RAID controller or FreeNAS et al ?

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Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Which is safer and more convenient?

I keep reading about RAID controllers doing wonky things. I personally had an instance years ago where a HD failed and the RAID controller said nothing. Only when I pulled the drives and tested them individually did I discover the problem. I've avoided RAID controllers ever since until recently when I acquired an LSI 9271 8i. It's currently running my backup server in RAID 6. I assume that modern RAID controllers will tell you if a HD is failing or has failed.

Question is, would I be better off moving to FreeNAS and a HBA or am I OK as is?

TIA
 

pricklypunter

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Nov 10, 2015
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My personal take is that for really low powered equipment, a raid card is useful for offloading the CPU, but for pretty much any modern CPU these days, I prefer to roll my own storage with an HBA. Modern CPU's barely break a sweat handling the parity calculations. The primary advantage of using a soft raid for me, is that I can simply pull the disks, stick them in another box and be back up and running again in short order. Things like ZFS just make it even easier, rarely do I even think about disk ordering now :)
 
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Fritz

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My personal take is that for really low powered equipment, a raid card is useful for offloading the CPU, but for pretty much any modern CPU these days, I prefer to roll my own storage with an HBA. Modern CPU's barely break a sweat handling the parity calculations. The primary advantage of using a soft raid for me, is that I can simply pull the disks, stick them in another box and be back up and running again in short order. Things like ZFS just make it even easier, rarely do I even think about disk ordering now :)
Thanks. :cool:
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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For windows? Raid controller with ssd caching, microsofts software raid/storage spaces* perform really bad with raid levels that use parity.
(*I tried it with server 2012/2012 R2/2016 and gave up after that)
I personally had an instance years ago where a HD failed and the RAID controller said nothing.
What controller brand was that? I tried some funny things with my raid controllers (hot swap bays are awesome for that!) and always got a nice alarm audible in the server rack :D
Which is safer and more convenient?
"Safer" is kinda hard to say.
I'm using raid controllers in combination with windows for ~10 years now and never had problems or lost data in my homelab/fileservers (not counting the user error that happen at 3am after a long working day).
I have a similar experience at work: customers and their it departments/datacenters only had problems caused by user mistakes or power related problems (that took down entire systems) that lead to data loss/corruption.
 
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Fritz

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It's been years and I don't remember what controller it was. It could have been a Promise consumer grade controller as for all I know, lol.

Gonna leave it as is for now. The array consists of 8 3TB drives so they're pretty old. Just a matter of time before one fails. In the mean time I have a backup of Backup should I need it.

I would never use Storage Spaces or any other MS storage technology. it all sucks.
 

Allan74

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May 15, 2019
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I think that anyone here will tell you the best way depends on what you are doing, what kind of budget you have, what kind of equipment do you have your heart set on reusing and how much of a headache you want.

My 'Storage' is 100% HD Movies, TV Series' for Plex and my entire Music collection in Flac.

For me it's simple. I have too large a collection of SAS2108 based RAID Controllers and I am willing to experience the headaches associated with everything (I like to complain) as I tried in the past to run multiple 6-8 drive RAID5 arrays on single cards because I was too cheap (and lazy) to get with the times. I am running less now, thanks to larger drive sizes...lol

It's kinda like my 'big platform upgrade' is going from LGA1366 to LGA2011 V2 so that I can use my large collection of DDR3 ECC REG...LMAO.

I should also add that each time I deploy a new array, I always buy 1 cold spare per 4 hot drives at time of purchase and have cold backups on the shelf of everything on decommissioned HDDs.
 
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Fritz

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I'm gonna put together a SAS3 box on the cheap after finding a deal on a 825TQ chassis. I already have the MB, CPU, memory. The MB is a Supermicro X10SRH-CF which has a builtin 3008 HBA. I'm going to fill it with 12G 6TB HD's to start. If I live long enough to see SS storage come down in price enough I'll upgrade to SSDs. But for now the above will do. This will be my new media server. Not sure at this point if I'm going to go with FreeNAS or stick with Windows Server. Or I might go with a RAID controller. My goal is to be able to recover fairly fast in the event of a HD failure. Stablebit Drivepool is also an option. If I duplicate the pool I can continue to use the server while the replacement HD is being created. Not sure about other options. But then again I do like the idea of protection against bit rot that FreeNAS and other ZFS options provide.

Nice to have choices.
 
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