Personal Project RAID 6 Setup & Troubleshooting Windows Home Server Upgrade Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,783 words · ~8 min read
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So, I just had a bit of a scare, guys. I thought Murphy's Law really had it in
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for me today. This is the stack of eight 3 TBTE hard drives that I'm using to
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upgrade my storage server that I archive all my footage on and all of that. And
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uh it appeared to me not that long ago, you can see the network is critical,
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which is bad. It appeared to me that I had lost two hard drives at the same
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time, meaning that the redundancy that Windows Home Server V1 provides um was
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not applicable to any data that was on both of the failed hard drives. Um
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however, it looks like upon further inspection, the Western Digital 1 TB
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Black that's in there is back up and running and only the Hitachi right here
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is actually dead. So, um, that was a
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real relief because it means that I do have to, uh, repair the network or the,
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uh, the backup database in all likelihood. Oh, no. It looks like the backup database is okay. Awesome. Those
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were on the WD. Um, but I do have to, uh, I do have to remove the Hitachi
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drive at some point. So, yeah, that's
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um, very disappointing and very frustrating because it takes a few hours
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to get that done. And I was really hoping to get these new drives in there
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and get them uh get them rated up and get Windows Home Server V2 on here. I
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had to This is just packaging for the new drives. Had to pull out some
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existing drives. This one failed a little while ago. The Wildfire was just
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in there for testing purposes. There's a few Seagates. These are old Seagates.
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7200.10s. All of them survived. Um which
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is a testament to these particular drives, I guess. two 320s and a 250. So,
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those are kicking it. Well, kicking
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back, not working anymore. Well, they work, but they're not going to continue
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to work for me. Um, whatever. You guys get the point. So, this Hitachi is going
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to come out. Uh, that WD is going to move slots, and I'm going to be putting
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Oops, sorry. I'm going to be putting the eight new drives in the eight bays at
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the bottom. And then I'm going to be going with uh, you know what? Maybe I'll
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throw the Wildfire in. It's got toggle nan, so it should be pretty reliable for
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the uh boot drive of Windows home server v2 or 2011, whatever you guys want to
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call it. Veil. Um, it's been brought to my attention that you don't have to use
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a 240 gig drive. You can get away with a 120 with a little edit during the
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installation process. So, that's a really good thing. And, uh, oh yeah,
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right. The kicker for all of this was that when the two drives were out, it
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told me the backup database was failed. And um I actually just bricked the OS of
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my wife's computer and was about to use the home server backup restore utility
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to get her computer back up and running. So I thought I had lost pretty much
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everything. But now that that one drive is working, I'm in uh pretty good shape.
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So thanks for coming along for the ride, guys. And I'll keep you posted on my
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Windows home server upgrade. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips
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for more unboxings, reviews, and other excuse me, other computer videos.
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So, none of the new drives got detected at all. They're all detecting as zero
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gigabytes, which um stands to reason since the firmware I'm running on my
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controller is older than my cats. So,
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I'm uh updating the firmware. All I got to do apparently is
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this.
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And apparently that didn't work. So, I'll
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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
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into Windows and create the array. I think I'm going to go with a RAID
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6. That worked. The file name just got
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truncated. So, this is my first boot after updating the firmware. This is
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new. I hope that's a good sign. All right. So, I'm into my RAID
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configuration. Physical drives. Let's see if they Oh, they are detected now.
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All right. So, I guess we might as well do a quick tutorial on how to create a
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RAID volume on an Ara RAID card. So, we're
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going to call this uh
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RAID six. I don't have another RAID six.
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All my other drives are just pass through drives, which just means they're
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standalone drives. RAID set was created
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successfully. Cool.
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Um, so let me
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see. Okay, so I could expand
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it. I could hm activate incomplete raid
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set. I guess that's pretty much it. I could create hot spares. I can rescue
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raid sets. Delete hot
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spares. Oh, neat. That's actually not a bad idea. I should probably use one as a
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hot spare since I don't really need all the capacity to go uh to go with it
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right now. So, what a hot spare will do is if a drive fails, it'll automatically
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go right in and rebuild the
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uh rebuild the array.
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So, let's have a
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look at the actually Oh, no, not this one. Sorry.
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Let's have a look
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at the volume that has just been created. Disc management. Here we
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go. Uh,
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refresh. Rescan discs
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maybe. There it is. No, wait. That's not it. 20 gigs. Oh, let's see if we can
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find it. I wonder if the OS is even compatible. Haven't done this in a
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while. So, uh, for one thing, I screwed up when I created it, and I accidentally
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created it with only, uh, seven drives.
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So, okay, there we go. Now, it has
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member discs, eight out of eight. Now, we have to create a volume set. So, we
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create select the RAID set to create a volume set. Then we make a volume name
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and we're going to call it RAID six
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again. Okay. Volume RAID level. This is
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where we can actually edit the uh change the RAID level. Volume capacity maximum
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18 terab. Excellent.
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Um yeah, these are
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4K. Foreground initialization should be
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fine. Let's go with default for all this
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stuff.
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Okay. Volumes to be created
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one. Here we go. Volume set has been
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created. Now we should be able to see it
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in disk
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management in theory.
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theories don't always work out that way. Give me a bit. Ah, yes, it's
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initializing. I'll be back once it's done. That takes a while. All right,
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there we go. It is in a RAID state normal now, which means that I can go
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ahead and disc management. Aha, welcome to the
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initialize and convert disc wizard. Next, disk 16
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initializing. Finish.
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So there is my
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16 terbte volume which has been split up
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and I forget how this works. Yeah, we need to convert to a GPT disc so that we
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can make it the full size instead of being limited.
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So can be only be accessed from Windows server blah blah blah. Okay, got it.
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Primary partition assign X for
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extreme.
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Next grade. Whoops. Apparently I have caps
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lock on already. Raid six. Perform a
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quick format.
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Finish. Because the cluster count is higher than
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expected. That's interesting.
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Yeah. Why don't we try not a quick Oh, that's going to take forever. Let's try
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one more time. Oh, okay. Well, let's see if I can figure this out now. Got to
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love extreme hardware. Always just works. Found a great uh article on the
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support site for Microsoft for the default cluster sizes for NTFS. And it
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looks like even though my volume is greater than 16 terabytes, it is not
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defaulting to 8 kilobytes. So, as soon as I recreate
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it using an 8
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kilobyte, here we go. Setting. We should
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be able to get access to the drive formatting and healthy local disc
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X. There we go. So, now let's run a
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quick benchmark and find out how fast this RAID 6 is. Now, we've all been
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spoiled by SSDs when it comes to huge
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ADO scores, but uh I'm still pretty optimistic so far. Looking at this guy
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right here, holy
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cow, we've already reached 1 Gigabyte per second in sustained reads at
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16K. At 30K, we're up to over 1.2
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gigabytes per second reads. The rights are slower because we're going to be
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controller limited on those. So, as fast as your RAID controller is is as fast as
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you can write to a RAID six. Um, a RAID five would be faster on the rights. Holy
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smokes. We're up over 1.6 gigs per second. And it looks like that's
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probably where we're going to peak. So,
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wow. 1.5 on that one. So, so yeah, we
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peak at around 700 megs per second, right? and around 1.5 or one pix gigs
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per second read. Just ridiculous. Okay, I'll be back once that the benchmarks.
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So, there you go, guys. That's what we ended up with. Uh, now let's do another
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run at a deeper Q depth. So, that should
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give us some interesting results. These are just staggering staggering numbers
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for a mechanical setup. Well, not much
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of an impact on scores. I am curious though to see how this array performs in
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RAID five as opposed to RAID six. So, I'll try RAID 5 with a hot spare, which
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basically gives similar data protection to RAID six because you could have two
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drives fail as long as they don't fail at exactly the same time and the hot
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spare would swoop right in and take over for the one that failed, whereas RAID 6
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can take two failures at the same time. I just want to see how much of a
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performance difference we see in these right performance in these right
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performance numbers with RAID 5. So, thank you for checking out this little
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RAID 6 experiment and uh stay tuned for
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more on my Windows home server upgrade. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech
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Tips.