Gadgetory

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 8 3 terabyte hard drives that I'm using to upgrade my storage server that I archived all my footage on and all of that and 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 was not applicable to any data that was on both of the failed hard drives however it looks like upon further inspection the Western Digital one terabyte black that's in there is back up and running and only the Hitachi right here is actually dead so that was a real relief because it means that I do have to repair the network they are the the backup database in all likelihood oh no it looks like the backup database is ok awesome those were on the WD but I do have two I do have to remove the Hitachi drive at some point so yeah that's very disappointing and very frustrating because it takes a few hours to get that done and I was really hoping to get these new drugs in there and get them get them read it up and get Windows Home Server v2 on here I had to packaging so many 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 C gates these are old C gates 7200 point 10 all of them survived which is a testament to these particular drives I guess to 320 s and and 250 so those are kicking it well kicking back not working anymore will they work but they're not gonna continue to work for me whatever you guys get the point so this attach is gonna come out that WD is gonna move slots and I'm going to be putting oops sorry I'm going to be putting the eight new drives in the eight days at the bottom and then I'm gonna be going with you know but maybe I'll throw the Wildfire in it's got toggle man so it should be pretty reliable for the boot drive of Windows Home Server v2 or 2011 whatever you guys want to call it Vail 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 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 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 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 from unboxings reviews another excuse me other computer videos so none of the new drives got detected at all they're all detecting a 0 gigabytes which stands to reason since the firmware I'm running on my controller is older than my cats so I'm updating the firmware all I got to do parently is this 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 rooted into back into Windows and create the array I think I'm gonna go with a raid 6 that work the file name just got truncated so this is my first food after updating the firmware this is new I hope that's a good sign alright so I'm into my raid configuration physical drives let's see if they oh they are detected now alright so I guess we might as well do a quick tutorial on how to create a raid volume on an arica raid card so we're gonna call this raid 6 I don't have another raid 6 all my other drives are just passed through drives which just means they're standalone drives raid set was created successfully cool so let me see ok so I could expand it I could activate incomplete raid set I guess that's pretty much it I could create hot spares I can rescue raid sets to leave hot spares no need 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 to go with it right now so little hot spare will do is if a drive fails it'll automatically go right in and rebuild the 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 mismanagement here we go refresh three scan discs maybe there it is no wait that's not it 20 gigs Wow let's see if we can find it I wonder if the OS is even compatible I haven't done this in a while so for one thing I screwed up when I created it and I accidentally created it with only seven drives so okay there we go now it has member disks eight out of eight now we have to create a volume set so we creat select the raid set to create a volume set then we make a volume name and we're gonna call it raid 6 again ok volume raid level this is where we can actually edit the change the raid level volume capacity maximum 18 terabytes excellent yeah these are 4k foreground initialization should be fine let's go with default for all this fat stuff okay things 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 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 this management aha welcome to the initializing convert disk wizard next disk 16 initializing finish so there is my 16 terabyte volume which has been split up and I forget how this works yeah we need to convert to a GPT disk so that we can make it the full size instead of being limited so dududududududu can be only be accessed from windows server to the mullah okay we've got it primary partition assign X for extreme next the whoops family I have caps lock on already six perform a quick format finish because the cluster count is higher than expected that's interesting yeah I'd only try not a quick follow that's gonna take forever let's try one more time oh okay well let's see if I can figure this out now gotta love extreme hardware always just works found a great article on the support spy 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 kilobyte so as soon as I recreated using an 8 kilobyte setting we should be able to get access to the drive formatting and healthy local disk 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 a DOS scores but I'm still pretty optimistic so far looking at this guy right here holy cow we've already reached one gigabyte per second and sustained reads at 16 K at 30 K we're up to over 1.2 gigabytes per second reads the writes are slower because we're gonna be controller limited on those so as fast as your RAID controller is is as fast as you can write to a raid 6 a raid 5 would be faster on the writes holy smokes we're up over 1.6 gigs per second and it looks like that's probably where we're gonna peak so Wow and point five on that one say so yeah we peak at around 700 Meg's per second right and around 1.5 or one pix 0.6 gigs per second read just ridiculous okay I'll be back once the benchmarks so there you go guys that's what we ended up with 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 mechanical well not much of an impact on scores I am curious though to see how this array performs in raid5 as opposed to raid six so I'll try raid five 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 six 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 and these right performance numbers with raid 5 so thank you for checking out this little raid 6 experiment and stay tuned for more on my Windows Home Server upgrade don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips