Complete Hard Drive Disaster - Picking up the pieces - Advice needed

[Fishypops]

TLDR;  I burnt out the logic boards on 4 out of the 5 hard drives, including the parity. Complete loss.  (Make sure you have a big enough PSU - don't keep switching it off and on).

 

Devastated. Looking to rebuild.  I don't have oodles of cash to spend on a drive array that has no data.  I figured that I would buy new drives as and when I need them / when they come on sale.

 

My data storage needs have been reset to zero.

Data needs;

Photo's:  < 1TB

Shows and Movies over the next year:  approx 2TB

Other Stuff: <500GB

 

Practical Needs =>  Serve up Shows and Movies to Kodi.  Want to ensure that there is little to no lag (snappy and responsive)

 

I am thinking about this drive config and would like some feedback:

Parity: 6 TB WD Red Plus

Cache:  64GB  SSD (Reusing old drive)

Drive for Current TV Shows :  60 GB SSD (Reusing old drive)

Drive for Unwatched Movies:  60 GB SSD (Reusing old drive)

Drive for then storing Watched TV shows and Movies, Photo's and Other Stuff :  6TB WD Red Plus

 

Hardware:  Old i3 CPU + 8 GB RAM + Gigiabyte H77N MB (all 12 years old)

 

If I lose the 60GB SSD's then no sweat. 

 

 

[trurl]

People have often burned drives by using incompatible modular PSU cables.

 

Sometimes you can get a burned drive to work again by replacing its board with one from the same model.

 

All of those old SSDs including cache are too small to be useful IMO

 

15 minutes ago, Fishypops said:

Complete loss

You must always have a backup of anything important and irreplaceable.

 

[Fishypops]

Thanks for this.

Quote

Sometimes you can get a burned drive to work again by replacing its board with one from the same model.

Question:  Would it be sufficient to repair the Parity drive ?  Could I then rebuild the data in new drives, without repairing the old data drives ?

 

Quote

All of those old SSDs including cache are too small to be useful IMO

This really would be a temporary situation...a few weeks; until I can get some breathing room.

[trurl]

4 minutes ago, Fishypops said:

Would it be sufficient to repair the Parity drive ?

Parity has none of your data and by itself can recover nothing. Parity is basically the same simple concept (and simple calculation) wherever it is used in computers and communications.

 

Parity is just an extra bit that allows a missing bit to be calculated from all the other bits.

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Overview#Parity-Protected_Array

[trurl]

1 minute ago, trurl said:

Parity has none of your data

Parity obviously doesn't have the capacity to be a backup of all your other disks. All the other disks are part of the parity calculation.

[trurl]

46 minutes ago, trurl said:

You must always have a backup of anything important and irreplaceable.

 

[Fishypops]

OK.  So having given this some more thought:

 

Does this make sense?

 

Parity - WDRED Plus 4TB- 3.5in HDD

Cache - WDRED 500GB SA500 2.5in SSD

Drive 1 - WDRED Plus 4TB- 3.5in HDD  (Older / Archive)

Drive 2 - WDRED 1TB SA 2.5in SSD   (Current Stuff)  -  ??  Maybe to sit outside of the array ?

 

Thanks.

 

 

Edited January 30, 2023 by Fishypops

[trurl]

SSDs in the parity array cannot be trimmed, and can only be written at parity speed.

 

But, disks outside the array have no parity protection.

 

What might make more sense is a 2 SSD btrfs raid1 mirror as cache, of whatever size needed to cache user share writes plus extra for things that need speed. appdata, domains, system shares are typically kept on fast pool so Docker/VM performance isn't impacted by slower array, and so array disks can spin down since these files are always open.

 

Since this would be a mirror, the total capacity would be equal to the smaller disks. Best if they are the same size.

 

Good time to start thinking about backup too. Parity and mirrors are not a substitute as you have seen. You don't have to backup everything, but you must always have another copy of anything important and irreplaceable.

[Fishypops]

Thanks again. Very helpful.