ZFS Raid Level for MKV

Which raid level to use?

  • mirror

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • RAIDz2

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • RAIDz3

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    2
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Dragonzeal

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Dec 28, 2012
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I've setup a OpenIndiana with napp-it on a ESXI box.
I have 6 hard disks and I'm still not sure which raid level to use.

The setup would be used to store home made mkv files from my blurays.
You could say that I already have backups.
But instead of always putting the bluray in the bluray reader I'd like to have it on a file server.

Which raid level should I use?
I'm also going to take backups on disks.

Should I go for raidz2 or just put mirrors in a pool?
 

cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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Because your data is static and you data loss will only cost time, single drive parity (RAIDZ) is all I would go with if you are set on using ZFS. For movies and music that you can recover easily and are generally static, I think snapshot raid or even simple drive pooling are better options.
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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Main advantage of snapraid is, that if you play video from one disk all others can sleep so it is more energy efficient especially with a lot of disk (count at about 5w per disk less energy). Other advantage is that if a disk fails, only this disk is lost. You can do "snapraids" on demand what means that even on a single disk failure you can restore this state. This is well suited for a pure media server. This is a real advantage on a pure mediaserver with a lot of disks. With few disk ZFS wins even in this discipline.

If you like realtime raid, realtime security with checksums, zero delay snapshorts, online filechecks with a self healing filesystem, striping raid with the performance of multiple disks and all the other ZFS highlights you need ZFS (Plus all the other nice things you like to have from a datacenter ready fileserver/filesystem).
 

Dragonzeal

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Dec 28, 2012
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Main advantage of snapraid is, that if you play video from one disk all others can sleep so it is more energy efficient especially with a lot of disk (count at about 5w per disk less energy). Other advantage is that if a disk fails, only this disk is lost. You can do "snapraids" on demand what means that even on a single disk failure you can restore this state. This is well suited for a pure media server. This is a real advantage on a pure mediaserver with a lot of disks. With few disk ZFS wins even in this discipline.

If you like realtime raid, realtime security with checksums, zero delay snapshorts, online filechecks with a self healing filesystem, striping raid with the performance of multiple disks and all the other ZFS highlights you need ZFS (Plus all the other nice things you like to have from a datacenter ready fileserver/filesystem).
I'm a little confused.
Do you us SNAPRAID as a backup program or does it do RAID also?
 

cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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Snapraid is a snapshot raid solution that does something similar to single or double parity RAID4. It is not a realtime RAID, so parity is computed as a scheduled command, sync. Any data that was added in between a sync is not protected. It has a couple advantages for a non critical data set like Multimedia that you have the original copies: 1) If you lose more drives than you have parity drives, not all the data is gone. Only the data on the failed disks will be lost. 2) Data on a single drive will only activate the drive it resides on, normally enough for streaming HD video, keeping power consumption to a minimum.

There are a few other snapshot RAID solutions like FlexRAID(Win/Linux), but snapraid is supported in Solaris and its descendants.
 

Dragonzeal

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Dec 28, 2012
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Snapraid is a snapshot raid solution that does something similar to single or double parity RAID4. It is not a realtime RAID, so parity is computed as a scheduled command, sync. Any data that was added in between a sync is not protected. It has a couple advantages for a non critical data set like Multimedia that you have the original copies: 1) If you lose more drives than you have parity drives, not all the data is gone. Only the data on the failed disks will be lost. 2) Data on a single drive will only activate the drive it resides on, normally enough for streaming HD video, keeping power consumption to a minimum.

There are a few other snapshot RAID solutions like FlexRAID(Win/Linux), but snapraid is supported in Solaris and its descendants.
Are there any best practices for snapraid?
 

zicoz

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Jan 7, 2011
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Doesn't drivepooling with ZFS mean that you'll lose all your data if one disk fails? (unless you add each disk as a vdev that is).
 

gea

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Doesn't drivepooling with ZFS mean that you'll lose all your data if one disk fails? (unless you add each disk as a vdev that is).
The idea is to create as many pools as you have disks (each pool from one vdev from one disk) so they are completely independent and do the pooling and redundancy in snapraid.
 

Dragonzeal

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Dec 28, 2012
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The idea is to create as many pools as you have disks (each pool from one vdev from one disk) so they are completely independent and do the pooling and redundancy in snapraid.
Is it still usefull to work with ZFS when using snapraid?
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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Is it still usefull to work with ZFS when using snapraid?
Snapraid without ZFS
-you do not have checksums on the redundancy disk-can you trust?
-you do not get informed on access when data is corrupted
-only a snap of current state

Snapraid vs ZFS Raid
- Performance. ZFS scales in performance over disks and vdevs, snapraid has always the performance of one disk
(therefor best suitable for a mediaserver with few users)

- all the realtime features of ZFS are missing
(realtime checksum, realtime self healing files, unlimited snaps without delay and without initial space consumption)


My own conclusion.
Even on my homeserver where I store also video, there are enough data that changes quite often, so I need the realtime features. On the other side I do not need that many disks at home when 4 TB disks are available for cheap so the energy save aspect is not there when you do not have more than say three or four disks and even then a few watts are not as important as my data.
 

Dragonzeal

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Dec 28, 2012
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At the moment there will only be 2 devices streaming from the storage server.
Also at the moment I have 6 1Tb 7200rpm disks.
I can go up to 30 disks in my case.
So it will grow.
I like the idea that 1 disk is used and the rest can go to sleep.
But I still haven't decided what to use.
Is ZFS with snapraid possible?
 

Dragonzeal

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Dec 28, 2012
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Actually before starting this thread I already setup a ZFS on OpenIndiana.
2 1Tb drives per vdev in a mirror
3 vdevs total in a zpool
I have 4 2Tb drives which I was going to use as backup drives

Is this a good way to work?
 

john4200

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Jan 1, 2011
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If you are going to use SnapRAID, I think your best OS choice is linux. SnapRAID should be able to be compiled on Solaris, but there is not much benefit to using SnapRAID with ZFS, so if you are going to use SnapRAID on a free OS, you may as well run a more widely used OS with better hardware support.

The other thing to keep in mind with SnapRAID is that you should only use it for files that are read-only and rarely deleted, like media files. SnapRAID is a poor choice for files that are frequently modified in-place, or files that are frequently deleted, since the redundancy depends on a sync being run whenever files are modified or deleted. For media files, it works great -- just run a sync whenever you add some more media files to your collection. Keep your other files (OS files, personal files, etc.) separate from the media files (and back up the important ones, obviously).
 
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Dragonzeal

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Dec 28, 2012
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If you are going to use SnapRAID, I think your best OS choice is linux. SnapRAID should be able to be compiled on Solaris, but there is not much benefit to using SnapRAID with ZFS, so if you are going to use SnapRAID on a free OS, you may as well run a more widely used OS with better hardware support.

The other thing to keep in mind with SnapRAID is that you should only use it for files that are read-only and rarely deleted, like media files. SnapRAID is a poor choice for files that are frequently modified in-place, or files that are frequently deleted, since the redundancy depends on a sync being run whenever files are modified or deleted. For media files, it works great -- just run a sync whenever you add some more media files to your collection. Keep your other files (OS files, personal files, etc.) separate from the media files (and back up the important ones, obviously).
Actually I still haven't decided what I'm going to use as RAID technology.

I'll start a new thread for this but the thread is going off topic.
I saw that RAIDZ is the preference of most.
 
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