Storage The Story of the Server with too many hard drives...

Once upon a time in a home office far far away...

*ahem* right. Enough silliness.

Simple story (as alluded to in the "What's Ruining your life right now?" thread).

I have a "server"; its simply a "spare" Windows 10 Pro box (i5, 8GB, random intel mobo, EVGA 600W Bronze PSU; all in a Fractal R5) used as a file store and backup location.

Known working setup:
1x 120GB SSD - OS
2x 3TB HDDs - two-way mirror storage space [docs, music, pics]
2x 4TB HDDs - two-way mirror storage space [films]
2x 4TB HDDs - two-way mirror storage space [TV]
1x 2TB HDD - standard partion/volume [backups] - in an removable caddy in the 5.25" drive bay

This uses all sata power cables.

Additions:
2x 4TB HDDs - to be added to two-way mirror storage space [films]
2x 6TB HDDs - to create a two-way mirror storage space [backups]

To add the above 4 drives, have had to add a 4port sata 6Gbs expansion card; and have used a 2x 3 port sata power extension cables.

Am i right in thinking that I have overloaded in terms of power required? and if so what can i do to "fix"?

Any help would be appreciated!

 

IIRC - Check the expansion hard isn't trying to RAID the drives attached to it

 

Dang that's alot of drives.
Why all these individual raid groups? :/

 

Shouldnt be, as its a duplicate of one l already have and that plug-and-played without checking it... but will check!

Yes, a lot of drives.
docs, pics & music space came first
added tv and films as separate spaces, because i felt like it? May conglomerate into one, if/when i can get it up and running...
backups i want to keep separate (so hence additional space)

 

Stream stuff instead?

 

If you suspect the power then your may want to perform a detailed audit. Check each drive's power consumption at each voltage level and compare the total to power supply. Unless the rest of your system is seriously taxing the power supply I doubt you have power issues as the typical drive is 4-6W. With 12 hard drives I'd expect the load to less than 100W. This assumes the power supply isn't faulty.

Wild shot in the dark, but I am wondering if it is an issue with the quantity and or the setup of arrays. You have multiple independent arrays, with the film array split across two hard drive controllers.

With your configuration, I'm guessing it wasn't planned out but added to and evolved with your needs. You mentioned being pressured into make a descension, but this might be the justification for planning out a revised storage plan. If you implement a software raid scheme, then you could combine your collection of disks into a single mirrored array despite mismatch sizes. Then use disk quotas if you wish to limit or ensure space of the different uses. For example, I use FreeNAS with 10TB in the array. I have a 1TB section off for Apple's Time machine, thus the Mac doesn't fill up my NAS with snapshots.

Aside question, the R5 has 8x 3.5" bays and 2x 5.25" bays, and 2x SSD locations, so I reckon that you have 11 3.5" drives to fit into 10 bays. How have you installed all the drives?

 

I'd ditch the mirroring all together and go with simple backups for all the media drives.

 

Yes a home server, with a smidge of home office/business use.

I do, i also want to access films/tv series that I have that are not available to stream and/or i havent been suckered into paying for a.n.other streaming service...

Think i've solved things, and i think what i was witnessing was Windows having a heart attack due to the extra 20TB of disk space...
TBH, it was mostly planned, but in increments. Having always separated stuff onto separate drives, i have just followed that path into mirrors/spans.

Oh, fitting it into the R5 was easy. I just borrowed the lower/3-disk cage from my main rig thats also in an R5, and fitted it between the cages and the PSU

Not sure I follow? backup where?

 

Rather than running mirrored storage space on what is likely static data, remove the mirrored drives and run a simple external backup, either to the same drives or the larger 6TB ones. You'd lose redundancy/uptime in the event of a disk failure (but I'd question how important that is in a system like this), but you'd gain data security in the event of corruption and save space/power.

 

So you are using the optional cage location and the primary cage location. Nice. My NAS is in an R5 as well and I'd looked into buying a second cage for expansion, but FD's parts store was out of stock with no expected restock date.

 

Ah k, sorry, being thick. I'll blame it on the back pain

I've gone for mirrors, primarily because restoring the ripped dvd/bluray collection would be a right pain, and would take ages - so chose redundancy rather than external backups.

Similarly, when i set it up, the documents include files, etc. that the wife needs access to for her business; as i leave early in the morning, the first i hear about any faults/issues I can ussually do diddly-squat about, so went for mirroring this time to ensure that she always has access to the files - this is somewhat mitigated by the business now utilising OneDrive, but 1x 3TB drive on its own ain't much use!

I looked earlier in the week, and they had it in white (still do), but as i had the other R5 seemed silly not to..

 

An offline backup copy will restore just as fast if not faster than a mirror. Plus there is reduced risk of data corruption in the backup. This is something I serious should do as well.

Cage yes but no trays... Plus at this point if I update my system I'll swap out the 2 TB drives for something bigger rather than adding more drives.

 

Fair enough, problem of external backups is having somewhere to store the drives - i think SWMBO might baulk at another box...

Lol, that could've been annoying if i had ordered one - assumed that the trays came as part of the cage!

 

"I've gone for mirrors, primarily because restoring the ripped dvd/bluray collection would be a right pain, and would take ages - so chose redundancy rather than external backups."

Oh gawd... RAID is not backup.... xD
What would you do if you had ransomware? How would you recover - you'd be ripping those disc's again

 

Jeez, did i say raid was backup? no. I did not.

What would I do if i had <insert random failure/data related problem>? I dont have the funds, nor the space to create the "perfect" backup system.

I'm so glad i posted this thread, and have had zero help on the problem, just 100% posts criticising my choice of using redundancy to protect my data.

 

Yes you have, Everyone agreed to pool the storage as you've got multiple drives wasted.

 

A power issue would manifest itself as the machine sh__ing the bed when it boots - HDDs use ~4x the power to spin up as they do idling.
If you can boot into the OS and see all the drives, the power supply is a red herring.

There could be lots of reasons storage spaces isn't happy with the new drives/controller, IME it's a bit of a fickle beast. I'd suggest as others have, not bothering with mirroring the two pairs of new drives, and instead configuring them as individual volumes with copy pass to update one from the other scheduled periodically. A "restore" in the event of a failure would simply be selectall->copy->paste

 

Am I right in thinking that some RAID controllers specifically spin up drives a few at a time on boot to try to negate some of that power surge?

 

Aye - staggered spin-up. Generally "proper" RAID controllers will.

A low-cost SATA add-in-card is unlikely to, though.

 

Excellent - I wasn't talking nonsense for a change I wonder if my RAID card does that... Time for a bit of procrastination research