Guide To Building A Media Storage Server - Page 2

All I have to do to enable duplication on the remaining files is to buy a single drive. Which would cost me far less than if I had to buy all new drives of equal size to do a RAID array.
I also have an external that I backup the server to as well.

And there are plugins for the WHS console for offsite backups.

I would take the less efficent duplication method over RAID any day due to the extra benefits of WHS itself along with the ability to use all of my drives of different sizes.

I do understand what you are saying. But RAID also has it's own drawbacks(everything has pros and cons) and not everyone can afford to buy a bunch of brand new drives especially when they already have a bunch of perfectly good drives.

For those who might be interested, there's a current thread in the Linux HTPC forum about using that OS for a media server.

As i requested for the configuration for WHS , i am planning to get above case for 20TB DAS. If you can come up with the article as soon as possible using Intel MB and Processor, i would really appreciate

The best possible and low cast DAS or NAS

Those are two contradictory statements as such, but I know where you're coming from.

The "cheapest" option in my opinion for ~20 disks, is:

- get three of the Supermicro MV8 cards, and get a motherboard with 3 PCI-X slots, and run software RAID.

You can't beat the price of those cards for 8 ports for $95. Anything else is more expensive, unless you start watching fleabay like a hawk waiting for a "good" deal.

Another option is to:

-Get a 4 port Silicon Image card and 4 port multipliers (~$85 for the card and about $340 for the 4 port multipliers)

But that's still more expensive.

I completely agree.
In this regard, and at the risk of being overly quantitative, it may be helpful to try to articulate the feature dimensions' that have to be implicitly or explicitly addressed in order to successfully build a media server. I know we all have different skills, goals, and budgets. My thinking is that if we can use this list to quantify our priorities, it may simplify our decision process. Some of these are obvious and are only listed for completeness sake; some of them can simply be builder options; but some of them are pivotal and will significant affect how useful the profiles defined in this thread are. Anyway, here's the list, please feel free to offer improvements

Media Server Feature Dimensions:
A. Runtime model (Bit streamer vs. Power HTPC; power up on demand vs. 24/7 operation; HW RAID vs. SW RAID)
B. Fault Tolerance (Quality components, minimize runtime corruption, backup plan, battery backup. (IMHO, there's little point in building this server without very solid robustness.))
C. Operating Costs (Assuming good MTBF components and relatively straightforward array extensions, this is primarily a power consumption issue.)
D. Initial costs (Both money and setup time)
E. Capacity (Execution and network bandwidth / storage size)
F. Maintainability (Primarily issue is extending array, hopefully little else to worry about)
G. System Complexity and User Technical Skills (Is our target user an IT Engineer or motivated AV hobbyist)
H. Software (OS choice, RAID, Ripping tools & Process, Converters, Playback SW)

I'd love to say that I want all of these, but unfortunately some of them oppose each other and force tradeoffs. (E.g. Skill vs. costs vs. capacity) Ultimately, these are odditory's call and will be addressed in the profiles he defines, but how he addresses them will ultimately determine how many people benefit from this thread. So my thinking is that if people chime in now and let him know what they value, it should help the overall value of the thread. I have previously stated that I am primarily interested in a low energy, robust, bit streamer, and am willing to subvert other features' for these but clearly there are other points of view, and I think it would be great for people to register them before we get too much inertia going

Gotcha, i am also planning for the same.

Does these cards work with WHS? And what are the other components i need? PSU 750W is in enough when i grow like 21 Drives, I may be planning Seagate 1.5TBs to hook up with except the main drive for OS....

Can you run ciprico's raid software with the supermicro cards?

The card has Windows drivers, so it's "compatible" with WHS from a driver point of view, but you won't be able to any RAID with the card and WHS.


How'd I know? Depends on your budget, what's in your parts box, what can you reuse, what chassis you are using...lots of things.

No.

Can you tell me if there is any major difference between the pci-x and the pci-e cards from ciprico?

Functionally none. I'm sure there are performance differences. PCI-X is just not as optimized as PCI-E, however, it doesn't mean PCI-X is a slouch. With a good motherboard that has multiple 133MHz PCI-X slots, you can reach almost equivalent performance.

Been a lurker for some time and thought I would finally chime in. This is something that I've been interested in lately. I'm looking to rebuild my HTPC and have been thinking of a HTPC server and NAS server. So here are some things I would like to see:

• OS: unraid or similar. I want something that can take multiple hdds of various sizes and still have the backup protection of raid without the cost. The downside with unraid is the write speed although with the latest version you can do a cache disk to help out. Plus they just released the multi-core version. I would like to record HD to this as well as stream movies, music, etc.
• Rackmount case: I like the Norco RPC-4020.
• CPU: Something dual core, cheap and runs cool.
• MB: as many sata connections as possible, dual gigabit nics, don't care about video or audio, boot from usb (for unraid).

My biggest question is raid vs something like unraid. So far what I see is that raid is faster but cost way more to maintain and grow. Unraid isn't fast but is getting better and very cheap to implement.

So with all that being said, my suggestion would be to base various system builds not only on know-how and cost but also the various OS/Raid styles. Like Combo 1 for someone that wants to build a Raid5 system, combo 2 for someone that wants an unraid system, combo 3 for someone that wants WHS.

That's my two cents.

Robert

I'd strongly recommend *against* doing dodgy cabling that goes in and out of cases, through multiple adaptors, and through excessively long cabling. SATA signaling voltages can only go so far, and at a certain point you're going to be running into signal integrity problems due to all those workarounds to connect your drives from one case to another. SAS uses higher voltages so it's more robust in these configurations, but you're likely to be using cheaper SATA drives.

One exception to this rule is if you have an intermediary that can boost the signal, such as a powered port multiplier or the like. However, the hardware required for port multiplier is rather overpriced, and hardware raid card choices are limited. I used to have a Highpoint PM card, but it could only manage about 120MB/sec no matter how I configured the drives. Additionally, the ESATA connector itself is rather flimsy compared to say, a latching miniSAS connector, and it can easily dislodge and cause your raid to die.

I think your hunch is right. If I recall correctly, the regular PCI bus is shared across all peripherals connected to the bus. All regular PCI cards will thus be sharing the same bus, which won't be able to go past 133MB/sec theoretically. Add overhead and all that, probably your max real world speed will be about 100MB/sec, and that will saturate your PCI bus. But like you said, if you only access 1 drive at a time, it wont be an issue since most hard drives won't read faster than 100MB/sec.

Then again, if they don't mind 100MB/sec performance, then maybe it'll
work for them, but I'm not sure if saturating the bus like that would cause
starvation of other PCI devices like soundcards, etc. I never tried it TBH.

Agreed, but with a bit of searching, you can find them. The ASUS DSBV-D is one such example. Dual 771, with 3 PCI-X slots (and a couple of PCI-e to boot)

Pair that with a single 40w dual core 5148 or something, and you'll be flying with power savings to boot.

It's not a problem. I have my 2 promise cards in PCI slots. You only need what? 4MB/s for HD video? I can transfer from my desktop to the server, stream HD to my HTPC and run a backup to my external drive from the server all without a hitch. Yes the file transfers and backup will slow down but it doesn't affect the video playback.

Prior to WHS PP1 all rights were to the landing drive and then got transfered to their final destination. Now all writes go directly to the drive they are intended for.

Being a server I don't use a soundcard on it. I do have an old Voodoo 3 I use in an AGP slot for video when I need it. But the only PCI cards are my 2 promise cards.

I tried WHS and now I'm running the opposite direction due to issues with managing large drive collections and windows instability and quirks. It's not easy to identify failing drives inside WHS. It's unstable like most Windows operating systems when it comes to drive failures even when it's not a system volume. If you lose a drive you have no idea what you've lost since it's pooled. In addition since you have to completely duplicate your data to protect it you most likely won't have a backup of what is lost. So I've finally given up on having a end all be all server. What I want is stability. I would only use WHS if you have a media server with very few drives.

So I've purchased parts for a new unraid server.

NORCO RPC-4020 4U Rackmount Server Case - Retail
Patriot Xporter XT 4GB Flash Drive - (2)
Intel Celeron 430 Conroe-L 1.8GHz LGA 775 35W Single-Core Processor
GIGABYTE GA-G31M-S2L Intel G31 Micro ATX Motherboard
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive - (2)
Unraid Server Pro Licenses - (2)
Supermicro SAT2 MV8 - (2) - Existing
Mixture of 400GB - 750GB drives - (19) - Existing - Will pick the newest and largest drives to get up to a total of 16 for unraid.
Corsair TX750W - Existing
Unraid

This build should be power efficient and offer a stable platform to serve my media.

Disk management add on can build a wire frame so you know exactly what drive is in what slot. Of course you tell it what is where. No OS is going to do that for you. They don't know in what bay of your computer a drive is installed in. Unraid won't tell you that. But with this addon you will know exactly what drive in what bay has failed.
http://forum.wegotserved.co.uk/index...s&full=1&id=64

There is a duplication add on, can't remember what it's called, but it shows you what data resides on what drive. Everything.
But if you lost the drive it doesn't matter what was on it if you have duplication enabled.
Edit - found it: http://forum.wegotserved.co.uk/index...ds&showfile=27

I don't know about instability. My server is rock solid. Been up since the last time the power went out. I don't even remember when that was. Even my Vista x64 desktop never crashes. Never locks up.

And you also have the ability to backup the entire server either to internal drives that are not part of the storage pool or external drive(s). so should your entire server die, should all the drives die for whatever reason you can still have a backup. My server is backed up to an external.
And you can choose from several online backup services with plugins for the WHS console. There is no replacement for offsite backups.

Yes I've used this and found that it was quite a bit more informative then the standard disk management tools. This issue I'm referring to are the logs in the event viewer. All the disk errors I was seeing wouldn't mention the volume's id in the error message. I would assume this is due to how WHS is handling the disks as I used Windows 2003 day in day out at work and the drives are identified on similar issues in the error messages. Disk management does some SMART checking but regular OS disk errors that are written to the event view aren't detected. Also there isn't any intelligent removal of failing drives. So your drives will continue to be written and read to until the drive utterly fails. This is not what I call a "reliable" set it and forget it solution to my data.

Second I had heard about this duplication plugin but I never fully looked into it's solution. Does this remember what's on all the drives even if the drive can no longer be accessed? So this catalogs non-duplicated shares as well? Also, to say well it can be duplicated that's just silly. I might as well install a free sync agent and keep a separate copy of everything I own. I have 7TB right now of data and I'm certainly not going to have a 14+ TB array just because I want to protect myself from a drive failure. Unraid makes much more sense.

So now I'll be running Unraid. I will be running off a jump drive with it's sole purpose to serve data on my network. I've reduced the chance of an OS drive failure and I'll also have a spare drive that should take a few minutes to switch over to in case of an issue. Unraid will automatically disable writing to a suspect drive from what I understand. I can withstand a drive failure and not lose any data. I guess I just want more of an appliance rather then something I'm still managing. A large WHS setup is still a chore and requires me to keep a close eye on it. Unraid will allow me to finally enjoy my nights away from the office instead of doing more computer work at home. I'll just end by saying, I'm sure it's fine for smaller installs but the more drives you're dealing with and the older they are the more chance you have for failure. I would not trust my current config with WHS.

Have you thought about WHS without duplication + FlexRaid for parity protection?

Drives are cheap. Your time to rerip, catalogue, artwork etc isn't.
Don't rely on WHS duplication to protect your data.

Backup it onto an external array or seperate system. This can easily be automated. The system can sleep and wake (WOL) only when a backup needs to take place.

Which motherboard would you recommend the ASUS or the Supermicro
X7DWE? With the Ciprico having a PCI-X version available of its RAID card, both boards become viable options. Is there any concern that the PCI-X slot would not be readily available in the future if the motherbaord dies?

Also, 1 question regarding the Ciprico cards... it says they support 32 drives. Is that for a single array or all drives attached the system? With the above motherboards, the drive count can be greater than the 32 specified.

Sorry to hijack, but I hope this compares the difference between 2 technologies and long term consideration.

TIA

AL

Can't really answer that. Technically, the X7DWE is a better board since it's based on the 5400B chipset and goes up to 1600FSB, but it is also a lot more expensive.

It really boils down to individual requirements, both are excellent boards.

I think the better deal is something like the TYAN S5211G2NR or the Supermicro MBD-X7SBA. Socket 775 CPU, normal DDR2 ram, and 2 PCI-X slots as well, plus a couple intel GbE ports. You can find them for about two hundred dollars, and you get 6 onboard SATA ports to boot. Add two of the 8 port SATA PCI-X cards, and you have 22 SATA ports, which fills up a norco 4020 well (with one SATA port for a system disk and the other for a slim optical drive). And the tyan has a couple PCI-E x16 slots to boot. They are both P35 based, with ICH9R SATA ports, so they are very fast onboard ports and well supported in DOS (er.. windows) and Linux.

The Socket 775 CPU's are much cheaper than the socket 771 models for the same performance, and no expensive FBDIMM's required, and these boards handle the latest 45 nm CPU's too. Alas, no overclocking capability...

PS And the tyan comes with a cheap onboard video controller too. :-)

I think you guys going the socket 771 route with FBDIMMs are really throwing money away.

Does max LAN speed dual 10/100/1000 mean that some how the two LAN ports can be bridged together to get 2000mbs speed?

Yes, it can be done, for e.g., with Link Aggregation (aka 802.3ad). The "speed" will still remain at 1gbps, but the "bandwidth" to the server goes up to 2gbps. SO you could have two workstations (as an e.g.) reading and writing to the server at full gigabit speeds without any deterioration.

For Link Aggregation to work, your switch has to support it, the NICs themselves have to support it, and the drivers have to support them.

Mine's setup that way.