My main question is, has anyone else used this tool to store their large files on, I know the write speed will be terrible I plan on adding 2 X 2TB ATA drives soon.
Is the only solution to an expensive RAID card and disks having to be the same? So far I'm getting 18MB/s write speed putting a SSD in there would speed things up?
I use this PC for storage of all my Blu-ray seasons and movies that I've ripped. Each movie is ~25GB and I have quite the collection to digitize. I'd then point Kodi at the Storage Drive it's made and then I have my HTPC.
I've looked into a NAS solution and also USB drives that include RAID such as a drobo but they're far too expensive for me.
Adding a USB 3.0 hub and attaching a 3.5" HDD into a USB 3.0 enclosure seems like the cheapest option. (Not got too much to spend on it )
You could do FreeNAS if you have an old pc laying around. I haven't set it up before but i think it too can do software raid i think it calls it zfs instead of raid because it is different(better). using usb is really bad solution, sure it will work but in the long run do it right don't have to futs with it later.
Yeah software RAID is the only cheap way without buying a NAS unless you have a spare PC lying around. If you do and it supports RAID on the chipset then you could take the external drives from their enclosures and chuck them all in their. Software RAID is really not recommended and also I notice you are running RAID 0 which has no redundancy. If one drive dies, everything goes poof. The problem for you doing a hardware RAID if you have a PC is that all the drives in the array need to be the same model.
Thanks for the replys, I did notice it was in a software "RAID0" so I've made a new one which will allow one of my drives to fail.
I do need an upgrade on my motherboard, but that'll mean more suited RAM and CPU. Currently pulling 70MB/s off the software storage space solution, it's just the write times that are a little slow but I can deal with that for now.
Once I do upgrade I'd be putting the HDD's into the computer case and using onboard SATA.
Sounds like a good solution for now and maybe I'll write up my findings when the HDDs and the USB hub come. Looks like a RAID5 setup I have now.
Thanks for the heads up regarding the config, would have been a mess if one of the older drives died.
Windows Storage Spaces was introduced with Server 2012 and improved again in 2012 R2. This is actually the same technology Windows Storage Server is based upon. Stoage spaces uses ReFS which is Microsoft's replacement to NTFS and this is. This is basically Microsoft's answer to zfs. ReFS is self healing. I have not used it on the consumer level, but this is used in the enterprise. On Server 2012, it is surprisingly nice. It is slower than hardware raid, however it does give you the ability to use SSDs as caching drives, which speeds things up dramatically.
Don't be afraid of storage spaces. Microsoft is moving in this direction.
If you want a good top level understanding of Storage Spaces check out John Savill's video on YouTube
Yeah I suppose you could add it to the pool - set as a journal disk... May increase write speeds but as for reads, well you probably wont see any difference. Best thing to do is to pool together drives with similar read & write speeds. If you were wanting to speed things up overall a ssd as a cache for your whole system would be an option (intel smart response caching - that is of course you have a supporting chipset).
5 days later and I thought I might as well share my findings if anyone else in the future is looking for a cheap way out of a NAS / Storage Server.
It just turns out that the USB 2.0 drives were bottle-necking the write times to the pool. I've taken the USB 2.0 drives out of the pool but left in 2 USB 3.0 drives and things are running nice and smooth now!
If you guys had some HDDs lying around I would seriously recommend trying this solution. I've got Plex Media Server running on this machine now and can watch my TV shows / Movies downstairs on my TV.