Whats best for a massive storage system?

[Blu]

I'm looking to build a file server with about 20 2TB drives, now I was planning on using unraid for this as it seemed stable but then a friend of mine told me about how there are alot of people saying it doesn't keep your data backed up properly and when a drive fails it usually fails to re build it. He suggested I go with ZFS (Raidz) and use raidz2 to make it more redundant and safer then one parity drive. What do you guys all think here?

Also what type of hard drive should I be buying for this? He suggested these and said the WD greens are terrible for massive storage,
Newegg.ca - HITACHI Deskstar 7K3000 HDS723020BLA642 (0f12115) 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
or if I don't mind loosing some speed,
Newegg.ca - HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 (0F12117) 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

What do you guys suggest I do? I'm ready to start saving up for this and buy it all at once (prices should be down a bit more by then right?) and am hoping to spend maybe 2500-3000 into it.

As for a mobo for this, I have a brand new 880GMA gigabyte motherboard I never used cause it had not enough pci slots for my HTPC. The thing here is, I read that raidz uses your ram as a "super cache" to write faster so I would want to have alot of ram he said. Would a 4x4GB (16GB ram) be enough you think?

[spikexp]

The reason why caviar green are know as being "terrible" for massive storage is 'cause of the head parking (a problem which can be easily bypass with a WD program
Link )

So, caviar green are not that bad for massive storage.

Wow, you talked about raid method that I don't know, I think I might need to go check them out.

[tangrisser]

I'm not sure about unRAID but with capacity that you are headed. It's likely to fail while recovering from previous failure. If you only have single redundancy then your whole RAID would fail as there no redundancy for the second point of failed drive. By using ZFZ and RAIDZ2, you will have more redundancy since you will have two drives that can fail at once without killing the RAID. As for RAIDZ2, it is said that more RAM the faster according to a lot of articles I have read.

If you decide the go with software solution, I think it doesn't really matter what hard drive you use. Even the Caviar Green 2TB should work fine. For hard drives, I would highly recommend purchasing them at once and burn-in before you actually put data on it.

Keep in mind that RAID is not back up and is only for sake of having redundancy.

[LarkStarr]

I think the supercache you're referring to is the L2ARC - completely not necessary unless your array is going to be heavily accessed consistently through a huge pipe. In a write once read occasionally scenario, cache won't be much an issue, over 20 drives the array will most likely be starved over a network. however, ZFS loves alot of ram. I don't think you *need* 16 gigs for a dedicated box, 8 might do (don't quote me on this though.)

[JD]

There's also the Samsung F4 2TB 5400RPM drives. They would also probably do fine.

As for 16GB of RAM, I'm going to say it'll be pointless unless you have a huge amount of people concurrently accessing this file share and some aggregated network links to it as well. And I'd assume the cache is only used for writes, not reads.

Run-of-the-mill 4GB will probably be plenty, unless you're going to have a bunch of people writing to it heavily.

I assume you'll be getting a 24-port SAS card too?

[Perineum]

I think the first thing you need to do is go through all your data and delete the garbage....

My storage array will be done soon but I'm going to start off with 6 or 8TB, and that's storing all my stuff, images of the HD of clients machines I've built and everything else I can think of.... I will expand it as I go, but what what do you need 36+ TB of storage for?

[lowfat]

Originally Posted by Perineum

I think the first thing you need to do is go through all your data and delete the garbage....

My storage array will be done soon but I'm going to start off with 6 or 8TB, and that's storing all my stuff, images of the HD of clients machines I've built and everything else I can think of.... I will expand it as I go, but what what do you need 36+ TB of storage for?

Media + backups can fill a lot of storage up very fast.

[_dangtx_]

what kind of data are we looking at?

a gizillion billion trillion little tiny files or large 50-100 gig ones?

id probably back up every drive to its brother manually,well,by way of soft.

no way you wont lose out stuff unless you go mental/very expensive :)

[Borg]

Hello... Blu...
If you ask me, I think there's two choices for 'storage' drives:

I would always check newegg since they sell both:
Newegg.ca - HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 (0F12117) 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Newegg.ca - SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

[Blu]

Originally Posted by JD

There's also the Samsung F4 2TB 5400RPM drives. They would also probably do fine.

As for 16GB of RAM, I'm going to say it'll be pointless unless you have a huge amount of people concurrently accessing this file share and some aggregated network links to it as well. And I'd assume the cache is only used for writes, not reads.

Run-of-the-mill 4GB will probably be plenty, unless you're going to have a bunch of people writing to it heavily.

I assume you'll be getting a 24-port SAS card too?

I was looking at this card, Newegg.ca - HighPoint RocketRAID 2340 PCI -Express X8 SATA I & SATA II Controller Card but there looks like there might be other ways around it if they don't re stock that one, might end up with two 8 port cards and then using the motherboard sata ports for the rest that I need. The reason I need so much storage is I'm building a massive HD movie/TV collection and it starts to eat up space pretty quick, If you got any links to a good cheap 24 port SAS card mind showing me it :D?