Advise RAIDZ setup For backup's and photo's small films (plex).

[K.J]

Please advise me on this raid 5 setup.

I have the following hardware in my treunas core.
2 x 8 GB DDR 4 2666MHz ECC Ram.
Avago lsi sas hba 9207-i.
Now have 3 x 2 TB WD Red Plus (cmr). Cache 128 mb purchased.
The disks are used to regularly backup my laptop.
These disks also hold all the photos and private videos that can be accessed via plex.

Is this fine, or do you recommend using another raid setup?

 

[Spearfoot]

Please advise me on this raid 5 setup.

I have the following hardware in my treunas core.
2 x 8 GB DDR 4 2666MHz ECC Ram.
Avago lsi sas hba 9207-i.
Now have 3 x 2 TB WD Red Plus (cmr). Cache 128 mb purchased.
The disks are used to regularly backup my laptop.
These disks also hold all the photos and private videos that can be accessed via plex.

Is this fine, or do you recommend using another raid setup?

Well... ZFS doesn't support RAID5, though ZFS RAIDZ1 is roughly equivalent. RAIDZ1 uses one disk for parity, so your 3 x 2TB disks in a RAIDZ1 array would give you the capacity of 2 disks (4TB). Would that suit your needs?

See the ZFS Primer for more details. There are quite a few other tutorials here on the site as well.

 

[danb35]

Is this fine, or do you recommend using another raid setup?

It sounds like you're already using it--is it working fine? We don't generally recommend RAIDZ1 (as noted above, there is no "RAID 5" in ZFS) with disks over 1 TB, but the risk has been somewhat overblown. But are you satisfied with the capacity and performance?

 

[K.J]

Hello @Spearfoot and @danb35 Thanks both for your advice!

In a few weeks I will install the new disks in raidZ1 Unless .......
Because danb35 suggests something else as raidZ1.
When a drive fails all I have to do is replace it.
Then I don't lose anything anyway as I understand it now?

Now as a test I have two very old disks in.
One for two IP cameras.
One for plex and the backup of the laptop which I make manually with regularity with EaseUS todo Backup.
These are both connected via the HBA lsi sas controller which is in IT mode.

The backup I now run via treunas often takes much longer than via an old ssd drive connected via usb.

 

[danb35]

When a drive fails all I have to do is replace it.
Then I don't lose anything anyway as I understand it now?

Correct. The concern is that as drive sizes grow, so does the chance of a data error on the remaining disks when rebuilding the array, and if you look around, you'll find a lot of literature saying things like "RAID 5 is dead". I think the concern is exaggerated, but it's nonetheless out there.

 

[ChrisRJ]

One factor to keep in mind is the availability of replacement drives. Chia mining has dried up the market place for affordable high capacity drives. So you might end up in a situation, where you cannot afford to wait a week or so until you find a drive at a price that suits you. Of course, a cold spare (burned in!) also helps here. I recently had a pretty new Seagate Exos 16 TB go bad and with RAIDZ2 it simply was a good feeling that during the resilver with my cold spare, there was still some protection in place.

At the end of the day it comes down to how much you value your data. I have a ton of photos, my first Pascal programs and other things that I would hate to loose. So the money for the extra disk is worth it for me.