Have a bunch of hardware and drives coming in for my plotting rig, just curious which hdd array I should run if any? I’m going to run 6 sata drives off a pcie expansion card inside my pc, and connect a TL-D800s 8bay das through a QXP port externally. For this many drives should I be running Raid 0 or JBOD for simplicity/speed? I plan on swapping out some of the 8tb drives I have for 16tb ones eventually so I’m not sure if that would affect the entire array as I hotswapped drives out. if that’s the case would I be better off just running the drives individually and filling them up 1-2 at a time since I could easily hotswap that way? And if 1 hdd failed in JBOD or RAID I’m worried it could wipe out the whole farm? unless I’m mistaken
There’s no such thing as hot-swappable RAID0. If you lose a drive then 1/8th of your data (in an 8 drive RAID0, one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard of) is gone forever and the 7/8ths of the data that’s intact is completely useless.
Plot on an SSD, farm storing your plots on the individual drives (JBOD). You could fill up one completely or work your way through a few plots at a time so that if a drive dies you don’t lose as many plots.
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- RAID 0 by-design has NO redundancy - it splits writes and reads across disks based on logic in the controller - that is how it achieves the increase in throughput. This also means a SINGLE disk going bad or being removed from the array, destroys the entire array. FULL STOP. This is the worst idea for storing completed plots because of the fragility of the array.
- Plotting on a RAID 0 setup temporarily and then moving it to alternative storage is fine - the worst case scenario is you stand to lose any in-progress PLOTS.
- RAID 1, 5, 1+0, etc. are all different configurations of arrays that include redundancy. These types of arrays can stand to lose different number of disks and have them hot-swapped with replacements. ALL of these array types will have a total capacity of LESS THAN simply adding the sizes of all the disks as some portion of the disks/entire disks will be used for parity data. NOTE: When a disk is pulled and replaced with a new one, the array will typically freeze operation while it rebuilds the array (i.e. introduces the new disks and fills it with it’s appropriate portion of the data). This can take hours. While this is more resilient to failure and good for retaining important data, a lot of people feel like it’s much cheaper to just lose the plot data and make new plots rather than sacrificing space to make sure you keep the plots you have.
Conclusion - a JBOD setup of N disks is the best setup for Chia. The drives can be pulled/thrown away if they fail and replaced with new drives you can start filling with new plots. Otherwise the files and drives mostly sit idle while you farm them for years to come.
The entire strategy with Chia is: To have as much filled, online storage as you can afford.
98% of us are “filling” that storage by also plotting, but there are plotting services out there that will sell you completely full disks of plots to… so it’s entirely possible you scrap the entire plotter build (high speed compute part) and just spend all your money on a huge JBOD setup that you hook to a relatively inexpensive machine that sits online and responds to network challenges.
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Okay, so RAID 0 will be an absolute no go then, didnt realize the lack of redundancies so I will be using JBOD. Follow up question, the 8 drives in my NAS will be covered under JBOD but I will also be running 6 hdd’s in my PC off a pcie sata expansion card. Would I be able to run JBOD on these hdd’s as well?
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So the good news is that “JBOD” just means “an enclosure of some kind to hold and power a bunch of disks that passes the connection through to the Mobo/Operating System to figure out what to do with it”
So on the D800 (the USB-C version) - when you plug it into Windows, Windows Explorer just shows you suddenly have 8x more disks (Drive D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K - for example)
NOTE: The D800 and other nice-enclosures MIGHT offer some form of basic RAID’ing from a controller card in the device; I’m not sure if it does or doesn’t. But I believe you can just ignore that if you don’t want to use it.
As long as your mobo and OS can support it - you should just end up with a shit-ton of hard drives listed … and I’m pretty sure most modern OS’s and motherboards should be fine with this.
In Short: You (should be) all good!
Perfect, I’m using the D800S which is essentially the same thing but is uses a QXP pci-e expansion card for faster transfer speeds. I believe the Z590 Prime A Asus motherboard I’m getting shouldnt have any issue with that, I’ll be running on windows 10, no linux since this is a personal rig. I guess it doesn’t make any sense to do JBOD so I’ll just stick to having a ton of individual drives and fill them individually that way if any drive fails I won’t lose any data on the other drives in my array
We have really similar builds - I did the ASUS Z590-PLUS, the QNAP stuff is aspirational once I fill this up 
nice! ill update with some pictures back here once I receive my QNAP NAS