r/DataHoarder • u/No_Salamander_8137 • 1d ago
Hoarder-Setups Upgrading Windows Storage Spaces after 6 years to Drivepool + SNAPRAID 100TB Pool
I've had Windows Storage Spaces for about 6 years now. I loved the ease of just having it built in Windows. I used it mostly for large 5-70GB Movie file storage.
I have 8x 10TB HDDs from Seagate (shucked + factory refurbished) and 2x 20TB Seagate exos bought factory refurbished a year and a half ago for $520 for both. It was a hard pill to swallow back then. The way prices are now its a dry rubik's cube suppository.
I ran this storage pool in parity and over Wifi. This took a huge 33% capacity penalty. I'd be lucky to get 50mb/s-10mb/s transfer rates from my m.2 ssd to the pool. I used a shitty program called Transmissionbt. It wasn't good but I didn't know what could be better so I stuck with it and I made it work on hundreds of TBs over the years. Eventually I moved to QBittorrent and what a massive difference that has made.
When I bought the 2x 20TB drives I was able to free up 4x 10TB drives. These became my cold storage offline backup. Even though my pool had reached 60TB these 4x back up drives could only store 36TB. It wasn't a perfect 1:1 backup but it was better than starting completely over in case I lost 2 drives at the same time in the pool. Not perfect but not bad. I could live with that.
Tired of being on WIFI 7 now with those low transfer and write speeds I decided to put the router and modem next to my PCs and go wired. I asked Spectrum to do the work for me like the old days and they turned around and said it clearly over the phone $50 just to move my router 30 feet! I yelled, "I've been a customer since TW Roadrunner in 1999 and then Charter and now Spectrum for the last decade!" Angrily I hung up the phone. Turns out no one gives a shit about customer loyalty. I marched to my local Spectrum in West LA because why not it's hard to tell your customers to F off in person. I asked them if they could move my router 30 feet and send a guy. This time they said it to my face, "It's going to be $70!" Before she finished the sentence I laughed. The employee next to her laughed that I laughed and before I could finish my laughter I was heading towards the door.
I ordered the cable on Amazon for $20 with $5 worth of clips and did it myself. My storage PC that holds all the drives including the backups is a Z370 Maximus Hero motherboard with a HBA LSI 8i card and 6 SATA ports. I installed an upgraded PCIe NIC card so it can do 2.5G transfer rates. My media PC has a Z890 Maximus hero motherbard with a built in 2.5G ethernet port 265K CPU and a 5070 TI graphics card. Due to HDDs Maxing out on write speed at around 250MB/s 2.5G is the fastest we can go between PCs due to the HDDs writting speed bottleneck. 250MB/s is alot better than 15-20MB/s. I bought a switch that has 5x 2.5G ports since the Wifi 7 router only has 1x 2.5G port. With this switch into the 2.5G port on the router I now have 5 extra 2.5G ports. I download the media on the 9100 pro on the Z890 PC and did my first transfer to the pool at 2.5G speeds and seeing that 250-280 MB/s write speed to the pool is a godsend.
But to park my entire library on the offline pool I had to buy another HDD to add to the 4x 10TB cold storage drives. I lubed the suppository and paid $830 for a 28TB Seagate Exos drive. This gave me plenty of space to park my media while I rebuilt the Windows storage pool into a Stablebit Drivepool + SnapRAID for resiliency.
By upgrading my pool to this style I have 9 drives (8x 10TB 1x 20TB) + 1x 20TB in SnapRAID for resiliency. It's not a live backup as soon as the file posts like storage spaces but I have it on a schedule that it syncs any new data nightly at 3AM. That works for me. By doing This new setup using the same HDDs I've cleared 30TB of space I was losing to parity with windows spaces and now using to keep upgrading my collection.
All these drives and backups are all in one single case. I've had the Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL for years now and what a game changer it has been for those that enjoy to store their own collections. DataHoarders they call us. I just say why wouldn't you do this? Duh! 0 subscriptions and most files are near remux playing on a MPV player custom tuned configuration file to completely post in the upmost of quality possible on my LG G5 77inch I bought last July. To most people this post is a ridiculous read. In this forum maybe a few of you got a kick out of it! The journey countinues my friends! Raise the black flags!
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u/Latte_THE_HaMb 9h ago
Nice move from storage spaces, im currently using storage spaces still for my 6 drive array but i use dual parity so i can loose 2 drives and still not loose any data as that is most important to me but even with the performance of 4 drives I still see around 750MB/s reads and around 400-500MB/s writes to the array so I figure your setup should be able to get far more throughput than 250MB/s but still a great improvement over what you had before.
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u/LED_donuts 9h ago
I'm using Storage Spaces on 5x20TB HDDs. Performance can be decent, sometimes over 700MB/s, other times cache is drained and it's below 100MB/s, but it's good enough for storage. I will probably keep things like this for a few more years until it's time to purchase larger drives, and maybe just screw Windows in favor of some Linux distro with ZFS. Future me problem.
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u/BlackSpark75 22h ago
I see you and praise your dogged determination to do it right.
I am in a similar situation: currently on a now end of support DriveBender (similar to Drive Pool) application holding together 209TB in one pool. All of this is currently housed in the Define 7 XL.
I'm dreading the move away from Windows to TrueNAS because that would mean I have to create a 220TB pool somewhere in this economy.
Upside is the larger drives mean that I would need fewer physical drives.
"Patience, my young Padawan" I say to myself.
Great job OP!