Home Server/NAS build

crazydom

No I was trying to be helpful. Merely stating the reliability of Samsung SSD's. NAS (Network Attached Storage) And I get it is for reliability. If this is the case Western Digital large capacity drives 4TB (RED) Lower power consumption, lower spindle speed (5900rpm I think) and yes in RAID configuration (or scheduled clone backup non raid) Don't jump to conclusions when you comment. And don't Chinese whisper mis quote me either.

crazydom

ED E wrote: »

He's on the list but Ive left a post for the maintainer to make him aware of doms activity.

Why not just message me privately and find out whether I was a spammer or not. I have posted on many gaming forums yesterday as I made a gaming build last month and learned many pieces of information that I though could benefit others. Sorry for trying to be helpful.

ED E

ED E wrote: »

Think the onboard NIC on the current unit might be on the way out, has dropped offline twice in 24hrs. Might have to do this build sooner than expected.

Crisis averted. Turns out it was just the 8800 GTX finally dying for the third time :P Time to swap in some lower power unit.

ED E

So, funds almost ready. Plan to build now sometime during September so I can have it running before college picks up again if possible.

Problem is, I cant for the life of me make up my mind on the storage config.
RAID 5, has issues
RAID 0, Nooooope
RAID 1, alright
RAID 10, can either do a "hack"/workaround to trick windows into doing it or buy a raid card(hurts the budget)

Going with the Asrock octa board the onboard SATA controller are too dispersed to be usable. This is where Storage spaces could amalgamate up to 11 drives into a storage pool nicely. Then a VHD on top.

Or go with flexraid, Serephucus you seem to love it but their site isnt great at really detailing features, seems a little empty. I'd want to be sure its tested fully before adopting it as once its in Ill be dependent on it. They say:

Moreover, parity is computed transparently to enable data recovery in the event a drive failure. New drives being protected can be added while preserving their existing data. This makes it easy to add and remove a drive from the protective array. So, you get all of the protection benefit of RAID without actually running in RAID mode and none of the restrictions!

Is it really as easy as they make it sound, like a drobo?

This is turning into a thread for server & systems, not that you'd ever get a reply over there

Regarding the disks themselves

======STORAGE:====(Amazon prices)========
2TB:
WD RED-
Current£68.53 Highest *	£99.00 Lowest *	£68.39 Average +£70.29	
SG Barra- (Potential issue)
Current	£60.04Highest *£94.98 Lowest *£62.99 Average +£66.97
SG NAS-
Current	£77.73	Highest *£102.49 Lowest *£77.98	Average +	£90.03 

3TB:
WD RED-
Current	£87.41	Highest *	£145.00 Lowest *£87.34 Average +£89.63
SG Barra- (Potential issue)
Current	£77.05 Highest *£137.99 Lowest *£85.00 Average +£91.95 
SG NAS-
Current	£93.55	Highest *£124.94	Lowest *£93.55	Average +£97.19

4x WD reds for a start should do it. €440.

/rambling. Ill add more to this tomorrow.

vibe666

The last time I used RAID5 on a consumer NAS (4x 1.5tb drives) I had a disk failure, then got a URE whilst trying to rebuild the array and almost ended up losing everything, although the NAS mfg support guys were able to remote on and recover *almost* everything and get it rebuilt, it was a good warning for me.

Ever since then I've always gone with RAID6 with a 2nd non-RAID copy of all the critical data (documents, family photos etc.) stored on another box locally and backed up to something cloud based, just to be 100% sure.

Anwyay, there's a good article about URE's in RAID here: http://www.zdnet.com/has-raid5-stopped-working-7000019939/

ED E

Mmmm, there are a good few examples of that online, no point investing in redundancy only to have it totally doom you.

Flexraid seems to be good in this regard. Take 4x3TB drives. 3xData, 1xParity. Lose the parity drive? 3 Data drives are safe. Lose a data drive, recover it with the parity drive. Lose a data drive and then get a URE on the parity drive? Only lose one very small chunk of data. Lose the parity and a data in one go? Keep 2/3 of the data.

Hopefully Serephucus will confirm I'm interpreting this correctly.

Wossack

yea I wouldnt be a big fan of hardware raid in a home environment for reasons above. Need to couple it with backup regime, or mirrored array to have peace of mind from the big 'lose everything scenarios' methinks - grand for corporate stuff, as they have the budget for that sort of thing, but for home use, I'd take the performance hit for a software raid type setup - unraid, flexraid, snapraid, zfs, WHS drive extender/pooling (RIP?)

your post above ED_E, dont know offhand if thats how flexraid works, but thats certainly how unraid does it

with unraid infact, further to the above, if the server goes entirely tits up (PSU kills the mainboard or whatever), you can remove the disks, and (after installing a suitable reiserfs driver), you can read the data directly from them individually - data's not stretched across drives etc

unfortunately its become a bit stagnant of late, so I dont know if I'd be rushing to recommend it over some of the newer offerings without doing a lot more research, but when I bought into it (~4 years ago), I weighed a lot up and went with unraid. zfs was a close second, but looked considerably more complex to get going

ED E

ZFS is lovely, but the overhead is too high for this role.

Flexraid disks are NTFS so you can pull them and pop em into a dock if the worst happens. The more I read the more I like it.

Serephucus

And that's where I am with FlexRAID at the moment. :P

You've done your research it appears. All correct. (In so far as I've read up on it; we could both be wrong).

It should also be noted that I don't use FlexRAID for everything. Only my movies and TV rips are stored on the array. My documents, pictures, and any other irreplaceables are stored on a separate drive, which backs up nightly to a twin. It's only literally popped into my head this second, but I suppose I could simply backup the data to the FlexRAID array to cut down on a disk... Hmmm...

As far as I've read/seen, the only real place you lose out with FlexRAID over something like ZFS or a dedicated RAID card is performance (and the real-time security, obviously). But really, who cares, when 4TB drives can sustain ~120MB/s speeds, and all you're doing is streaming off the thing?

ED E

Yeah, IO load will be very low, there'll be some tasks that will thrash the disks a bit but they'll be scheduled at 2-4AM when nothing else will be happening.

One thing I cant get my head around is the parity system. I understand the concept of parity, but as theres no striping and files are kept intact on drives, how does a single 2TB drive provide parity for several other drives enough to entirely recreate the files.

To the google machine!

[20 minutes of reading and confused faces later]

This makes it so much clearer:

am still confused on how the parity works for flexraid. For example. I have 3 x 2tb drives containing data and a fourth which is designated as my parity drive. If there is 4tb (3.8 actually) of combined data between the three 2tb drives, how is a single 2tb drive going to have enough capacity to handle parity of the three 2tb drives?

This is where I am getting confused. How can 4tb of data fit on a single 2tb parity drive? I understand parity is not necessarily the sum of the total data but it just doesnt make sense to me.

In simple terms, the parity looks at the same bit block on each HD and sees if it is a 1 or a 0. It sums this total and stores it on the parity drive. If one of the drives fail, the parity will look at the other HDs bit total and compare it to the parity. If it matches, then that bit on the missing drive was 0. If it's short one, it knows the bit was 1.

FlexRaid's parity works well. I've restored 930GB of data on a HD.

If nothing else comes from this, my understanding of RAID will be much better. Now sold on FlexRaid, back to hardware.

Serephucus

Yup, took me a bit of googling to figure that one out as well. It's basically one big XOR check, if that helps.

Just as a refresher, what's your current thinking RE hardware?

ED E

Cant say no to that Avaton.



I saved some parts lists as examples:

Amazon Sample Build

Corsair CMV8GX3M2A1333C9 Value Select 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1333 Mhz CL9 Mainstream Desktop Memory Kit £63.50
Silverstone SST-DS380B - SST-DS380B External 8x 3.5" SAT Hot-Swap ; 4x 2.5" - Black £139.62
Silverstone SST-ST30SF - Strider SST-ST30SF SFX Series - 300 Watt £46.84
C2750D4I - ASROCK MAINBOARD MINI-ITX WITH INTEL AVOTON C2750 8-CORE CPU £340.00

Subtotal (4 items): £589.96 + UNKNOWN SHIPPING

Eh no amazon, thanks.

Scan Sample Build
300W Silverstone ST30SF Strider SFX, 80Plus Bronze, PSU£30.30 £36.36
8 Bay Silverstone SST-DS380B Premium Small Form Factor NAS Case with 3 Fans 3.5"/2.5" HDD/SSD SATA/SAS w/o PSU (SFX) £89.20 £107.04
ASRock C2750D4I, Intel, Intel Octa Core Avoton C2750, DDR3, SATA III 6Gb/s, D-Sub, Mini ITX £219.50 £263.40
8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Value Select DDR3 PC3-10666 (1333), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 9-9-9-24, 1.5V £51.80 £62.16

Total Inc Vat + P&P: £480.46

€600.85
That+drives would be €1040, say €1100 with accessories. Oh and an SSD for like another 80.

Its a little more than I initially had in mind, but considering the working life of a unit like this it makes sense to invest in something decent. Can shave €55 by dropping from the Silverstone to the CM N600, I dont need the hot swap bays, but they are nice (again shut up and take my money).

Theres no geizhals.de for Scan is there? Also if I manage to spot a good deal on the 3TB reds I could save a good few quid that way.

Serephucus

That's pretty damn similar to the build I have in mind (if/when money actually gets saved). I think Geizhals has a pretty good deal on the Reds at the minute. The 3TB ones are around the €100 mark IIRC.

Then there's also Denverton...


Edit: Oh, I'd also spend the extra £3 and get ECC memory. It's also on ASRock's QVL.
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-crucial-ddr3-pc3-12800-(1600)-240-pins-ecc-unbuffered-cas-11-low-voltage

Altheus

I'm in same boat now, and I'm troubled. I'm finding it hard to justify the e300 spend on the C2750/2550. It's a hardcore server board, but going a Celeron/Pentium/I3/Atom route would be seriously cheaper, which frees up enough for an extra 4TB drive for better reliability/redundancy.

I'm probably headed the FreeNAS route (running off a USB Stick / no SSD needed) as it seems like it has plenty of great plugin support. I'll run around 8-12 devices off it, but probably never more than 2-3 at a time, with that in mind, not so sure I need an 8-core chip. I'll never use the awesome LAN management stuff and the extra redundancy outweighs ECC RAM.

I'm looking at 5x4TB instead of 4xTB .

16TB RAID6 config ~7.5TB vs 20TB RAID6 - ~11.6TB
16TB RAID5 config ~11.3TB vs 20TB RAID5 - ~15TB

Using this calc: http://www.servethehome.com/raid-calculator/raid-reliability-calculator-simple-mttdl-model/ - It gets me down to a conservative estimate of data being safe for 10 years (0.00285%)

I was looking at the Lian Li Q08B as it has enough internal HDD trays to sate my glut of drives. http://www.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsps?adp=0&aid=35870&agid=1200&apop=2

I'm thinking of going the HGST Deskstar route (5 year warranty) based on this (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/)- http://www.hardwareversand.de/en/7200+RPM/161128/HGST+Deskstar+NAS+4TB+6Gb+s+SATA+RTL+3%2C5.article

Wossack

think the sweet spot at the moment for €/Gb is with 3TB drives - but could be wrong

Altheus

Wossack wrote: »

think the sweet spot at the moment for €/Gb is with 3TB drives - but could be wrong

Yep, for the HGST drives, it works out around 50 euro more expensive for 5x4TB vs 7x3TB.

ED E

Serephucus wrote: »

That's pretty damn similar to the build I have in mind (if/when money actually gets saved). I think Geizhals has a pretty good deal on the Reds at the minute. The 3TB ones are around the €100 mark IIRC.

Then there's also Denverton...


Edit: Oh, I'd also spend the extra £3 and get ECC memory. It's also on ASRock's QVL.
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-crucial-ddr3-pc3-12800-(1600)-240-pins-ecc-unbuffered-cas-11-low-voltage

Thats because you suggested all the parts at the start of the thread and I couldn't find better stuff, you were on the ball with your first reply.

Assume Denverton is going to be even more costly :pac:

Thanks for saving me from another idiot mistake.

Altheus wrote: »

I'm in same boat now, and I'm troubled. I'm finding it hard to justify the e300 spend on the C2750/2550. It's a hardcore server board, but going a Celeron/Pentium/I3/Atom route would be seriously cheaper, which frees up enough for an extra 4TB drive for better reliability/redundancy.

I'm probably headed the FreeNAS route (running off a USB Stick / no SSD needed) as it seems like it has plenty of great plugin support. I'll run around 8-12 devices off it, but probably never more than 2-3 at a time, with that in mind, not so sure I need an 8-core chip. I'll never use the awesome LAN management stuff and the extra redundancy outweighs ECC RAM.

I'm looking at 5x4TB instead of 4xTB .

16TB RAID6 config ~7.5TB vs 20TB RAID6 - ~11.6TB
16TB RAID5 config ~11.3TB vs 20TB RAID5 - ~15TB

Using this calc: http://www.servethehome.com/raid-calculator/raid-reliability-calculator-simple-mttdl-model/ - It gets me down to a conservative estimate of data being safe for 10 years (0.00285%)

I was looking at the Lian Li Q08B as it has enough internal HDD trays to sate my glut of drives. http://www.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsps?adp=0&aid=35870&agid=1200&apop=2

I'm thinking of going the HGST Deskstar route (5 year warranty) based on this (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/)- http://www.hardwareversand.de/en/7200+RPM/161128/HGST+Deskstar+NAS+4TB+6Gb+s+SATA+RTL+3%2C5.article

The Avaton is OTT for a basic NAS, Im only going for it as it'll be running other stuff too.

Wossack wrote: »

think the sweet spot at the moment for €/Gb is with 3TB drives - but could be wrong

Im seeing the same, 3TB is definitely the best value right now.

vibe666

I have seven of the 4tb HGST drives in my Synology and they've been great so far, not skipped a beat in the last 9 months and performance is exactly as you'd expect, although they're definitely noticeably quieter and running slightly cooler than the samsung 2tb's that they're replacing.

and yes, could hardly say no with the price and warranty on them.

possibly over-cautious, but I bought them at 3 different times from 3 different suppliers just in case there might be a bad batch, didn't want to risk having them all fail at once due to some manufacturing fault or dodgy firmware revision.

but yes, likely over-cautious.

ED E

Funds sorted, amazingly.

Starting the final build list, just realized we never specified it was RAID-F and not tRAID we were talking about

In terms of drives these are on HDUK but now at 1-2 months for dispatch
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-3-5-inch-Desktop-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLW4M/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=1-1&keywords=Western+Digital+Red

But, HWVS have them at €105! Sorted. Thinking I may just go for 3x3TB for now, 6TB should be plenty for now and with 8TB drives hitting the market the 3's are just going to drop further between now and when I fill em.

For the SSD I'm thinking Samsung again. 830 has served me well and iirc 840 Pro = 830, so thats the one. That said the EVO is a chunk(50 vs 76 GBP) cheaper, thoughts? Or this is at its best price yet?



So thats an idea of what we're at now. Look right?

Serephucus

I was talking about RAID-F the whole time, just to be perfectly clear. :P

There's also the MX100 from Crucial. Doesn't quite beat the 840 Pro on performance, but it's not far off, and it's cheaper than even the Evo.

Also, make sure you have enough room for Plex's database files. With my ~6TB of stuff, my database files are around 95GB, though they can be moved to any drive you like. I also have verbose logging enabled in PMS, just in case anything does happen, to have as much info as possible.

TheDoc

Interesting thread, I'm putting a build together myself with the below.

Western Digital 3 TB Red £95.47
Corsair CMX4GX3M2B1600C9 XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600 Mhz CL9 Performance Desktop Memory Kit £35.90
ASRock FM2A88X-ITX+ Motherboard (Socket FM2+, AMD A88X, DDR3, S-ATA 600, Mini ITX, 1x PCI Express 3.0 x16, A-Style) £70.85
AMD A4 5300 CPU (3.4GHZ, 1MB Cache, 2 Core, HD7480D, Socket FM2, 65W, Retail Boxed) £27.95
LiteOn IHAS124-04 24x SATA Half Height Internal DVDRW Drive - Black £12.58
Corsair Builder Series CX 430 Watt ATX/EPS 80 PLUS Bronze Power Supply Unit £29.99

€360 total including shipping. I also need to add a Case which I have picked out on another site for €40.

Any thoughts on the above? I'm trying to keep the price down. I had a 500GB HD in there for £40 but figured I'm getting more bang for my buck if I lob in the extra €100.

Main purpose of the machine is media playback, and also to oeprate as a downloading machine (replacing a laptop).

I've a NAS that I use to store my media, so I'm somewhat torn on the size of the HDD in this machine, against the cost.

TheDoc

@ED E

Are you finding scan to be a bit cheaper then amazon or ?

Johnboy1951

TheDoc wrote: »

Interesting thread, I'm putting a build together myself with the below.

<snip>

Any thoughts on the above? I'm trying to keep the price down. I had a 500GB HD in there for £40 but figured I'm getting more bang for my buck if I lob in the extra €100.

Main purpose of the machine is media playback, and also to oeprate as a downloading machine (replacing a laptop).

I've a NAS that I use to store my media, so I'm somewhat torn on the size of the HDD in this machine, against the cost.

If you have a NAS for storage do you really need storage in the media player?
Could it not download direct to the NAS?

ED E

TheDoc wrote: »

@ED E

Are you finding scan to be a bit cheaper then amazon or ?

Common stuff is usually cheapest on amazon, more unique stuff can be crazy there though. In the case of the avaton board its a lot cheaper, thus the ordering from 3 places.

TheDoc

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

If you have a NAS for storage do you really need storage in the media player?
Could it not download direct to the NAS?

That's what I do at the moment AI yeah. Probably will go 500gb to save a few quid noe I think of it.

NAS has 1TB drive in it with slots i have never filled. I manage my media and delete stuff so never come close to full .

Serephucus

Could also go with a cheap 30GB SSD or something, might be an option.

Also, if you're looking for something cheap, just to play media, a NUC might be something to look at too. Works out at around €400 for an i3/4GB/60GB SSD, AFAIK.

TheDoc

Serephucus wrote: »

Could also go with a cheap 30GB SSD or something, might be an option.

Also, if you're looking for something cheap, just to play media, a NUC might be something to look at too. Works out at around €400 for an i3/4GB/60GB SSD, AFAIK.

Had a look at NUCs and not really sold on them tbh. Anything I saw was expensive for bare bones sets that needed another few parts taking the price a bit too much.

Not overly interested in SSD since its pointless for a HTPC. Would prefer a bigger sotrsge HDD.

Think I'll drop down to 500GB and then hopefully can make some second hand sales and pull the trigger on this

ED E

Checked and 3 fans included, so cooling sorted. 6x headers to run them and ramp em down to like 30%. 2xMolex for power, grand. Sata power free for SSD, check. No need for peripherals thanks to the IPMI

If I'm doing anything stupid please shout, will order this later on today otherwise.

ED E

Done. Unfortunately while I was making my mind up the mobo went out of stock with the case and PSU already awaiting a restock. Could be a few weeks I suspect, but thats alright. Will post pics when its built.

Big props to Serephucus and everyone else for the help.

Serephucus

Can't wait to see the results of this. I have an SFX PSU ordered for mine, and I'll be grabbing the case and motherboard when they come back in stock. Should have money for them by later this week. (waiting on RMA refund)