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So I finally bit the bullet -- I'm building a Home NAS server.

I found a 4 bay Hot swap SATA enclosure for under $100 -- so I'm repurposing some old 3GHz P4 parts, and building a 4 bay RAID 5 NAS Server. I'm likely going to throw Linux on there and run a DLNA compliant media server.

What does this get me?

a media server with 3TB of storage (to start)... and the ability to recover from a crashed hard drive.

I'm going to back up all my pics, music and TV series DVDs to the machine so listening and watching shows is as simple as turning on my PS3 and selecting an episode (That's what the DLNA server is for).

I'm actually pretty stoked about this little project...

I'm hoping to expand it to be able to rip all my DVDs and BDs to it in the sometime future....

Are you using the Kingwin enclosure that takes up 3 5.25" bays?

Does the FreeNAS distro support your PS3? A lot of guys are raving about it.

I've got two 4-port, RAID-capable SATA host adapters on my motherboard. I was going to use that Kingwin enclosure for the Silicon Image Sil3114 adapter and re-configure from a small RAID-1 to the same thing - a very large RAID-5.

awesome!

NOS2Go4Me,Apr 22 2009, 12:00 PM Wrote:Are you using the Kingwin enclosure that takes up 3 5.25" bays?

Does the FreeNAS distro support your PS3? A lot of guys are raving about it.

I've got two 4-port, RAID-capable SATA host adapters on my motherboard. I was going to use that Kingwin enclosure for the Silicon Image Sil3114 adapter and re-configure from a small RAID-1 to the same thing - a very large RAID-5.
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Yup, I'm starting with the Kingwin enclosure... and the motherboard will have 4 eSATA ports as well for another external RAID enclosure or two down the road.

I'm sort of torn between using freeNAS or using Ubuntu and configuring fuppes and all that stuff myself (fuppes appears to work rather well through the PS3). I may test with freeNAS first and see -- I've heard complaints about playback of .vob and other large-sized files, but we'll see.

The documentation for freeNAS is a bit light too. If the web interface proves useless, I'll drop it and put in Ubuntu. I have an 80Gb boot drive that I'll be using for the OS, so it's not like I'm tight on space.

I'm interested to see how the software NAS stacks up with the 2 PCIe controller cards and a single core 3GHz processor. Hopefully it won't choke when transcoding media from the RAID 5 array.

mmm.... nachos

kingpin....great movie.

ANTHONYD,Apr 22 2009, 10:26 PM Wrote:kingpin....great movie.
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started building up the machine yesterday as the first few parts arrived.

The kingwin drive bays are pretty sweet -- but they don't have locks on them, and I can see myself playing with the doors and popping drives indiscriminately if the server's in arm's reach...

Apparently the mobo takes DDR2, and I only have DDR memory -- so gonna have to pick some up today

I may also pick up a gigabit ethernet for the machine as well, since the onboard is only 10/100.. no biggie there.

The thing I'm not so sure about is with going with RAID 5... I want to do that to maximize capacity, but not sure if the tradeoffs of performance and increased likelyhood of lost data down the road are worth it.

My options are to go for 3TB RAID 5 or 2TB RAID 10... I just love the sound of 3TB of data (that'll hold 300 of my DVDs)... but do I want the increased risk of losing stuff down the road? I dunno..

Since the machine will support it, I'm tempted to build it out with 3TB RAID 5 for now -- and save up for an external drive box.. load that up with 2TB drives and mirror them -- 6 drives in the external box = 6TB mirrored, and then transform the current setup from RAID 5 to RAID 10 and have a total of 8TB mirrored storage.

Gonna have to think about this one.

If RAID5 is good enough for my production servers here at work, it should be good enough for your home NAS! :D

Ryan

reldridge,Apr 24 2009, 10:32 AM Wrote:If RAID5 is good enough for my production servers here at work, it should be good enough for your home NAS! :D

Ryan
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yes and no..

as work production servers tend to use smaller enterprise-level disks (Fibre Channel or other) they have a lower unrecoverable read/write error occurance than high capacity consumer drives (which is what I'm using)

statistically speaking, the larger your RAID 5 array, and the larger the size of the disks, the greater the probability of both a disk failure and a failure during rebuild due to an unrecoverable read/write operation.

factor in the fact that I'm using consumer drives that have a higher MTBF and Higher rate of unrecoverable read/write operation, I have a significantly greater risk of data loss using RAID5

And with mirroring, sure there's still that chance of data loss, but dataloss is usually just partial.

We'll see how the RAID 5 works to start... if there's a performance issue, it's a moot point.

True that... Most of my RAID5 here is based on 300 GB SCSI U320 drives. Running on a dedicated HP RAID controller.

Plus I still have tape backup, should anything go wrong...

doing the math.. the maximum expandable size of my server is 98TB... that's a lot of porn!

DP,

Since you have the physical media anyways in the case of a catastrophic failure of the drives, do you really want the extra expense of going with a Lincoln cost solution when a Ford cost solution will do?

As much as I am a champion of data redundancy, at some point the cost of the solution far outweighs the risks of data loss.

Now if you're storing data for which no physical backup exists then yeah, I can see wanting the "all singing / all dancing" level solution.

Otherwise I say go consumer level and wait for solid state drives to mature and then go that route.

Just my 2 cents (plus GST/PST/HST where applicable)

NefCanuck

yeah.. I'll go RAID 5 and start saving money for a tape rack :P

I don't think I'll invest in SSD anytime soon. SSD really has a finite lifespan -- unlike HDD that have an average life before they wear out, an SSD is guaranteed to wear out.

SSD's have their uses -- but what I'm building needs to last longer than a typical business solution -- that's why I'm making it as flexible/expandable as possible

darkpuppet,Apr 24 2009, 11:10 AM Wrote:yeah.. I'll go RAID 5 and start saving money for a tape rack :P

I don't think I'll invest in SSD anytime soon.  SSD really has a finite lifespan -- unlike HDD that have an average life before they wear out, an SSD is guaranteed to wear out. 

SSD's have their uses -- but what I'm building needs to last longer than a typical business solution -- that's why I'm making it as flexible/expandable as possible
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Yeah, right now I would not recommend SSD for anything critical (I thought about an SSD drive to replace the one on my laptop for better battery life / access times, but with the lifespan issue it's not there yet)

Once it matures though, look out, I can see electro-mechanical HDD's going the way of the floppy disk drive.

NefCanuck

There's a lot of FUD out there about SSDs. The bottom line is that they have at LEAST a 5-year lifespan for most enterprise applications, which could equate into a much longer lifespan for home users.

Also, the RAID-5 "bit flip" rebuild error situation is indeed quite possible. See this article - Why RAID-5 stops working.

On the premise posed by that article, and due to the fact it's entirely likely in enterprise SATA/SAS deployments of ridiculously-large arrays, I cannot wait for the "bugs" to be sorted out with SSDs. Once the write/erase lifecycle limitations are fixed... rotational HDDs are a thing of the past - literally.

For my own sanity, I'd go with multiple RAID-1s. I did indeed consider a large, 4TB raw RAID-5 (3TB before formatting), but now I might just make two 2TB RAID-1 arrays.

hmmmm

The latest stable version of freeNAS doesn't support growing of RAID 5 arrays -- so that's out.

I may try the nightly build, since it has support for ZFS and RAID-Z (basically a more bulletproof RAID 5) ... I just don't like being a guinea pig -- but I guess worth trying out to see if it'll serve the media I put on it.... If so, that'll be ideal

BTW... ZFS is what gives Apple it's Time Capsule some of it's capabilities.. much nicer than leaving it to the gods to determine what lives and dies on your HDD.

*waits patiently for NOS to chime in on ZFS* :P

If I were a betting man...

NOS: "The problem with ZFS.....

well, it's up and running as a media server.. pretty nice if you ask me.

And I've already suffered a write failure (beta software.. go figure)... but totally recoverable... the zfs is pretty decent.

The NAS server hasn't broken 25% CPU or disk load yet... the cpu runs at 27C, the disks run at 39C, and it's not pushing the bandwidth hard -- seems the limit is on my computers being slow :P..

the real test will be streaming ISOs to the PS3.. just ripping a few now to try it out.

and 3TB of freespace is nice!

Actually, ZFS is a great idea. I won't slag what I haven't had the chance to break / make shine. Of course, the fact Sun designed it makes it fairly cool in tech circles to begin with ;)

Steve - which HDs do you have in there?

3TB of free space? I'm jealous! :)

Any pics of the Kingwin drive rack in operation? Nice flashy LEDs for drive read/write state?

And the million-dollar question - are you running the SATA host adapter in AHCI mode to even attempt a hot-swap rebuild?