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Which RAID for a Personal Fileserver?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-much-redundancy-can-you-handle dept.

Dredd2Kad asks: "I'm tired of HD failures. I've suffered through a few of them. Even with backups, they are still a pain to recover from. I've got all fairly inexpensive but reliable hardware picked out, but I'm just not sure which RAID level to implement. My goals are to build a file server that can live through a drive failure with no loss of data, and will be easy to rebuild. Ideally, in the event of a failure, I'd just like to remove the bad hard drive and install a new one and be done with it. Is this possible? How many drives to I need to get this done, 2,4 or 5? What size should they be? I know when you implement RAID, your usable drive space is N% of the total drive space depending on the RAID level."

2 of 898 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RAID 1 by robi2106 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No kidding. I wonke up one morning, turned on my system and found my one an only partition for my storage drive (non-raid) totally gone. WinXp Pro just decided to wipe it clean. I surfed around a while and find a nice Russian (or some other foreign site) that served up a juicy hacked exe for a harddrive recovery app. It did the trick and recovered my data by rebuilding the partition table based on the data (or something like that).

    I was even thinking of buying the app until I surfed to the company's site and found it was >$2K US. Screw that. If it happens again, I may not reciver my stuff.

    I didn't have anything critical on there, but it woudl have been very time consuming to re-rip my CDs again.

    jason

  2. Building a home fileserver by KaiLoi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have just finished doing this exact thing.

    I basically built a box to do nothing other than fileserv. I put together a nice simple old PC (550mhz with 256 meg of ram) and mounted it in an old rack mount case I had lying round.

    It's running debian with 2.4.26.

    I'm running software raid and installed 2 x 2 interface IDE cards.

    I threw in 6 seagate 120 gig drives (the ones with the 8 meg cache) and ran raid5 across 5 of them and a hot spare to rebuild the raid should a drvie fail. Each drive has it's own IDE channel to prevent channel faliure from screwing my raid.

    I'm using ext3 as the filesystem and wrote my own little raid mon script that SMS's me should a drive fail and alarms locally.

    This setup has been rock steady and gives me 460 (ish) gig of usable space after formatting.

    For added peice of mind the machine is plugged into a UPS that is connected to the machine via Serial. If the UPS kicks in it shuts the machine down properly after sending an alarm SMS (the DSL and switch are also on the UPS) (yes I'm a paranoid freak)

    This makes a perfectly good media and file server and I've had no problem with it in the few months I've had it.

    I also reccomend setting the spin down time onm the drives manually with hdparm. It was getting awfully warm in the box till I turned that on on the seagates. Modern drives are rather hot. ;)

    I have the whole thing mounted via SMB on my other boxes around the house and it's fast,(gig ethernet) reliable and easy.

    Tho do remember that no amount of raiding will save you if you lose 2 drives through some horrible freak of badness, and no raid level is going to protect you from a house fire. Hence mine also rsyncs all my absoloutely vital files (scanned family photos and docs) offsite to a file storage site every night at 2am so as not to chew my bandwidth dduring usable times. Don't forget the only truely secure data is that which is backed up.. and offsite.... twice. ;)