VoiletDragon's NAS Build: H97N-WIFI - Core i3 4360 - HD4600

[jfredson]

That should be fine. I think you create a RAID via terminal but not sure if I'm correct in saying that. The reason why I just used separate drives is because everything is backed up so if one drive fails I can just restore everything to that drive.

Interesting. Do you find that preferable to having a single RAID volume? What do you use to backup your individual disks?

 

[VioletDragon]

Interesting. Do you find that preferable to having a single RAID volume? What do you use to backup your individual disks?

I use Time Machine but I've set up two back ups. I've never bothered with RAID but it's something for you to try.

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

Raid does indeed work with OSX. For software raid you have 2 options, inbuilt from the command line or using a third party app such as SoftRAID.

I seem to remember it is possible to boot using raid but that you had to have an EFI partition on each drive, or something similar.

With the state of SSD drives today, booting from a raid drive makes little sense though. The best option would be to boot from a small fast SSD, then raid the data drives together, then setup some kind of backup plan to a storage volume outside of the NAS machine.

SoftRAID claims bootable support on a real mac, not sure about that in a hackintosh environment though.

For my NAS i have 4 x 2Tb SSDs in raid using the OSX command line raid tool; it has worked flawlessly from day one.

Hot swapping would likely work, but depends on your chosen raid mode, and would likely cause mischief is you did that on a boot volume.

 

[jfredson]

Ahh, that makes sense. We're growing out of our Time Machine backup as we're up to 3TB of data and growing by about 2TB per year at the moment. I'm hoping that a RAID setup will allow us to expand our archive indefinitely and protect against single drive failures.

I use Time Machine but I've set up two back ups. I've never bothered with RAID but it's something for you to try.

Ahh, that makes sense. We're growing out of our Time Machine backup as we're up to 3TB of data and growing by about 2TB per year at the moment. I'm hoping that a RAID setup will allow us to expand our archive indefinitely and protect against single drive failures.

 

[VioletDragon]

Ahh, that makes sense. We're growing out of our Time Machine backup as we're up to 3TB of data and growing by about 2TB per year at the moment. I'm hoping that a RAID setup will allow us to expand our archive indefinitely and protect against single drive failures.


Ahh, that makes sense. We're growing out of our Time Machine backup as we're up to 3TB of data and growing by about 2TB per year at the moment. I'm hoping that a RAID setup will allow us to expand our archive indefinitely and protect against single drive failures.

Post #13 gives you more information on RAID. Thanks WonkeyDonkey for your reply

 

[jfredson]

Raid does indeed work with OSX. For software raid you have 2 options, inbuilt from the command line or using a third party app such as SoftRAID.

I seem to remember it is possible to boot using raid but that you had to have an EFI partition on each drive, or something similar.

With the state of SSD drives today, booting from a raid drive makes little sense though. The best option would be to boot from a small fast SSD, then raid the data drives together, then setup some kind of backup plan to a storage volume outside of the NAS machine.

SoftRAID claims bootable support on a real mac, not sure about that in a hackintosh environment though.

For my NAS i have 4 x 2Tb SSDs in raid using the OSX command line raid tool; it has worked flawlessly from day one.

Hot swapping would likely work, but depends on your chosen raid mode, and would likely cause mischief is you did that on a boot volume.

Very cool, thanks for the tips. I'm looking at using an internal SSD for the OS installation and 3x 4TB HDs for the archival RAID array. Which raid mode would I need to use to be able to hot-swap drives on drive failure? How easy is it to add new drives in to expand the total storage space of the array?

I assume it's fairly easy to setup something like Backblaze B2 or Amazon AWS for an offsite backup in case of catastrophic failure, but I'm hoping that the RAID setup should protect me against the most common hardware-related data losses.

 

[jfredson]

Post #13 gives you more information on RAID. Thanks WonkeyDonkey for your reply

Thanks for the inspiration for doing this. Your build is basically exactly what I'm trying to do and I hadn't realized I could use OSX for this. Sorry for hijacking your post.

 

[VioletDragon]

Thanks for the inspiration for doing this. Your build is basically exactly what I'm trying to do and I hadn't realized I could use OSX for this. Sorry for hijacking your post.

I was looking at proper NAS hardware until I did my research and found that some people have been having issues with them due to SMB and slow data transfers that's when I decided to go with a NAS that runs OS X Server app. After seeing WonkeyDonkys NAS build that's when I decided to build a NAS/Server hack.

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

You should read up on different raid modes to work out which is best for your setup. Theres a good primer here.

Note SoftRAID state that Apple removed support for raid in 10.11, thats incorrect, it is still there. What they did was to remove it from Disk Utility, but it is still accessible from the command line.

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

Further NAS build here with some info you may find helpful.

There is a good explanation of using OSX command line raid here.