Should I Flexraid?

Definitely! As your storage expands, some sort of redundancy is extremely important so you don't lose data in the event of a hard drive failure. The pooling Flexraid provides is also very convenient. There is a free alternative called Snapraid, but it doesn't have an interface and does not provide pooling. I think there is free pooling software out there though. I like Flexraid because it has everything bundled together (parity, pooling, scheduling, etc.), and has a nice interface I can access over the network.

Just got Flexraid going in the last few days and it defenitely has given me a ton of peace of mind. Just seeing that email in my inbox every morning telling me my Parity has been succesfully updated makes me breathe a sigh of relief.

+1 on flexraid.

I use FlexRaid.

Recommended.

You to ?? Man , I love to see that mail

Just another quick post to give a "thumbs up " on Flex as well .... LOVE IT !!

Another pooling option is Drive Bender. It is just pooling though.

No, Drive Bender has data duplication as well. You can set it to duplicate all files in your pictures folder, but not duplicate your Blu-ray folder. You don't see the duplication in the pool, it just has a copy on two discs.

The only issue I have with Flexraid is that its basically one guy programming it and doing all the support. Nothing against him, but that means he's getting pulled in a lot of different directions and so he can't respond to support requests as fast as you might expect. I installed Flexraid about two weeks ago and I kept having an issue where when my WHS rebooted, the trial license seems to disappear and hence the drive polling does not start running and my shares are nowhere to be found. I have to re-request a trial license each time, then manually restart the service (and yes I did set the task up to start the service on a reboot). I posted on the forums there and I had to bump it twice before he responded (not mad at him mind you, just the reality of a one man show) and so far no solutions/fixes have been proposed.

Well, last night, I guess my 14 days were up because when I tried to re-request it, it told me the trial period was expired. I went ahead and purchased it to see if maybe adding a real license will fix it, but I don't know (hopefully I'll get the license email by tonight). If it doesn't, I'll try reinstalling. If that doesn't work, hopefully he'll give me a refund and I'll look at other solutions.

IMO that was one of the biggest draws to using Flexraid. Storage Pooling is nice and all but the real draw is one drive being able to back up multiple drives. I know it's not a legit 1 to 1 backup but it still works. Combining everything in a simple easy to use GUI with plenty of features, made it a no brainer for me.

That's correct.

Edit: Sorry, didn't really get the details of the last question. Lockdown571 pointed it out. Only need one parity drive for X storage drives.
Edited by bryansj - 7/27/12 at 6:14am

Your parity drive only needs to be as large as your largest single hard drive. You also technically only need one parity drive, so as you add more storage, you don't need to add another parity drive. So you could have ten 2 TB drives for storage, and then one 2 TB drive for parity, and you would have redundancy against one hard drive failure.

If you are only using pooling then check out Drive Bender. You can pool your two drives and then enable duplication on any important data/folder without giving up a full drive for parity.

Do I have to erase/format the data drives when setting up flexraid?? I understand the parity drive will be formatted, but I would like to keep the data drives intact..

No, you don't. That's one of the great things about flexraid.

That was one the strongest motivators for going with Flexrain was the ability to add already populated drives unto the storage pool.

I was using flexraid but changed over to snapraid. It does have a UI despite what someone posted above. I had no need for drive pool as I use media browser so it handles multiple drives fine.

Snapraid is free. Can't say I have had a failure yet to test it out.

Just to clear this up, I have 2 x1Tb, 2x 1.5Tb, 2x 2Tb and 1x 3Tb harddrives, I would only need 1 more 3Tb and Flexraid and I would have 12Tb of useable space and 1 3Tb parity drive to ensure I never lose data in the event of a single hard drive failure. Is this correct?

Yes that sounds right. I'm not positive if there is a limit on how many drives one parity drive can cover. But you have it right that is how it works.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

School of thought is about 1 parity drive for every 8 to 9 TB worth of data drives

Yes, you are correct . I also use 3 tb parity drive for my largest 2 tb data drive . I think it is a nice safety net.

So in this instance , you would not need to start considering another parity till you hit 16 TB of data drives

I am not doing the math but yes.

adding a 3TB drive for your parity would allow you to retain all the stuff that is on your drives now... and create a single HDD of the total of them all.

It would all be backed up on the 3TB parity drive you added.

Your parity must be as large as your largest drive.

3TB is common for that.

Thanks everyone! This will be much easier than copying everything twice to separate HDDs

Don't ever considder raid a good redundancy option.

Huh? Are you saying RAID is not "good" or not "redundant" or not an "option"?

I'm saying that Raid (with the exeption of the raid types that have 1:1 mirroring) should not be considdered a way to prevent loss of data. And mirroring ones are not 100% safe either.