Best raid level for home NAS ? 12 port mobo

ASRock Rack C2550D4I Intel Avoton C2550 2.4GHz/ DDR3/ SATA3/ V&2GbE/ Mini-ITX Motherboard & CPU Combo (C2550D4I)

ntel Avoton C2550 2.4 - 2.6GHz Quad Core;
also comes in 8 core versions

10 and 12 sata port mobo..........

Supports 4x 240-pin DDR3 DIMM; Maximum 64GB Capacity,
Dual Channel Support, 1333MHz Minimum,
Supports ECC and Non-ECC Memory

Intel C2550 SATA controller:
2 x SATA 6.0Gb/s,
4 x SATA 3.0Gb/s; Marvell SE9172 controller:
2 x SATA 6.0Gb/s (Supports RAID 0, 1); Marvell SE9230 controller:
4 x SATA 6.0Gb/s (Supports RAID 0, 1, 10)
2x Intel i210 GbE, Supports WOL, Teaming, PXE, Energy Efficient Ethernet 802.3az; 1x Realtek RTL8211E for IPMI ASPEED AST2300 : IPMI 2.0 with iKVM Support
Form Factor: Mini-ITX 170mm x 170mm (6.7" x 6.7")

im just thinking, if i start with like 4x or 5x 4TB+ disks
what would be my best raid options
i hear that at drive sizes this large its almost a garujntiee that if you have to replace one drive, the array will throw an error by the time its repaired
thus effing up the whole thing
so we need something at least double drive redundant

RAID Z2. With 5x 4TB drives RAID Z2 gives you two disks for Parity and 11TB of usable space.

how important is using a "nas" rated drive ?
will freenas spindown when not directly in use ?

im really just thinking
remove any and all spinners from my desktop

movies music and iso's on network box.

im expecting cheaper drives to hit $99 for 4TB today and tomorrow

Just don't get get green drives and be sure to stress test the shit out of them before you actually migrate your data over. Send the failed drives back under warranty and repeat with the new ones.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178338&cm_re=4tb_hard_drive-_-22-178-338-_-Product

?

those are down to 99

Nice. Seagate last I checked had one of the higher failure rates in enterprise settings (like 1-2% higher than the lowest being HGST) but I don't believe they stress test ever drive before they put it into a machine in the enterprise world. Probably less time consuming and therefore cheaper to just replace drives as needed.

whats the cheapest hgst you can find ?
anything at a comparable price ?

i mean NATURALLY the brand with the best failure rates would be ideal

Just go HGST if you want your drives to last

If you plan on having more than 8 disks you need to use NAS or enterprise drives with some sort of vibration compensation. So go with the HGST NAS disks, the WD red pros or some other enterprise level drive.

You should think about what you're going to do in the future and consider that when setting it up now. If you plan on having a total of 8 disks you might want to set up 4 disks in raidz1 now and then add a second set of 4 later in the same configuration. Or 5 disks in raidz2, etc.

I would go quantity over quality for disks in ZFS. A NAS drive costs about 40% more than the regular Seagate desktop drives. If you put more cheaper disks in something like a raidz3 or a full mirrored backup, that would keep your data much safer than running fewer higher quality disks.

I guess in the end I wouldn't even REALLLLLLLLY care if it were a bunch hdds in a low power pc, that I manually just stored data on
And if I wanted just manual copied each folder to a different drive idk

It sounds like a hassle,
But raid failures killing ALL drives data sounds like a nightmare

I think I've got the case of
Money burning holes in my pocket

True enough tho, I really wanna remove every drive that isn't an ssd from my desktop

Ideally I'd like cheap ass drives
Naturally.
But at the same time,
I'd like drives that will be spinning some ten years down the road
Hell tomorrow I'll post the power on time of my current hdds

http://m.newegg.com/Combo/ComboDetail?comboid=2594287&combotype=0&index=2&ifss=True

In one and a half hours time from this post
A newegg shellshocker deal will become active for
2x hgst 4tb nas drives
2 x HGST Deskstar NAS H3IKNAS40003272SN (0S03664) 4TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" High-Performance Hard Drive Combo
02:00AM(PST)

Have a look at snapraid. It offeres the redundancy of RAID without the risk of total data loss and is a little more flexable as far as adding more storage and recovering deleted files.

this looks cool
@wendell have you tried this thing ?

I'm using it with 32tb over 13 disks. I've been using it for a few years and in that time I've lost 8 disks and had a few corrupted files but thanks to snapraid I haven't lost any data.

There's plenty of ways to pool the disks as well so they appear as a single disk, on Linux I use AUFS but there are lots of alternatives.

what do you think the best way to "label" the disks physically you think
like, this is disk 1234ect so when the software says hey disk2 is being screwy you should replace it

Raid Z2, but Raid Z2 according to the FreeNAS manual should be run in 4 or 6 disk configs.

It such a personal choice. You have plenty of flexibility with 12 drive ports. I'm leaning more towards mirrored pairs in an array but to be honest at home I have used what I have in ghetto setups a lot.

How important is the data. I mean porn would be fine on raid5, hell raid 0 if you have unlimited internet. Business or family photos mirrors and offsite backups. Storage is so cheap unless you're storing raw video footage

That's what I do. You could also use the serial number or uuid. It is a total pain to figure out which disk has failed without some link between the logical label and the physical disk.

gotcha, by serial might be the easiest then id mark it with a sharpie or something
sadly i diddnt find any super sales on drives today...