I have referenced this video about 6 times. This has been one of the most useful and concise video on the subject. I love your details with real experience behind it. Keep being awesome! My goal is slightly different. I’m trying to set up a mixed ssd and hdd set up. (This is for fun. I’m retired).
You have answered sooo many questions, in just a few videos, that other UA-camrs with fancy studios just gloss over. There seem to be a thousand UA-camrs, making thousands of "Intro" videos, that only show default setups. As I will just be a home user and, if I am going to build a whole desktop, I want it to be useable for storage as well as an actual computer.... Your videos have shown me that I can build a regular video editing workstation, add a bunch of drives, configure Storage Spaces correctly, and get reasonable bandwidth for my needs. I don't need 999 MBps transfer speeds over a network, when I am just one guy editing videos or organizing my e-book library. 300 MBps is plenty. If I need anything to be super-fast, I can just use NVME drives as cache drives for my editing software's proxy files. The point is: You have given me what I need to be able to build the system I want and not worry about speed or reliability problems.
I'm a novice and aspects of your videos are often over my head. Hopefully, those over-my-head instances will gradually become less frequent. I love your videos nonetheless. Thanks!
Thank you for being so concise and informative. One of my great frustrations with other UA-cam guides is the amount of faff, BS, and gloss that content creators pad their videos with.
Just the video I needed! 0:45 You hit the nail on the head! I'm just a broke grad student that wants to make the most of the storage devices I already have lying around without investing more money (and still get the most out of what I already have). Thanks man!!
I have started to use SnapRAID+Mergerfs for large media files that don't change much and can be recreated. I also looked at BTRFS but it sounded like this may be "dead" code at this point so I ruled it out. In my case, future development is a factor. Unraid seems to proprietary and includes other features I'm doing with other software (Proxmox, LXC)
There's a project called "Perfect Media Server" (you should be able to find it by searching that verbatim) that sounds similar to what you're using. I plan to use that project as an overarching guide for my upcoming server build, there might be some things in there of interest to you
A small correction: with the use of thin virtual disks, the storage spaces are very flexible. You may add/remove disks with the exception of going below column number requirement.
In the case of the motherboard hardware failing (instead of the hard discs) I heard with storage spaces you can take your hardrives to a different windows10 motherboard and it will auto recognize them. Basically you can move the setup at will without any crazy long time. I hope this is true, as that's another bonus.
What would you recommend for a home server that would host media files and a few services (probably through Docker) for things like PhotoPrism (or similar family photos cloud), home assistant etc and to start with a couple of drives and in time add more if needed.
media files would fall under the type of data that rarely changes so those could easily go onto a mergerfs+snapraid setup, for services like photoprism, home assistant etc I would go with a mirror/Raid1 using either btrfs or zfs.
What do you think about such solution: Snapraid for parity, mergeFS for union two drives, but drives itself in ZFS file system format. Does it make sense?
With mixed drives this is a good solution. Zfs will function like any other filesystem here and you can use features like compression and snapshots if you want.
Can you do a video on optimization of windows storage spaces using virtual hardrives. And using ReFS. By having a vhd, it is possible to allocate some portion of the hdd with parity and rest with no parity for temp and downloadable data. Thanks.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m working on setting up a test system for storage spaces right now and will include this into the tests I run. Also storage spaces allow virtual disks of different redundancy levels, so one group of drives can have a virtual disk in a mirror and a virtual disk in a parity configuration.
Why would you want to use vhds for this? You may just make thin provisioned parity and stripe virtual disk, and have no headache with vhd mounting and compaction. Pls, mind the difference between vhd and storage spaces "virtual disk". There was a bug within ReFS, which prevented compaction of the thin disk on storage space. Although I'm not sure if it was fixed or not.
I had a question about the parity write hole issue on snapraid. You mentioned that it occurs because of striping across data disks, but from what i've heard, snapraid doesn't use striping, files are just stored on individual disks. Is the parity write hole issue still a problem in this case or no? Thanks!
Low amount of changes. Like daily backup or photo storage...and 1 scripted daily parity update is acceptable for you_ Snapraid+Mergerfs Regular small changes daily:....Unraid
So what if you combine btrfs(raid 5/6) + UPS. Does this fix the write hole issue? If it would just damage the data i was writing at the time i wouldn't probably worry that much if its going to delete data that has been there for awhile i am worried.
A UPS should reduce the chance of a sudden power loss, but doesn't make it impossible, as a hardware issue or crash can still lead to a sudden power off. I think if you run a scrub it will make sure the data is good after the power outage, but I can't confirm if a scrub also checks the parity data. I'd still stay away from BTRFS RAID 5/6 as it seems to not be a priority to fix for the team, and I don't like known issues when storing my data. I will note in my usage It has been fine.
Might be just me, but mhddfs (patched version, not the one shipped with most recent debian distros which is broken and the maintainer won't fix) has been WAY more reliable than mergerfs. Mergerfs tends to mangle files with no warning. And the author of Mergerfs was kind of a prick when a bunch of users reported similar issues.
Yea BTRFS has a lot of nice features and does raid 1/0/10 well. I just wish it does 5/6 as well as there commonly used to get the most storage with some redundancy.
Yea all of these methods allow you to select the drives that you want to be used in a raid array. All other drives will function like normal drive and can be setup in other ways.
hi can you do a video where you actually show how to setup an array with uneven drives? and is it possible for that array to display as 1 single, v disk or partition?
Yea I can do a video on these situations in the future. All of these solutions will make the mixed drive sizes show up as one large volume where one drive can fail with no data loss.
@@ElectronicsWizardry well i am waiting for that video, i am planing a DAS build, and to run it as a NAS under TrueNas scale, under proxmox, and i bought 12 single disk backplains for this build, i was always under the impression all my disks had to be same size, but if you'll show us how to pull it off then maybe i won't truenas as my sharing server, could the mixed disk array work with ZFS file system?
i got multiple different size hdd ,one 2x tib, 2 x 4tb, i endup combine them by split 4tib into 2x2tib ,a pair of 2two forms a mirror vdev, 3 other 2tib in raidz1, combines 2vdev ,now i got a 5.31 tib rpool with enough parity,redundance and well distributed capacity.
It depends on the use for me, but I like many of the features btrfs has like built in raid, snapshots, and compression. If I don’t need these features or want the most stable filesystem I go with ext4.
Open media vault should be able to use btrfs and mergerfs and snapraid I don’t know of any open media vault specific file systems of raid programs and all Linux filesystem should work.
OpenMediaVault does not provide a storage solution in of itself. It's just a front-end that can use (and manage through plugins) other storage technologies
The others here have explained how these options fit in with OMV and many other OSes / front ends. I built an OMV based NAS using mergerfs and snapraid last year from left over drives to see how it compared to my main Unraid box. It worked well enough and my data was not changing as regularly as my other data (family photo archive) so I could sync less regularly as a form of bit rot protection. I liked the idea of this vs Unraid’s default behaviour where parity is updated with every write. I have never experienced bitrot but came across another guy claiming he had some in very old photo files that showed pixel corruption after been transferred across multiple PCs over the decades. Unraid had supposedly copied corrupted changes over to his parity and he could never recover the images back to their original form. Always back up, back up and then back up again! Still love Unraid more for its overall easy to use yet broad functionality and flexibility with different drives, plus easy data recovery, but have just switched the OMV box over to ZFS 0n TRUNAS SCALE. Bit more of a learning curve with the first set up but geez the multiple snapshots with minimal storage overheads and ZFS self healing is looking very impressive so far and easier for me to set and forget once done. I tended to forget to sync the snapraid and not check in on my files from time to time. ;-) I suggest living with a new RAID system before committing all your data to it. See how easy it is to configure, maintain and get working again when you physically remove a drive and insert a new one first.
.... That moment you clearly hear MURDER-FS, but realize that they said MERGER-FS, and then realize that most people probably won't get the joke here >.>😅
As a ZFS user, I could say that is years beyond the rest of file systems. But if I have to choose one from the ones you exposed, it would be Storage Spaces.
@@cldpt Poorly. It compares poorly. ZFS is great at enterprise-level "I have unlimited money to make my data safe". It is _terrible_ at bargain-bin NAS "I want to add drives as I'm able to afford them".
BTRFS = has parity problems. SnapRAID = is not real time, so not a viable solution, because u can lose data. The real battle is between UnRaid vs Storage Spaces. To me with proper configuration Storage Spaces gets a clear win (using REFS), but its harder to configure because of poor documentation and almost useless GUI.
I currently have a Raid 5 configured in Snapraid+Drivepool for my Plex server. I'm wanting to switch to a different solution due to the complexity in configuring Snapraid, issues with Drivepool, and concerns about data loss in the event of a rebuild. I just don't spend enough time with this stuff to justify a script-based solution. It's served me well for years, but I want to get away from it before it's too late. My biggest issue is that I [stupidly] build my storage configuration using three 12TB WD Gold helium drives. I wasn't aware at the time that there's a high statistical probably that I could have a data error occur while in the process of rebuilding a failed drive, in which case I'd lose the data permanently. So I'm wondering what your recommended solution is? I'm considering going to Raid 6, but transferring the data to a new system has me very concerned. As far as solutions I'm considering, I'm looking into FreeNAS and Unraid, but I'm not necessarily sold on anything yet. I was originally tied to a Windows based solution with my current configuration, hence why I chose Snapraid, but I'm planning to build a separate dedicated Plex server when i switch. I want something easy to add/remove drives from pool and easy to rebuild. Having varying drive sizes is nice but not mandatory.
I have referenced this video about 6 times. This has been one of the most useful and concise video on the subject. I love your details with real experience behind it. Keep being awesome!
My goal is slightly different. I’m trying to set up a mixed ssd and hdd set up. (This is for fun. I’m retired).
agree!
You have answered sooo many questions, in just a few videos, that other UA-camrs with fancy studios just gloss over. There seem to be a thousand UA-camrs, making thousands of "Intro" videos, that only show default setups.
As I will just be a home user and, if I am going to build a whole desktop, I want it to be useable for storage as well as an actual computer.... Your videos have shown me that I can build a regular video editing workstation, add a bunch of drives, configure Storage Spaces correctly, and get reasonable bandwidth for my needs. I don't need 999 MBps transfer speeds over a network, when I am just one guy editing videos or organizing my e-book library. 300 MBps is plenty. If I need anything to be super-fast, I can just use NVME drives as cache drives for my editing software's proxy files.
The point is: You have given me what I need to be able to build the system I want and not worry about speed or reliability problems.
I'm a novice and aspects of your videos are often over my head. Hopefully, those over-my-head instances will gradually become less frequent. I love your videos nonetheless. Thanks!
Awesome video, I had a lot of questions about which to use. Thanks a lot.
Probably the most useful video by a mile when searching for different sizes drives in youtube, i wish it was on the top of the results
Incredibly helpful and informative video, thank you! A JBOD setup like this is exactly what I need to get into the home server space.
Thank you for being so concise and informative.
One of my great frustrations with other UA-cam guides is the amount of faff, BS, and gloss that content creators pad their videos with.
Great overview and helped me decide which route to take on my next project. Cheers in 2023!
Just the video I needed! 0:45 You hit the nail on the head! I'm just a broke grad student that wants to make the most of the storage devices I already have lying around without investing more money (and still get the most out of what I already have). Thanks man!!
Exactly the video I was looking for, I'm slapping together some old hardware for my first nas
Very informative explanation and comparisons, thanks a lot for the video!
Another well explained video. Thankyou.
Thanks, great explanations.
I have started to use SnapRAID+Mergerfs for large media files that don't change much and can be recreated. I also looked at BTRFS but it sounded like this may be "dead" code at this point so I ruled it out. In my case, future development is a factor. Unraid seems to proprietary and includes other features I'm doing with other software (Proxmox, LXC)
There's a project called "Perfect Media Server" (you should be able to find it by searching that verbatim) that sounds similar to what you're using. I plan to use that project as an overarching guide for my upcoming server build, there might be some things in there of interest to you
I like this video. Great content.
A good video, thank you.
surely this is VERY usefull! thanks.
thanks for the vid
A small correction: with the use of thin virtual disks, the storage spaces are very flexible. You may add/remove disks with the exception of going below column number requirement.
In the case of the motherboard hardware failing (instead of the hard discs) I heard with storage spaces you can take your hardrives to a different windows10 motherboard and it will auto recognize them. Basically you can move the setup at will without any crazy long time. I hope this is true, as that's another bonus.
What would you recommend for a home server that would host media files and a few services (probably through Docker) for things like PhotoPrism (or similar family photos cloud), home assistant etc and to start with a couple of drives and in time add more if needed.
media files would fall under the type of data that rarely changes so those could easily go onto a mergerfs+snapraid setup, for services like photoprism, home assistant etc I would go with a mirror/Raid1 using either btrfs or zfs.
thanks
What do you think about such solution: Snapraid for parity, mergeFS for union two drives, but drives itself in ZFS file system format. Does it make sense?
With mixed drives this is a good solution. Zfs will function like any other filesystem here and you can use features like compression and snapshots if you want.
Can you do a video on optimization of windows storage spaces using virtual hardrives. And using ReFS.
By having a vhd, it is possible to allocate some portion of the hdd with parity and rest with no parity for temp and downloadable data. Thanks.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m working on setting up a test system for storage spaces right now and will include this into the tests I run.
Also storage spaces allow virtual disks of different redundancy levels, so one group of drives can have a virtual disk in a mirror and a virtual disk in a parity configuration.
Why would you want to use vhds for this? You may just make thin provisioned parity and stripe virtual disk, and have no headache with vhd mounting and compaction. Pls, mind the difference between vhd and storage spaces "virtual disk".
There was a bug within ReFS, which prevented compaction of the thin disk on storage space. Although I'm not sure if it was fixed or not.
I had a question about the parity write hole issue on snapraid. You mentioned that it occurs because of striping across data disks, but from what i've heard, snapraid doesn't use striping, files are just stored on individual disks. Is the parity write hole issue still a problem in this case or no?
Thanks!
Hi. Do you have your link of snapraid config? Im in doubt between snapraid+mergerfs vs unraid.
Low amount of changes. Like daily backup or photo storage...and 1 scripted daily parity update is acceptable for you_ Snapraid+Mergerfs
Regular small changes daily:....Unraid
what do you think about using mdadm to organize raid5 as lower-layer and zfs as upper-layer keep both expand and snapshot features?
Yea that will work fine and let you expand by adding a drive. I hope zfs adds this feature to the stable versions soon.
What was the Number of Columns on the Storage Space for your virtual Disk?
Hey, the timestamps in your description or malformed. There are some video glitches during the last minute
So what if you combine btrfs(raid 5/6) + UPS. Does this fix the write hole issue? If it would just damage the data i was writing at the time i wouldn't probably worry that much if its going to delete data that has been there for awhile i am worried.
A UPS should reduce the chance of a sudden power loss, but doesn't make it impossible, as a hardware issue or crash can still lead to a sudden power off. I think if you run a scrub it will make sure the data is good after the power outage, but I can't confirm if a scrub also checks the parity data.
I'd still stay away from BTRFS RAID 5/6 as it seems to not be a priority to fix for the team, and I don't like known issues when storing my data. I will note in my usage It has been fine.
Might be just me, but mhddfs (patched version, not the one shipped with most recent debian distros which is broken and the maintainer won't fix) has been WAY more reliable than mergerfs. Mergerfs tends to mangle files with no warning. And the author of Mergerfs was kind of a prick when a bunch of users reported similar issues.
I use btrfs with two copies and I use automated backups to limit risks.Never lost data for years.
And I never used raid 5,6 only 1 and 10 style.
Yea BTRFS has a lot of nice features and does raid 1/0/10 well. I just wish it does 5/6 as well as there commonly used to get the most storage with some redundancy.
What I like to do is to have a SSD boot drive and a pair of hard drives in RAID. Can I do that without the system wanting to RAID all of my dives?
Yea all of these methods allow you to select the drives that you want to be used in a raid array. All other drives will function like normal drive and can be setup in other ways.
hi can you do a video where you actually show how to setup an array with uneven drives? and is it possible for that array to display as 1 single, v disk or partition?
Yea I can do a video on these situations in the future. All of these solutions will make the mixed drive sizes show up as one large volume where one drive can fail with no data loss.
@@ElectronicsWizardry well i am waiting for that video, i am planing a DAS build, and to run it as a NAS under TrueNas scale, under proxmox, and i bought 12 single disk backplains for this build, i was always under the impression all my disks had to be same size, but if you'll show us how to pull it off then maybe i won't truenas as my sharing server, could the mixed disk array work with ZFS file system?
Super helpful video.
But you do need to improve your editing - the audio cutting off makes it hard to understand what you say during certain cuts.
Late to this video but is Mergerfs only on Linux? I want to use on Windows
Mergerfs is Linux only but there is software like drivepool that fits a similar need on windows.
i got multiple different size hdd ,one 2x tib, 2 x 4tb, i endup combine them by split 4tib into 2x2tib ,a pair of 2two forms a mirror vdev, 3 other 2tib in raidz1, combines 2vdev ,now i got a 5.31 tib rpool with enough parity,redundance and well distributed capacity.
Do you prefer BTRF over EXT4?
It depends on the use for me, but I like many of the features btrfs has like built in raid, snapshots, and compression. If I don’t need these features or want the most stable filesystem I go with ext4.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Thanks! I think I just go with ext4, I need security and simplicity over speed or features.
Did you rule out OpenMediaVault?
Open media vault should be able to use btrfs and mergerfs and snapraid I don’t know of any open media vault specific file systems of raid programs and all Linux filesystem should work.
OpenMediaVault does not provide a storage solution in of itself. It's just a front-end that can use (and manage through plugins) other storage technologies
OpenMediaVault is an operating system, you can use any raid and filesystem compatible
The others here have explained how these options fit in with OMV and many other OSes / front ends. I built an OMV based NAS using mergerfs and snapraid last year from left over drives to see how it compared to my main Unraid box. It worked well enough and my data was not changing as regularly as my other data (family photo archive) so I could sync less regularly as a form of bit rot protection. I liked the idea of this vs Unraid’s default behaviour where parity is updated with every write. I have never experienced bitrot but came across another guy claiming he had some in very old photo files that showed pixel corruption after been transferred across multiple PCs over the decades. Unraid had supposedly copied corrupted changes over to his parity and he could never recover the images back to their original form. Always back up, back up and then back up again!
Still love Unraid more for its overall easy to use yet broad functionality and flexibility with different drives, plus easy data recovery, but have just switched the OMV box over to ZFS 0n TRUNAS SCALE. Bit more of a learning curve with the first set up but geez the multiple snapshots with minimal storage overheads and ZFS self healing is looking very impressive so far and easier for me to set and forget once done. I tended to forget to sync the snapraid and not check in on my files from time to time. ;-)
I suggest living with a new RAID system before committing all your data to it. See how easy it is to configure, maintain and get working again when you physically remove a drive and insert a new one first.
I've stopped raiding due to size of drives. Takes WAY TO LONG replace drives due to amount of data. Drive pooling for me works way better.
.... That moment you clearly hear MURDER-FS, but realize that they said MERGER-FS, and then realize that most people probably won't get the joke here >.>😅
We are sorry for being that stupid
As a ZFS user, I could say that is years beyond the rest of file systems. But if I have to choose one from the ones you exposed, it would be Storage Spaces.
how does ZFS compare using mixed drive sizes?
@@cldpt first you have to create positions to mach all different sizes, thread l then just create the vdevs with them and the pools.
ZFS doesn't have a good way to add drives to an existing RAID, as far as I know.
@@cldpt Poorly. It compares poorly.
ZFS is great at enterprise-level "I have unlimited money to make my data safe". It is _terrible_ at bargain-bin NAS "I want to add drives as I'm able to afford them".
BTRFS = has parity problems.
SnapRAID = is not real time, so not a viable solution, because u can lose data.
The real battle is between UnRaid vs Storage Spaces.
To me with proper configuration Storage Spaces gets a clear win (using REFS), but its harder to configure because of poor documentation and almost useless GUI.
I currently have a Raid 5 configured in Snapraid+Drivepool for my Plex server. I'm wanting to switch to a different solution due to the complexity in configuring Snapraid, issues with Drivepool, and concerns about data loss in the event of a rebuild. I just don't spend enough time with this stuff to justify a script-based solution. It's served me well for years, but I want to get away from it before it's too late.
My biggest issue is that I [stupidly] build my storage configuration using three 12TB WD Gold helium drives. I wasn't aware at the time that there's a high statistical probably that I could have a data error occur while in the process of rebuilding a failed drive, in which case I'd lose the data permanently.
So I'm wondering what your recommended solution is? I'm considering going to Raid 6, but transferring the data to a new system has me very concerned. As far as solutions I'm considering, I'm looking into FreeNAS and Unraid, but I'm not necessarily sold on anything yet. I was originally tied to a Windows based solution with my current configuration, hence why I chose Snapraid, but I'm planning to build a separate dedicated Plex server when i switch. I want something easy to add/remove drives from pool and easy to rebuild. Having varying drive sizes is nice but not mandatory.
Hey Dracula! Good video! Make sure you get some sun once in a while.