So far, I didn’t find any disadvantage on tRAID versus Flexraid as far as “protection” is concerned(*). But I wait on performance test to see if there will be issues when simultaneously streaming movies to several “clients”.

(*) One of the main difference will be in case of disk failure: you will not be able not restore only a few files. Instead you will have to restore the whole disk. This could be quite slow for Terra-bytes disks. Meaning that you should possibly not use tRaid to protect files that need to be recovered within minutes. My current understanding is that FlexRaid and tRaid could possibly run side by side (on distinct ports, for sure, and with their own pool ?!). But I didn’t test that yet and read about people having issues trying to do so.

As there is still no support to “undelete” files deleted through the network, this could be also quite an inconvenient…

Thanks for getting back to me by the way! I do know what you mean in that development seems to have drastically slowed since they took on NZFS and tRAID. Will be exciting seeing the trickle down of advanced features into FlexRAID. I hope the issues I’m running into will be solved eventually. For now I may just disable pools and wait for the feature to advance. I just want at least some level of protection. I can forgo the convenience until the bugs are worked out. In your opinion is there any disadvantage of going with tRAID instead of F-RAID for someone like myself who just has a bunch of movies that I want to protect.

My home server is a old Supermicro 24bay system that has been modded for quiet computing. It is pretty funny the three old Supermicro HBA PCI-X cards still work in Windows Server 2012 Essential.

I don’t remember such an issue. But to be honest, I plan to move from FlexRaid to tRaid as soon as possible. Among other because I find FlexRaid sometimes too capricious (and because I like the robust “realtime” protection offered by tRaid).

Currently looking at the RC of tRaid, it appears to me that a lot of effort has been put on its development. It will solve most of the issues I have noticed while installing/configuring/using FlexRaid (a.o. because it works at disk block level instead of at file level).

Once the final version of tRaid will be released, the new “pool” system of tRaid will be integrated to FlexRaid. This should already solve a lot of issues one can sometimes experience with FlexRaid (as your I presume). Next, according to the team, the development of FlexRaid should continue, as it’s a product which is still valid for various scenario where tRaid won’t be the best solution.

Not with my current setup, but it’s not running 24/7. I turn it on to backup my other PCs, to transfer media from/to my NAS and “Verify” the parity data. And it never runs longer than 24 hours without interruption.

That being said I had BSODs at the beginning, while assembling my PC and testing FlexRaid. I did conclude it was due to drivers provided with some on-board controllers. I did re-install the server without those drivers (the defaults from Microsoft works fine) and had no issue anymore. Actually, I also had to remove the floppy disk drive as it was provoking sudden-reboots ?!