How long should 20TB of full drives take to initialize flexraid ????? (help me with basic math) - Page 2

Lol you posted that question on three threads.

 

I have my server hdd to turn off after 60mins. The HDD were running 24/7 but then I don't see a point in that if I'm not accessing media late at night or early mornings. There is a small delay though, maybe 3 seconds? I don't know the exact time but its nothing to go crazy over.

Mfusick has said that he notices a 0.2 second difference. So 3 seconds is completely unacceptable.

FlexRaid spins them up when needed. Yes, there is downtime. No, I don't spin them down otherwise manually as they use about 2 watts at idle (about 2.8 watts actually). I guess if you had about 20 drives it would make sense to spin some of them down after a certain period.

This whole argument about "performance" while building a parity drive is just ridiculous. Who care if it takes 10 hours or 30 hours?

Its like CrashPlan. It took about 3 weeks to upload but what do I care? Its backed up there now and as I add additional data it just gets updated. There could be data being uploaded from my server at this very minute or it could not. And frankly, what's the difference?

In the end I don't care if it takes 3x as long with building a parity drive one time either. I do it once (hopefully) and then its on autopilot after that. I push play on my HTPC and the movie starts sometimes within a second (if the drive is active) or sometimes in about 2 seconds (if the drive is not active). I just don't see what the argument is all about here --- certainly don't understand the argument for as fast of parity as possible as somehow being "better" when it comes at the expense of some of the things that I love about FlexRaid and software raid in general.
Edited by assassin - 2/10/13 at 4:50pm

I don't believe this is correct

If you leave the spin down drives after "never" they will never spin down

Basing this off what Brahim says in the forums, paraphrasing would be "only the os or a third party app can spin down drives"

http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php?topic=1120.0

You might have to do INF edit to get the drives on your M1015 to sleep.

That's correct. I fixed my typo before you posted.

I agree with the parity calculation argument being silly.

That's correct (both statements )

It spins up the drives from idle when needed. I have 5 drives currently in my server and aggressive power savings to me just isn't needed at this time but I don't really have a problem at all with the person that wants to save an additional 10w.

I find it incredibly interesting and frankly amazing that compared to traditional servers that are power hogs that we are discussing 10w (2w x 5) as being significant when discussing software based RAID servers.

You were too fast. Got me before I could do the edit >.<<br />
Anyways, do you think FlexRAID is a viable option for a very large library? Say, 60TB worth of media. Some people here think it may not be.

Wow. Is that all media?

Nightly backups of all the computers in the house, media, and a slew of other things ^_^

(This is all imaginary and hypothetical btw)

There are quite a few people here at AVS that have 50+TB server running FlexRaid with no issues. I cannot comment on 60+ TB as the largest I have built is around 40TB. My personal server currently is around 10TB and growing.

I think this guy is using Flexraid

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1512972

NewOrleansDukie here at AVS also uses FlexRaid and has a server of 50TB or more if I remember correctly.

There was some discussion about your card here http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php/topic,619.msg7870.html#msg7870

Actually I can't really tell if that's resolved or not. Try Flexraid forum search for m1015 or lsi 9210

Windows Storport Idle Power Management (IPM) is not enabled by default


Download driver from here.
Windows 7/ Server 2008 R2
http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/storagecomponents/Pages/LSISAS9211-8i.aspx

Open LSI_SAS2.INF with notepad
Find the [Shutdown_addreg] section.
Add this line.
HKR,"StorPort","EnableIdlePowerManagement",0x00010001,0x01

Re-install the new driver.

Until you do this procedure only your drives connected to the motherboard will sleep.

Huh?



it's not anything like Crashplan. RAID... even snapshot RAID... is not a backup. Bad comparison.



I don't understand. If it's not that big of a deal, why do you use FlexRAID in the first place?


So... other than the raw data being available on the NTFS file system, what is "better" about FlexRAID?

Because, if that's the only advantage, you still haven't won me over.

You completely missed the point of the argument.

Here is the breakdown of every discussion with Assassin:

"I don't agree and you are stupid for not agreeing with me. My way is the the best and only way to do things."

That about sum it up Assassin?

No.

While that may be true in some cases (yes Assassin you can be a dick sometimes ), you really did miss the whole point of his argument.

Did I miss Assassin's point? It's actually quite the opposite. Assassin dismisses the arc of the conversation and likes to focus on small points. Especially when these individual points don't fall into his worldview. He will argue his single point completely dismissing others way of doing things. If he gets challenged using his same technique he will walk away stating its "not worth his time."

Assassin really does not want you to answer his questions or address his points, only agree with him.

That's not true at all. I state all the time that there are many different ways of doing things. Don't really understand the point you are trying to make here.

I'm not sure I entirely understand what you were trying to point out previously

When you say it? You're referring to flexraid as a backup?

In my first experience, building a 4TB parity for a 20TB array took flexraid somewhere close to 11 hours

Updating the parity the next day took 2 hours. I don't plan to update every day, since the post-update validation took 7 hours.

No this is not a backup, but for me it brings the probability of data loss to a very low number. The odds of a hard drive failure are low for media storage drives. Being able to replace 1 failed hard drive with another covers me 99.9% of the time in my mind. For the 1 in 1000 chance that I have 2 HDDs fail simultaneously, I could add another parity drive.

The odds of losing a data drive along with my parity drive simultaneously are not worth considering. Worst case, I get a new parity drive and build a new array while losing everything on that drive. I can re-rip my movies or tv shows. I have music and pictures backed up. If I lose recordings, I'll be like 99% of other cable tv subscribers when they change providers