I have this i3 Windows 10 based system that I have been using as an Steam Streaming/HTPC/Storage media. I am planning to setup Rockstor on it but I want to go step by step and this is one of the steps I want to verify. This system has an i3, 8GB RAM, 4x4TB WD Red in JBOD. I plan to setup Rockstor on a 64GB USB and put the WD Red in RAID 5.
Currently these drives have about 7TB of data.
If I copy the data on to two of the drives and format the other two:
Can I setup Rockstor on the USB, then put two of the empty drives and format into BTRFS. Copy the data from the 2 full drives onto the empty ones inside of Rockstor then add in the other two drives. Arrange all media accordingly and then change RAID into 5 from previous JBOD in Rockstor?
Or perhaps there is a better way of doing this.
I have a couple external drives lying around that I will be using a backups during this process along with storage on my main PC but not enough empty to fully copy all the data from the HTPC. There is about 5 TB of movies/shows that aren’t backed up anywhere and probably won’t be able to. The important stuff I will be going through in the next couple days to make sure I have everything backed up.
And can someone update me on how RAID5 is doing in the latest build along with new Rock-On Support and Gigabit NIC support with Link-Aggregation. Also how is the progress running Rockstor inside of a Hypervisor?
Ya your plan seems pretty solid just will take a while as you probably guessed.
RAID 5 support hasn’t changed too much the implement is stable and preforms well. There are a few caveats scrubs still run at around 100GiB an hour and free space reporting doesn’t work.
Can’t help you on the rest of those as I haven’t had a chance to test them yet. Though there were a couple of threads dealing with running it virtualized. I’m pretty sure the only problem was getting it to properly pass the disks to Rockstor.
Raid 5, easy to set up, just follow the instructions here: interface has changed a little, but if you are used to computers, the basis is still the same.
For install the way you describe,OS on USB, then add 2 disks, copy data over and add more disks, that should be OK. Have backup of important stuff (I take no responsibility).
I for one is looking forward to the day, where the devs speedup scrubbing on RAID5/6.
My scrubs run at about 140 GiB an hour, on my 7 disk RAID6 array, and with that speed a scrub runs for almost 2½ days. Slower the more data I put into the array.
There is room for improvement. My system could probably read at above 1,2 TiB an hour (making a scrub a ~6 hour job), so the current speed is a little sad
I can now. I think I just installed it wrong the first time. And I realized now that I need Linux OS or Mac to connect to the device to transfer the files. So just figuring out how I will move 5TB of data. Gonna be a bit longer to have this implemented. Don’t have that much time to work on it this week. I will just consider all the work before a trial test I guess.
Ya it sometimes picks weird defaults for some reason. Good luck though Rockstor is based on Linux (CentOS) so you shouldn’t need another Mac/Linux box if I understood you right.
I am going to install on HDD. Probably going to take advantage of the extra space on the HDD for things like owncloud and btsync. Two of the 4tb WD REDs will be wiped and pooled into single for now. The other two I will take out and using a SATA drive adapter connect it to my laptop which will boot Ubuntu MATE from USB so I can transfer
link that and have access to individual folders because I could not find a proper file system manager.
I do not think the SAMBA share method would work the way I need it to, to properly organize all my files.
The SFTP in Linux seems to give full access and seems easier than sharing/connecting to each SAMBA share I will be creating.
Edit: Also looking into it, I will go for RAID 10 once this all works out. The scrubbing being faster does make a huge difference and even with RAID 10 I will have 3Tb left which should last me a year or two which should be enough time to either add a couple more drives or RAID 5 support to be nearing more acceptable levels.
