Quote:
Originally Posted by ime2006
I have a 12 bay home server. But i just keep stuffing in HDD into it.
So far, it only filled 5 bays. And its running on Win10 Pro and 16GB DDR4 Ram. No raid.
Now, If I do Raid 5, i should get 10-11X read speed performance with all 12 bays filled.
Question is how reliable is Raid 5 ?? Or maybe i should do Raid 6 ??
And if a drive failed, does it take a long time to reconstruct ? Also, can i add more drives in the Raid 5,6 array later on ?
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I don't think speeds increase like that but it'll be much faster than single drive reads. A single drive is enough to saturate a 1GBe connection, so throughput isn't the issue. A RAID would have much faster seek and response times which is what you need if you have several users accessing the data.
You should just stick with a RAID 5. The writes are slow enough with a RAID5, RAID 6 is even slower because it'll have to calculate 2 parity bits. If you want 2 disk redundancy, go with RAID 5 + hot spare. It should automatically rebuild on the hot spare if one drive fails.
Adding drives to a RAID 5 or 6 depends on what you're using to create the RAID. I'm running Server 2016 with a H700 flashed to HBA mode so I'm letting Windows handle the RAID with Storage Spaces. I've read that I could add drives to the array but I haven't tried. What I normally do is replace with bigger drives one at a time and expand the drive. It's expensive because I have to replace 4 drives each time. Some hardware RAID cards may let you add a drive to the array and redistribute the data.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ime2006
btw, what about RAM ? Should i expend it to 32GB or 64GB?
ALSO, WD RED/Blue NAS vs Seagate IronWolf ?
Planning to get all 8TB HDDs to fill up empty bays.
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RAM shouldn't matter, it's just a file server. More ram would give you some more write cache if you're running Windows. If you're planning to run some virtual machines then load it up otherwise 8GB is fine.
If you're going to RAID, just go with the cheapest disks. I've used desktop drives and even WD Green disks without problems. My smallest array consists of 3TB Seagate Barracudas. Don't forget that RAID stands for Redundant Array of
Inexpensive Disks. I just keep a spare disk laying around in case of failure but make sure that disk is at least as big as your biggest disk.