FlexRaid: Transparent RAID (tRAID) vs RAID over File System (RAID-F)

[pmac 132]

Thanks @@Airbender. That was a very informative post. I've been doing some more research, and I didn't realize you can efficiently run a FlexRaid system off of your main HTPC until now.

 

Since my computer rarely turns off (only for updates, or if I experience my dreaded HDMI audio dropout from changing inputs), would it be feasible to just install FlexRaid on my current system, rather than building a new computer for a separate server? This way, all I'd need to do is purchase a parity drive, install the FlexRaid software and go, correct? Also, is there an advantage to having a party drive larger than your largest usable drive?

 

After doing more research, I believe I'm pretty set on Raid-F, since I'll only be backing up movies/tv shows I shouldn't need real time parity, which would slow down my write speed, and (in my eyes) put extra wear on my HDD's. I can just set it to snapshot while I'm sleeping.

 

Also, I can't wait to use the drive pooling feature, it'll be so much nicer than using multiple drives and separating my collections to make them fit

 

Thanks,

 

Patrick

[Airbender 113]

Hello pmac,

 

"Thanks @Airbender. That was a very informative post. I've been doing some more research, and I didn't realize you can efficiently run a FlexRaid system off of your main HTPC until now."

 

Your welcome any time, yes that is the beauty of MB3 and FlexRaid you can run them on any system , it does not have to be a server but i would advise right now 

FlexRaid does requires a good SATA Controller cards for internal and extranl drives so if your motherboard has 6 SATA 6Gbps make sure your controller is sata III 6Gbps also and it is strong to handle all the work.

 

Here is the video of my system just to give you an idea

 

1-

 

2-

 

3-

 

"Since my computer rarely turns off (only for updates, or if I experience my dreaded HDMI audio dropout from changing inputs), would it be feasible to just install FlexRaid on my current system, rather than building a new computer for a separate server? This way, all I'd need to do is purchase a parity drive, install the FlexRaid software and go, correct? Also, is there an advantage to having a party drive larger than your largest usable drive?"

 

 

Ok you can trun you system to a server and keep it and get ROKU 2XS for $49.99 and use Roku MB3 App much better setup bro to be honest or get ROKU 3 for 79.99 with 3 months Netfliex for free

 

OR just use it which ever way you like

 

Ok yes you need to have at lest 1 or 2 Parity drive , the reason i said get 4TB is because in the future you will get 4TB drives for DATA so if you get 1 Parity drive of 4TB you will save your self time in moving and upgrading PPU Drive which is Parity drive " Future planing " ,,, if you get 2 Parity drive of same size then you can recover 2 Drives failer so just FYI AND WORD OF ADVISE PARITY IS NOT BACKUP SYSTEM it is not even close to real backup solutions so get Crush plan 4.99 a month unlimated cloud backup , crush plan is real back system and all cool kids in MB3 doing it

 

"After doing more research, I believe I'm pretty set on Raid-F, since I'll only be backing up movies/tv shows I shouldn't need real time parity, which would slow down my write speed, and (in my eyes) put extra wear on my HDD's. I can just set it to snapshot while I'm sleeping."

 

to be honest with you not sure what the hell peope talking about i run raid f for over 2 months and now i am running traid and i bought it and i dont see a difference in read and write speed

 

In reality when i move data from my 2 TB that is set for sabnzbd to any drive in the pool the transfer speed started at 87 MB and went down to 32MB and then to 16 MB and then back up to 35 MB until it completed the transfer. same speed in tRaid no difference so it is your call

 

"Also, I can't wait to use the drive pooling feature, it'll be so much nicer than using multiple drives and separating my collections to make them fit"

 

i am telling this right now IF YOU GO POOLING FROM START YOU CAN NOT GO BACK

 

your advantacge of pooling will be you can add more storge to your pool as it goes low but the data will be all over the place and man you will have hard time putting them together again but if you cool with the way pool works then go for it

 

For Raid F setup you will need to go over this guide the best i found

http://assassinhtpcblog.com/server-flexraid/

 

 

Good Luck

Edited February 4, 2014 by Airbender

[pmac 132]

@@Airbender, like I've mentioned before, I'm very new to this... Sorry to sound like such a noobie, but much of what you said about SATA controllers is foreign to me  . 

 

My system specs are as follows:

 

CPU: Intel Core i5-2400 4-core 3.10GHz

RAM: 8GB

OS: Win7 64-bit

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6670

Motherboard: Pegatron Corporation 2AC2

Chipset: Intel H61 (Cougar Point)

Drives: 2x WD Green 1TB SATA 3 GB/s (External)

              2x WD Green 3TB SATA 6 GB/s (External)

 

Using HWiNFO64, for my 1TB drives, under "General Information" for my Drive Controller it says: "Serial ATA 3Gb/s <-> USB". But for my 3TB drives, it says: "Serial ATA 6Gb/s @ 3Gb/s <-> USB"

 

I have no idea what I have for a SATA controller, or how to check 

 

Ideally I'd like to have FlexRaid work on this PC though, just not really sure how to go about it.

 

Thanks,

 

Patrick

Edited February 4, 2014 by pmac

[Airbender 113]

@@Airbender, like I've mentioned before, I'm very new to this... Sorry to sound like such a noobie, but much of what you said about SATA controllers is foreign to me  . 

 

My system specs are as follows:

 

CPU: Intel Core i5-2400 4-core 3.10GHz

RAM: 8GB

OS: Win7 64-bit

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6670

Motherboard: Pegatron Corporation 2AC2

Chipset: Intel H61 (Cougar Point)

Drives: 2x WD Green 1TB SATA 3 GB/s (External)

              2x WD Green 3TB SATA 6 GB/s (External)

 

Using HWiNFO64, for my 1TB drives, under "General Information" for my Drive Controller it says: "Serial ATA 3Gb/s <-> USB". But for my 3TB drives, it says: "Serial ATA 6Gb/s @ 3Gb/s <-> USB"

Hello

 

Let move out from here as this page is only for F Raid vs T Raid

i will reposnd to you in this page

http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/3475-flexraid-advance-question/ 

 

Thanks

[pmac 132]

Thanks.

[Airbender 113]

Hello

 

@@sfnetwork

You online backup solution got my interest with the cost vs unlimited storage. Do you actually use it?  Yes i do , but i do not backup C drive or 2TB Sab drive or MB3 Drive only drives in raid and i dont backup parity drive.

With a backup??  You can restore from the backup at anytime but first the backup has to complete

 

I wouldn't need parity and would get access to another 4TB. That is your call bro to be honest but it is good to have a parity drive and online backup

 

Hope this helps

[Airbender 113]

@@Airbender

Did you actually ever test the tRAID pooling with MB3 (library scans access denied errors, etc..)?

I'm sooo tired of waiting for Brahim to port traid pooling in RAID-F but I never got any confirmation anywhere that tRAID pooling is actually better (not on paper; in real usage).

 

Pooling is priority #1 for me and snapshot raid seemed exactly suited for my needs but the pooling... aahhhh 

Even in other software like MetaBrowser, it gets "access denied" errors which causes sooo many issues when doing batch processes (some nfo/xml and images not changed, etc...) plus the scanning performance...

Hi ,

 

No sorry i did not , after i read about it here and in Plex forums and flexraid forum i change the way my setup is

This is what i did

 

1- 2X 120GB SSD on Raid 1

1- 2TB drive NOT PART OF tRAID for SABNZBD and Couch and ect

1- 60GB SSD for MB3 Cache files and IBN , ect

1- 4TB Parity Drive

 

Rest of my drives are in tRaid Config and i disabled the pool completely

 

This setup i am not running into any issues and i have so much space to add files to any of my individual drives as i get new files and in the future if i need more space i can buy 4TB drives and add them to tRaid

at this moment running tRaid for almost a month with zero issues.

 

"Pooling is priority #1 for me and snapshot raid seemed exactly suited for my needs but the pooling"

Ok the pooling in tRaid is ok or good but it is not as good as Raid-F but it is functions very well based on my simple test, i made video of it and provided screenshots also

 

at the end you will have to deiced )))) i have paid verion of tRaid now and i am really happy + running Crush plan backup on top of tRaid 

 

Sorry i know this is not the answer you looking for

 

 

Thanks

[sfnetwork 514]

Hello

 

@@sfnetwork

You online backup solution got my interest with the cost vs unlimited storage. Do you actually use it?  Yes i do , but i do not backup C drive or 2TB Sab drive or MB3 Drive only drives in raid and i dont backup parity drive.

With a backup??  You can restore from the backup at anytime but first the backup has to complete

 

I wouldn't need parity and would get access to another 4TB. That is your call bro to be honest but it is good to have a parity drive and online backup

 

Hope this helps

How much data approx you backup online?

[Airbender 113]

At this moment 27 tb it will take 2 years and some days to complete

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[wraslor 70]

Just wanted to chime in here.  I've been using raid-f and traid for a while now and it seems like I always ran into problems.  Raid-f had a drive die, when I tried to recover it would fail what I learned was if something got corrupt on one drive it will cause the failure even though I had mine syncing daily.  Switched to t-raid and encountered the nice 15-20 MB/s write speed which stunk but wasn't a deal breaker.  Upgraded to the newest t-raid version and now traid crashes everytime I try to copy a file.  The error thrown is that it is trying to write a file in too large of chunks, I was told by the mod at flex raid that I should look at what program is doing the writing.... to which I replied windows explorer...  

 

Regardless it just seems like I've had too many issues.  So now for my solution and maybe to suggest an alternative for anyone interested.

 

Stablebit drive pool and scanner.  This program has a pooling feature that is super easy to setup, just click add drive and that's it!  The scanner is an advanced hard drive monitor that continually checks your drives and you can setup email, sms, etc alerts to smart error, surface errors, etc.  When you have a drive that starts seeing errors, you go into the drive pool, click remove drive and it will copy your data on the failing disc to the other discs automatically.  My testing with it has been good so far. I'm curious if anyone else has experience with it?

[sfnetwork 514]

Just wanted to chime in here. I've been using raid-f and traid for a while now and it seems like I always ran into problems. Raid-f had a drive die, when I tried to recover it would fail what I learned was if something got corrupt on one drive it will cause the failure even though I had mine syncing daily. Switched to t-raid and encountered the nice 15-20 MB/s write speed which stunk but wasn't a deal breaker. Upgraded to the newest t-raid version and now traid crashes everytime I try to copy a file. The error thrown is that it is trying to write a file in too large of chunks, I was told by the mod at flex raid that I should look at what program is doing the writing.... to which I replied windows explorer...

 

Regardless it just seems like I've had too many issues. So now for my solution and maybe to suggest an alternative for anyone interested.

 

Stablebit drive pool and scanner. This program has a pooling feature that is super easy to setup, just click add drive and that's it! The scanner is an advanced hard drive monitor that continually checks your drives and you can setup email, sms, etc alerts to smart error, surface errors, etc. When you have a drive that starts seeing errors, you go into the drive pool, click remove drive and it will copy your data on the failing disc to the other discs automatically. My testing with it has been good so far. I'm curious if anyone else has experience with it?

How's the pooling performance and stability with MB3, etc... Scanning library, etc...?

I had my eye on it for a while now.

 

@@Airbender

You online backup solution got my interest with the cost vs unlimited storage. Do you actually use it?

With a backup, I wouldn't need parity and would get access to another 4TB.

 

 

 

 

Sent from Tapatalk.

[sfnetwork 514]

@@Airbender

Did you actually ever test the tRAID pooling with MB3 (library scans access denied errors, etc..)?

I'm sooo tired of waiting for Brahim to port traid pooling in RAID-F but I never got any confirmation anywhere that tRAID pooling is actually better (not on paper; in real usage).

 

Pooling is priority #1 for me and snapshot raid seemed exactly suited for my needs but the pooling... aahhhh 

Even in other software like MetaBrowser, it gets "access denied" errors which causes sooo many issues when doing batch processes (some nfo/xml and images not changed, etc...) plus the scanning performance...

[Guest virtualtinker]

I would agree with some of the prior comments made regarding tRaid.  I've been using it for about a month with my 6 drives housing about 4TB of usable data.  From my perspective, the storage pool itself has not really given me any problems.  Whatever you are talking about regarding Raid-F with the access denied, I haven't seen.

 

However that said, there have been some road blocks long the way, most of which I guess will be worked out as the product further matures.  For one, in the earlier release back in December, all of my verify sync jobs were failing.  This was apparently fixed in the release last week.  This has introduced a new problem entirely though.  Since the last release, I've had my storage pool crash probably 4 times now which trying to view movies via the web client and changing settings.  Also, and this is in no part necessarily the fault of tRaid, but with the current SWMC plugin, there seems to be problems with watching live TV via the web client when WMC is pointing to a storage pool.  I've been working with the developers and, for the time being, I've had to dedicate a drive for live TV outside of the storage pool in order to get it to work reliably.

[sfnetwork 514]

I would agree with some of the prior comments made regarding tRaid.  I've been using it for about a month with my 6 drives housing about 4TB of usable data.  From my perspective, the storage pool itself has not really given me any problems.  Whatever you are talking about regarding Raid-F with the access denied, I haven't seen.

 

However that said, there have been some road blocks long the way, most of which I guess will be worked out as the product further matures.  For one, in the earlier release back in December, all of my verify sync jobs were failing.  This was apparently fixed in the release last week.  This has introduced a new problem entirely though.  Since the last release, I've had my storage pool crash probably 4 times now which trying to view movies via the web client and changing settings.  Also, and this is in no part necessarily the fault of tRaid, but with the current SWMC plugin, there seems to be problems with watching live TV via the web client when WMC is pointing to a storage pool.  I've been working with the developers and, for the time being, I've had to dedicate a drive for live TV outside of the storage pool in order to get it to work reliably.

Sounds promising... Now (well more like since 5-6 months if not more), I'm waiting for Brahim to port tRAID pool in RAID-F... 

From all the pieces of information/feedback I got over different treads, it's a lot better...

When (if) pooling gets better in RAID-F, IMO, it will be the best option (snapshot raid)

 

Every time we mention something wrong with RAID-F pool on FlexRaid forum, the answer almost always ends up to be; wait until tRAID pool i ported to RAID-F...

Gotta keep faith 

Edited February 7, 2014 by sfnetwork

[Airbender 113]

hello

 

i will add this the reason i have my setting little different then everybody else to avoid issue and so far it is been great setup with tRaid and i am happy with

+ i am still making more howto videos so other can benefits from it

 

Thanks

[wraslor 70]

How's the pooling performance and stability with MB3, etc... Scanning library, etc...?

I had my eye on it for a while now.

 

@@Airbender

You online backup solution got my interest with the cost vs unlimited storage. Do you actually use it?

With a backup, I wouldn't need parity and would get access to another 4TB.

 

 

 

 

Sent from Tapatalk.

Performance is great, It doesn't impact the drives and I'm getting the normal 90-120 mb writes you would see without using a parity setup.  I've had it running for about a week now and it's been solid, not had to reboot or encountered any errors.

[sfnetwork 514]

Performance is great, It doesn't impact the drives and I'm getting the normal 90-120 mb writes you would see without using a parity setup.  I've had it running for about a week now and it's been solid, not had to reboot or encountered any errors.

ok so you can use tRAID pooling without transparent raid parity?

[Airbender 113]

Performance is great, It doesn't impact the drives and I'm getting the normal 90-120 mb writes you would see without using a parity setup.  I've had it running for about a week now and it's been solid, not had to reboot or encountered any errors.

I will add the Performance of the hard drives also depends on the SATA Controller card the better card the better Performance for sure

[Airbender 113]

ok so you can use tRAID pooling without transparent raid parity?

i dont think that even possible i asked this and got answer for it and posted in this post in the past , to make the pool you have to have parity as far my understanding goes

[sfnetwork 514]

i dont think that even possible i asked this and got answer for it and posted in this post in the past , to make the pool you have to have parity as far my understanding goes

Yeah, I remember you confirming this but from this post, it seems possible (if I didn't misunderstood)

http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/2167-flexraid-transparent-raid-traid-vs-raid-over-file-system-raid-f/page-8&do=findComment&comment=68660

[Airbender 113]

Yeah, I remember you confirming this but from this post, it seems possible (if I didn't misunderstood)

http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/2167-flexraid-transparent-raid-traid-vs-raid-over-file-system-raid-f/page-8&do=findComment&comment=68660

Hi i wont take @@wraslor answer as true because i am running tRaid and no option in advance setting none so until he show us a video or screenshots of where it is this option i would say no it is not possible

[sfnetwork 514]

Hi i wont take @@wraslor answer as true because i am running tRaid and no option in advance setting none so until he show us a video or screenshots of where it is this option i would say no it is not possible

oh no, you're right this was about the other solution... (Drivepool)

Never mind....

Edited February 7, 2014 by sfnetwork

[wraslor 70]

Correct, I don't believe you can do traid pool without raiding but raid-f you can.

[Airbender 113]

Yeah that of someone only wants the pool and not parity then F-Raid pool is the way to go. I personally did not run into any issue with tRaid pool in my tats ting so only thing I can say it worked great in my tests

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Airbender 113]

Hello

 

so here are some screenshots of my setup now i hope this help