Windows RAID Advice

chrisloudon

Hi all,

After building an HTPC   NAS system I have been left with a decision on how to configure 4 spare 4TB hard disks to store the bulk of my movie collection and could do with a little help on what direction I should take.

A quick Google sent me down a RAID 5 path which was pretty simple to setup using the Intel RST tool however my write speeds are so slow the system is virtually unusable. Once I created the array, I started moving my files back to the volume and discovered my writes speeds were no more than 10MB/s which is roughly 10x less than I was getting on each single drive. Some further reading suggested while not necessary with 4 or less disks, I should initialise the array however, at the current rate of progress I think hell might freeze over as its taking roughly an hour to complete a single percent.

If this is normal for a RAID 5 setup for 1st use then I'm happy to let the initialisation run its course but just wanted to check here first.

Happy to take any further advise on alternatives.

Many thanks

Chris

next010

Are the drives inside the PC ?

Windows has native RAID (mirror/span) support in it's disk management tool, also there is the storage spaces feature which is an alternative of sorts to RAID5.

I've never used the Intel RAID tool but the above are the built in basics I would start with.

RAID5 is slow in write speeds, verifying a RAID5 pool is also a very slow process and depending upon the size of the pool can take a day or so. Again no experience with Intel RST so I've no idea if it's meant to be that slow.

Stablebit Drivepool is an alternative dynamic fault tolerance storage system for Windows, it is faster than using RAID5 and can work with any size volumes being made larger or smaller depending upon your needs, however it must not be used with a USB HDD, it is SATA drive only no matter what the site says, using anything other than SATA can cause data corruption.

Depending upon the the size of your drives making some RAID 1 mirror drives is a lot easier and less hassle. Especially if using a movie library system like Plex or whatever, you don't need the movies stored all on one drive they can be spread out across any number and your clones of those drives are your fault tolerance.

CARLOS

Another vote for Stablebit Drivepool, been using it for a few years and it is excellent also because the way it works any data can be retrieved from even a single drive if you need to remove them for any reason.

Hillskill

I’ve been looking into this software this afternoon. Think I’m going to give it a go too. Looks impressive

EndlessWaves

Just to add the usual warning. RAID is not a backup.

The primarily purpose of RAID and other similar systems is to ensure that the data remains accessible when a drive fails, that you don't have the downtime or can put it off until a time convenient to you.

They make poor backup systems because no old versions of the data is preserved. There's no way to recover from unwanted changes, such as accidental deletion, data corruption from faulty memory or a randomware attack.

Bigfingers

Hardware raid for performance stability and features. Drawback is cost

software raid for financial reasons as the performance is nowhere near hardware.

Hardware all day long for me with offline back up

chrisloudon

Thanks for tips guys.

I tried using the Windows Storage Spaces but found the performance hit was even worse than the Raid 5 volume I setup using RST.

I've decided to take the storage space hit and am using a RAID 10 array but will incestiage the Stablebit Drivepool which looks interesting.

Thanks Again.

mjn

The RAID controller is your limiting factor. Without a cache, write speeds will be awful. I can get 250MB/Sec write speeds from my RAID 5 with 7 disks. But that is with a proper RAID controller and 512MB cache.

On my backup server, i use two RAID 5 logical drives in one Windows drive pool and the limiting factor is my 1Gb network connection maxing out.