So, I just had a bit of a scare, guys. I thought Murphy's Law really had it in
for me today. This is the stack of eight 3 TBTE hard drives that I'm using to
upgrade my storage server that I archive all my footage on and all of that. And
uh it appeared to me not that long ago, you can see the network is critical,
which is bad. It appeared to me that I had lost two hard drives at the same
time, meaning that the redundancy that Windows Home Server V1 provides um was
not applicable to any data that was on both of the failed hard drives. Um
however, it looks like upon further inspection, the Western Digital 1 TB
Black that's in there is back up and running and only the Hitachi right here
is actually dead. So, um, that was a
real relief because it means that I do have to, uh, repair the network or the,
uh, the backup database in all likelihood. Oh, no. It looks like the backup database is okay. Awesome. Those
were on the WD. Um, but I do have to, uh, I do have to remove the Hitachi
drive at some point. So, yeah, that's
um, very disappointing and very frustrating because it takes a few hours
to get that done. And I was really hoping to get these new drives in there
and get them uh get them rated up and get Windows Home Server V2 on here. I
had to This is just packaging for the new drives. Had to pull out some
existing drives. This one failed a little while ago. The Wildfire was just
in there for testing purposes. There's a few Seagates. These are old Seagates.
7200.10s. All of them survived. Um which
is a testament to these particular drives, I guess. two 320s and a 250. So,
those are kicking it. Well, kicking
back, not working anymore. Well, they work, but they're not going to continue
to work for me. Um, whatever. You guys get the point. So, this Hitachi is going
to come out. Uh, that WD is going to move slots, and I'm going to be putting
Oops, sorry. I'm going to be putting the eight new drives in the eight bays at
the bottom. And then I'm going to be going with uh, you know what? Maybe I'll
throw the Wildfire in. It's got toggle nan, so it should be pretty reliable for
the uh boot drive of Windows home server v2 or 2011, whatever you guys want to
call it. Veil. Um, it's been brought to my attention that you don't have to use
a 240 gig drive. You can get away with a 120 with a little edit during the
installation process. So, that's a really good thing. And, uh, oh yeah,
right. The kicker for all of this was that when the two drives were out, it
told me the backup database was failed. And um I actually just bricked the OS of
my wife's computer and was about to use the home server backup restore utility
to get her computer back up and running. So I thought I had lost pretty much
everything. But now that that one drive is working, I'm in uh pretty good shape.
So thanks for coming along for the ride, guys. And I'll keep you posted on my
Windows home server upgrade. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips
for more unboxings, reviews, and other excuse me, other computer videos.
So, none of the new drives got detected at all. They're all detecting as zero
gigabytes, which um stands to reason since the firmware I'm running on my
controller is older than my cats. So,
I'm uh updating the firmware. All I got to do apparently is
this.
And apparently that didn't work. So, I'll
give it another crack. I'll get it I'll get it updated and then we'll see how things go once we get booted into back
into Windows and create the array. I think I'm going to go with a RAID
6. That worked. The file name just got
truncated. So, this is my first boot after updating the firmware. This is
new. I hope that's a good sign. All right. So, I'm into my RAID
configuration. Physical drives. Let's see if they Oh, they are detected now.
All right. So, I guess we might as well do a quick tutorial on how to create a
RAID volume on an Ara RAID card. So, we're
going to call this uh
RAID six. I don't have another RAID six.
All my other drives are just pass through drives, which just means they're
standalone drives. RAID set was created
successfully. Cool.
Um, so let me
see. Okay, so I could expand
it. I could hm activate incomplete raid
set. I guess that's pretty much it. I could create hot spares. I can rescue
raid sets. Delete hot
spares. Oh, neat. That's actually not a bad idea. I should probably use one as a
hot spare since I don't really need all the capacity to go uh to go with it
right now. So, what a hot spare will do is if a drive fails, it'll automatically
go right in and rebuild the
uh rebuild the array.
So, let's have a
look at the actually Oh, no, not this one. Sorry.
Let's have a look
at the volume that has just been created. Disc management. Here we
go. Uh,
refresh. Rescan discs
maybe. There it is. No, wait. That's not it. 20 gigs. Oh, let's see if we can
find it. I wonder if the OS is even compatible. Haven't done this in a
while. So, uh, for one thing, I screwed up when I created it, and I accidentally
created it with only, uh, seven drives.
So, okay, there we go. Now, it has
member discs, eight out of eight. Now, we have to create a volume set. So, we
create select the RAID set to create a volume set. Then we make a volume name
and we're going to call it RAID six
again. Okay. Volume RAID level. This is
where we can actually edit the uh change the RAID level. Volume capacity maximum
18 terab. Excellent.
Um yeah, these are
4K. Foreground initialization should be
fine. Let's go with default for all this
stuff.
Okay. Volumes to be created
one. Here we go. Volume set has been
created. Now we should be able to see it
in disk
management in theory.
theories don't always work out that way. Give me a bit. Ah, yes, it's
initializing. I'll be back once it's done. That takes a while. All right,
there we go. It is in a RAID state normal now, which means that I can go
ahead and disc management. Aha, welcome to the
initialize and convert disc wizard. Next, disk 16
initializing. Finish.
So there is my
16 terbte volume which has been split up
and I forget how this works. Yeah, we need to convert to a GPT disc so that we
can make it the full size instead of being limited.
So can be only be accessed from Windows server blah blah blah. Okay, got it.
Primary partition assign X for
extreme.
Next grade. Whoops. Apparently I have caps
lock on already. Raid six. Perform a
quick format.
Finish. Because the cluster count is higher than
expected. That's interesting.
Yeah. Why don't we try not a quick Oh, that's going to take forever. Let's try
one more time. Oh, okay. Well, let's see if I can figure this out now. Got to
love extreme hardware. Always just works. Found a great uh article on the
support site for Microsoft for the default cluster sizes for NTFS. And it
looks like even though my volume is greater than 16 terabytes, it is not
defaulting to 8 kilobytes. So, as soon as I recreate
it using an 8
kilobyte, here we go. Setting. We should
be able to get access to the drive formatting and healthy local disc
X. There we go. So, now let's run a
quick benchmark and find out how fast this RAID 6 is. Now, we've all been
spoiled by SSDs when it comes to huge
ADO scores, but uh I'm still pretty optimistic so far. Looking at this guy
right here, holy
cow, we've already reached 1 Gigabyte per second in sustained reads at
16K. At 30K, we're up to over 1.2
gigabytes per second reads. The rights are slower because we're going to be
controller limited on those. So, as fast as your RAID controller is is as fast as
you can write to a RAID six. Um, a RAID five would be faster on the rights. Holy
smokes. We're up over 1.6 gigs per second. And it looks like that's
probably where we're going to peak. So,
wow. 1.5 on that one. So, so yeah, we
peak at around 700 megs per second, right? and around 1.5 or one pix gigs
per second read. Just ridiculous. Okay, I'll be back once that the benchmarks.
So, there you go, guys. That's what we ended up with. Uh, now let's do another
run at a deeper Q depth. So, that should
give us some interesting results. These are just staggering staggering numbers
for a mechanical setup. Well, not much
of an impact on scores. I am curious though to see how this array performs in
RAID five as opposed to RAID six. So, I'll try RAID 5 with a hot spare, which
basically gives similar data protection to RAID six because you could have two
drives fail as long as they don't fail at exactly the same time and the hot
spare would swoop right in and take over for the one that failed, whereas RAID 6
can take two failures at the same time. I just want to see how much of a
performance difference we see in these right performance in these right
performance numbers with RAID 5. So, thank you for checking out this little
RAID 6 experiment and uh stay tuned for
more on my Windows home server upgrade. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech
Tips.