300+ hours). When it completed, I was prompted to restart the PC in order to make use of the new space. I did so, and now the drive is inaccessible in Windows - it claims it's unformatted. If I go to server management and select storage, Windows properly detects the array, sees the previous partition of ~3TB as well as the unallocated space. But if I hit open or explore on that partition (or right click it for properties), it claims it's unformatted. It seems like I may have just lost 3TB of data! How can I get this back / what did I do wrong (or is there a problem with the software / the drives)? If I recover the data succesfully, how can I expand the partition to take up the entire space of the drive? EASEUS makes a product for expanding GPT arrays, but it only works up to 4TB which I'm now over.
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Feb 21, 2011 20:11
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If anyone recalls, I recently attempted to expand a RAID 5 array to utter failure and the array basically needs to be nuked from orbit and rebuilt. I'm wondering now if I should build the array the same way I did last time (using Intel's firmware raid - Rapid Storage Technology), or if I should use Windows Server 2008's OS-level raid. I'm looking to do raid 5 across 5 1.5TB drives. Any suggestions for which of those two would be preferable?
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Apr 8, 2011 19:19
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I hate to cross-post, but my RAID5 array is dead and I am very worried that I have just lost all of my data despite the fact that I have 4/5 good drives! Details are in a HoTS thread and I'd really love any advice or suggestions you guys have. At this point I'm at a loss with what to try next. http://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=170
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Jan 30, 2013 10:51
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Fitret posted:I hate to cross-post, but my RAID5 array is dead and I am very worried that I have just lost all of my data despite the fact that I have 4/5 good drives! Details are in a HoTS thread and I'd really love any advice or suggestions you guys have. At this point I'm at a loss with what to try next. http://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=170 I got some advice from a friend, which is to plug in those drives to another device with the same RAID controller (i.e. another motherboard that also supports ICH10R). Could this be dangerous at all (i.e. destroy data), or is it safe?
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Feb 2, 2013 07:22
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:57 |
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McGlockenshire posted:Even though Intel firmware RAID is just short of a joke, it still tries to take itself seriously. The data about the array setup is stored on the disks, not inside the firmware on the board. You should be totally safe plugging all of the disks into another machine with an identical chipset. Thanks! I didn't think it could be a problem, but I figured better safe than sorry. Hopefully this works, otherwise I'm looking at whether or not my insurance company will cover data recovery scenarios.
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Feb 2, 2013 09:42
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