NASLite Network Attached Storage

I'm getting 3 old computers tonight. They are all about 7-10 years old i would guess. I have looked into the Sata raid controllers, and most of them seem to be PCI-X.

Some like the "LSI SuperTrack EX12350" is PCI-E

I do have the hardware guide in front of me, and like i said most seem to be PCI-X or PCI-E (is PCI-E what you find on older computers?).. And for the case of something like LSI MegaRAID SuperTrak EX12350 as above. Is is supported? The docs only say "SuperTrak".. they give no model numbers. Does that mean all models are supported?

I see all 7xxxx/8xxxx 3ware cards are supported, but i can't find a complete list of these and which ones use which type of expansion slot.

I'm not sure what type of expansion slots to find on a computer 7-10 years old, but i'm guessing all i am going to find it regular old PCI slots correct?

If that is the case which supported SATA RAID controller can I use? I'd like to spend more more then $200 for the controller.

Is PCI-X new? I bought a new dell about 3 years ago that appears to have only regular PCI slots on it.

Thank for the help. I want to make sure I buy the correct RAID controller. I do not want to get one put it in only to find out it is not supported etc.

Did some more reading, and if i am understanding this correctly. You can plug the adaptec 2410a (pci-x) into regular pci just fine. It will just run slower. Is that correct? is that correct for ANY pci-X?

So i can buy this and i'll be fine right?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0206821549

I've used a 2610SA and a 7500-8 in a 32-bit PCI slot with no problems.

[edit] What about this Adaptec 2610SA? [/edit]

First off you are going to need to be careful, some RAID cards, aren't. By this I mean that they are based on the use of the processor in the background via special drivers and do not contain any processor or off load XOR engine and cache on the card. These are only going to be RAID0 or RAID1.



PCI is a 32bit 33MHz interface bus, PCI-X is 64bit and comes in a number of flavors in terms of speed 33, 66, 100, and 133MHz are those speeds. Though there are exceptions, most PCI-X cards will drop back to 32 bit and 33MHz speed, BUT NOT ALL! Some PCI slots Generally yes. As a general rule you can assume that the naming of a family of controllers means support is across all devices using that name.



Go to 3Ware's site for that info. Most in not all the 7xxx cards will be PCI or PCI-X as will the vast majority of the 8xxx cards.



Correct.




PCIe is the newer interface, most of the newer performance RAID cards will be 8X PCIe types. Allot of the consumer motherboards will only have 1x and 16x slots.



Your welcome,

Mike

PS. Stay away from Adaptec cards, they have really crappy support now, you can't even talk to tech support without paying first. Go for the 3Ware cards.

Well i just bought that off ebay. It has it's own on board processor. NASLite will support this one correct? SO i should be good to go.

great just saw your post to stay away from adaptech..

well it should work. What support will i need. As long as i can get into the cards bios and setup. It should be fine.

Even if it is under warranty and fails they will charge you $80.00 USD to get the RMA and then refund it at their leisure. I use to be a hardcore Adaptec fan until they made that change. Customer support is king, performance is a close second. Sorry to hear that you went Adaptec, hope you never need their help.

Mike

Here's a question for you. Lets say i use the adaptec card and it works fine for a year, then it fails somehow. If i'm using raid level 1... can i just get another controller card and plus the hard drives back in and be back up and running? Or do i suffer data loss if there is a failure of the controller card?

Yes i know i need to make backups. I'm wondering the best way of doing that.

I could set up another nas server with just a regular hard drive in it and every night rsync from the main one to the other. Would that be best?

Again thanks for the answers, and trust me i wish i saw yoru messages before i bought it. But it's only $40 bucks used.. if it doesn't work i have 14 days to return it. And if it works then a good $40 bucks spend.

I want to know what happens when they fail? I hope they don't just screw up all your data. I hope they are smart enough to know when they fail and just stop reading and writing the drives.

Again raid 1 is raid 1 no matter what the controller so i should be able to just swap right?

Should i be going raid 10 or anything else? My main concern is security of the data. I never want to lose data again. Performance is secondary to me. As long as it can read/write about as fast as my current NAS (a bufallo link station) then i'll be good.

In theory you should be able to use any RAID card for a Mirror (RAID1) I can't answer for sure though. The data will still be there, this I do know. You can even move the drive to another machine and mount it to retrieve the data.

Some cards store the configuration data on the drives allowing you to recover by simply replacing the card with another card of the same. Some store the configuration as a file that can be uploaded to the card to recover, Again for the same card.

Running RAID 10 will give you a bit of speed and some data integrity. Remember that if you have 2 drives that have an MTBF of 1.2 Million hours then your MTBF for the array will be 600K Hours. For 3 drives that number drops to 400K Hours etc. The truly paranoid will run a RAID50 with a couple of hot swap drives in reserve for on the fly rebuild of the bad node. For the totally insane data freak a RAID60 is the ticket. This takes allot of drives and money, it is all a matter of how important the data you have is to you and how much you are willing to spend to make sure that its there when you want it.

Mike

So raid 1 should be good right? Only way i lose data is if both hard drives fail at the same time right? And since i'm using one old hard drive, and one new hard drive that possibility should be very close to zero.

And of course soon as a hard drive fails i just need to make sure i get a new one in there.

Now, does the raid controller (or/and NAS) tell me when the hard drive fails? I assume i'll get errors here and there.. increasing more and more as a drive fails. So i keep using the drive untill NAS or the raid controller tells me it is completely failed? Or i swap it out soon as it starts getting errors?

Man, THIS IS YOUR REALITY CHECK! There are two kinds of drives out there, those that will fail and those that have. The facts are that there is about a 1% to as high as 7% failure rate in drives. The drives that most of the people are buying are not as robust as the makers would like you to think, to get those you pay! Example, Seagate has the ST3750330NS. The drive is 750GB and rated for near line storage use in arrays. It has a better warranty and is generally much more reliable than the consumer devices most buy. They run about $140.00 as opposed to about $75.00 for the consumer drive. The firmware is different and the support is as well.

If you have a drive that is reporting unrecoverable errors then you need to wipe and map out the bad blocks with the software provided by the manufacturer. Better yet, retire the drive and use the linear motor magnets for the refrigerator. SMART will go a long way to telling you what is going on with your drives and when it is time to replace one. Remember that an unrecoverable error is LOST DATA, period. Get a couple of good, new drives and burn them in for 60 days before you start to trust them with your data. In my experience, if a drive makes it past 30 days you generally have a good one. Also, leave the NAS running 24/7. Power cycling the drives is the kiss of death to longevity and it's hell on electronics. Cool them well, have a fan blowing on them if you can. I have drives that are well in excess of 7 years old and still in service, two of them in excess of 31,000 hours of spin time. Not spinning them down is the main reason for this long life. They are only spun down if I am going to be away for more than a few days.

Mike

Still not sure i see how i'm going to lose data using raid 1. Unrecoverable errors and failures will happen. But it's writing to both drives at the same time. One fails i swap out a new one, or like you say wipe and map out the bad sectors.

It still seems to me that the only way i lose data is if errors (which yes i know WILL happen) happen to both drives at the same time.

if that were not the case then what is the point of raid 1. Might as well just stick one hard drive in there without an array, and back it up every night via rsync to an external drive.

I plan to also rsync the entire thing to an external drive. But that's when i get some more cash to get the external drive.

For now, again i don't see how you lose data with a raid 1 array unless you let the bad drive sit there and don't fix it or swap it.

Should i go raid 5? I'm reading about the differences, and if i understand it correctly.. raid 5 allows the array to stay alive if one of the drives fail.. while raid 1 will just stop operating if one of the drives fail.

I'll need 3 drives for raid 5, but i get more storage space.

If one the hard drive drop out, i don't care if the all the data goes offline until i put a new one in. That's ok.

Raid 5 adds this "parity" That allows the rebuild. I assume raid 1 just copies all the data from the remaining disk to the new disk to get back up and running.

raid 10 adds the party as well, so what is the different between raid 10 and 5 then? (the controller i'm getting has 6 sata ports, so i can go to 3 drives i feel like it !)

In RAID1 (a mirror) you basically have a pair of drives being written to with the same data. Should a drive fail in a mirror the data is still available, just that the mirror has failed.

In RAID10 you have a pair of RAID0 (stripped drives with no parity) being mirrored. This gives better speed but uses allot of drives. Minimum number of drives for this will be 4 and the total space will be n/2 where n=the total number of drives in the array. Picture a pair of RAID0 stripes then being RAID1 mirrored.

In RAID5 (stripe with parity) you have an array of devices being written with data and parity. This a RAID0 with parity This give you better use of the drives and a fair amount of data integrity in that you can have a drive fail and not loose data. Storage space is n-1 with a RAID5 array. The disadvantage to a RAID5 implementation is that you have allot of background I/O which limits the total bandwidth of the array by quite a bit. This doesn't mater to the general consumer (All NASLite users are in this category) but if you are looking for the absolute fastest array you can get then you will have to look to a RAID50 implementation.

All of the above have advantages, issues, and trade offs. Moving up the RAID food chain will cost bigger and bigger bucks but also brings more reliability and features to the table.

Hope this helps a bit.

Mike

I think i'm going to go with raid 1 with 2 500G SATA Hard Drives.

I also believe that I should be running a NAS LITE "mirror" (really rsych i'm sure).. to an external 500G Drive everynight.


The mirror will run once a day, thus if any accidental deletes or something like that happens, i can get that data back from the last nights mirror.

The raid 1 will protect me from data loss due to hard drive failures.

More questions:

1. Does making the nightly mirror to the external 500G drive really do anything for me other then let me get back accidental deletions? Yes it's a 3rd layer of protection against the whole raid array failing, but the chances of that are almost non existent right?

2. From this document: http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt it says raid 1 is better then 5. I read that if corrupted data gets into one drive of a raid 5, it get put back into the rebuild of the array as the parity for the corrupt data is wrong. IF currupt data gets into 1 drive of a raid 1, it does not get put back into the array when rebuilt, as the rebuild is a straight copy of the other (good) drive.

3. Assuming the above is true, then 10 really is the best way to do, but like you said you need 4 drives to start with. But if you want the best, you pay for the best!

4. I can't afford raid 10 but i can do raid 1 with a nightly mirror to an external drive. This seems like the best current solution to me. Do you agree? And if you do agree, what would you wager the chances of data loss due to hardware failure are? I'm thinking close to nothing. raid 1 i read has a less then 5% failure rate if you swap in the new drive right away when one fails. With the addition of the nightly usb mirror, i should be close to 0%.

5. If i buy 2 usb drives, and bring one over to my mother in laws once a week or so.. i'm then protected from the office burning down senario correct? I only lose as much data as the last time i swaped out the usb drive correct?