 So I just had a bit of a scare guys. I thought Murphy's Law really had it in for me today. This is the stack of 8 3 terabyte hard drives that I'm using to upgrade my storage server that I archive all my footage on and all of that. And it appeared to me not that long ago, you can see the network is critical, which is bad. It appeared to me that I had lost two hard drives at the same time, meaning that the redundancy that Windows Home Server V1 provides was not applicable to any data that was on both of the failed hard drives. However, it looks like, upon further inspection, the Western Digital 1 terabyte black that's in there is back up and running and only the Hitachi right here is actually dead. So that was a real relief because it means that I do have to repair the network, or the backup database in all likelihood. Oh no, it looks like the backup database is okay. Awesome, those were on the WD. But I do have to remove the Hitachi drive at some point. So yeah, that's very disappointing and very frustrating because it takes a few hours to get that done. And I was really hoping to get these new drives in there and get them rated up and get Windows Home Server V2 on here. I had to...oh, sorry, I was just packaging some new drives. Had to pull out some existing drives. This one failed a little while ago. The wildfire was just in there for testing purposes. There's a few Seagates. These are old Seagates. 7200.10s. All of them survived. Which is a testament to these particular drives, I guess. Two 320s and a 250. So those are kicking it. Well, kicking back. Not working anymore. Well, they work, but they're not going to continue to work for me. Whatever, you guys get the point. So this Hitachi is going to come out. That WD is going to move slots. And I'm going to be putting the eight new drives in the eight bays at the bottom. And then I'm going to be going with...you know what? Maybe I'll throw the wildfire in. It's got toggle man, so it should be pretty reliable for the boot drive of Windows Home Server V2 or 2011. Whatever you guys want to call it. Vail. It's been brought to my attention that you don't have to use a 240 gig drive. You can get away with a 120 with a little edit during the installation process. So that's a really good thing. And oh yeah, right. The kicker for all of this was that when the two drives were out, it told me the backup database was failed. And I actually just bricked the OS of my wife's computer and was about to use the Home Server backup restore utility to get her computer back up and running. So I thought I had lost pretty much everything. But now that that OneDrive is working, I'm in pretty good shape. So thanks for coming along for the ride, guys. And I'll keep you posted on my Windows Home Server upgrade. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos. So none of the new drives got detected at all. They're all detecting as zero gigabytes, which stands to reason since the firmware I'm running on my controller is older than my cat's. So I'm updating the firmware. All I got to do apparently is this. And apparently that didn't work. So I'll give it another crack. I'll get it updated and then we'll see how things go once we get booted into back into Windows and create the array. I think I'm going to go with a RAID 6. That worked. The file name just got truncated. So this is my first boot after updating the firmware. This is new. I hope that's a good sign. All right. So I'm into my RAID configuration. Physical drives. Let's see if they... Oh, they are detected now. All right. So I guess we might as well do a quick tutorial on how to create a RAID volume on an Eureka RAID card. So we're going to call this RAID 6. I don't have another RAID 6. All my other drives are just pass through drives, which just means they're standalone drives. RAID set was created successfully. Cool. So let me see. OK, so I could expand it. I could activate incomplete RAID set. I guess that's pretty much it. I could create hot spares. I can rescue RAID sets, delete hot spares. Oh, neat. That's actually not a bad idea. I should probably use one as a hot spare since I don't really need all the capacity to go to go with it right now. So what a hot spare will do is if a drive fails, it'll automatically go right in and rebuild the array. So let's have a look at the... actually, oh, no, not this one. Sorry. Let's have a look at the volume that has just been created. Disk management. Here we go. Refresh. Rescan disks maybe. There it is. No, wait, that's not it. 20 gigs. Oh. Let's see if we can find it. I wonder if the OS is even compatible. Haven't done this in a while, so for one thing, I screwed up when I created it and I accidentally created it with only seven drives. So OK, there we go. Now it has member disks, eight out of eight. Now we have to create a volume set. So we select the RAID set to create a volume set. Then we make a volume name. And we're going to call it RAID 6 again. OK, volume RAID level. This is where we can actually edit the change of the RAID level. Volume capacity, maximum 18 terabytes. Excellent. Yeah, these are 4K foreground initialization. Should be fine. Let's go with default for all this stuff. OK. Volumes to be created one. Here we go. Volume set has been created. Now we should be able to see it in disk management. In theory. Theories don't always work out that way. Give me a bit. Ah, yes, it's initializing. I'll be back once it's done. That takes a while. All right, there we go. It is in a RAID state normal now, which means that I can go ahead and disk management. Aha. Welcome to the initializing convert disk wizard. Next disk 16 initializing. Finish. So there is my 16 terabyte volume, which has been split up. I forget how this works. Yeah, we need to convert to a GPT disk so that we can make it the full size instead of being limited. So do do do do do do do can be only be accessed from Windows server. Blah blah blah. OK. Got it. Primary partition. Assign X for extreme. Next. Raaad. Whoops. Apparently I have caps lock on already. Grade six. Perform a quick format. Finish. Because the cluster count is higher than expected. That's interesting. Yeah. Why don't we try not a quick. Oh, that's going to take forever. Let's try one more time. Oh, OK. Well, let's see if I can figure this out now. Gotta love extreme hardware. At least just works. Found a great article on the support site for Microsoft for the default cluster sizes for NTFS. And it looks like even though my volume is greater than 16 terabytes, it is not defaulting to eight kilobytes. So as soon as I recreate it, do do do do do. Using an eight kilobyte setting, we should be able to get access to the drive formatting and healthy local disk X. There we go. So now let's run a quick benchmark and find out how fast this raid six is. Now we've all been spoiled by SSDs when it comes to huge addo scores, but I'm still pretty optimistic so far looking at this guy right here. Holy cow. We've already reached one gigabyte per second in sustained reads at 16 K. At 30 K, we're up to over one point two gigabytes per second reads. The rights are slower because we're going to be controller limited on those. So as fast as your raid controller is, is as fast as you can write to a raid six. A raid five would be faster on the rights. Holy smokes. We're up over one point six gigs per second and it looks like that's probably where we're going to peak. So wow. One point five on that one. So yeah, we peak at around 700 megs per second, right? And around one point five or one point six gigs per second read. Just ridiculous. Okay, I'll be back once the benchmarks. So there you go, guys. That's what we ended up with. Now let's do another run at a deeper queue depth. So that should give us some interesting results. These are just staggering, staggering numbers for a mechanical setup. Well, not much of an impact on scores. I am curious, though, to see how this array performs in raid five as opposed to raid six. So I'll try raid five with a hot spare, which basically gives similar data protection to raid six because you could have two drives fail as long as they don't fail at exactly the same time. And the hot spare would swoop right in and take over for the one that failed. Whereas raid six can take two failures at the same time. I just want to see how much of a performance difference we see in these right performance in these right performance numbers with raid five. So thank you for checking out this little raid six experiment and stay tuned for more on my Windows home server upgrade. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.