Guide To Building A Media Storage Server - Page 143

depends on the drive. i use western digital desktop drives with TLER enabled and they are fine. Seagate 1.5tb drives won't work (SD1A/B firmware might - haven't confirmed). I tried the CC1H firmware ones that you can't flash to SD* firmware.

This is a good idea. Even if I do eventually decide to replace those 1.5 drives to maximize capacity, I'm sure I could still find a good use for them.


Thanks for clarifying this. I got nervous there for a second and thought I might have to scratch my whole plan.

How long do you guys think it will be until single drives greater than 2TB are available? Because 2TB is a meaningful threshold for many OS's, wouldn't this slow down the normal progression of HD capacity in the market?

The WHS update (Vail) is expected mid/late next year. Supposedly, it will include an updated to Server 2008/Win 7 base OS and support for large (>2GB) hard drives.

Where are you guys getting your information about the next version of WHS? I just bought WHS and before I made my purchase I searched extensively for information and found nothing. I thought as soon as I bought it a new version would come out.

I gotta say that I am very happy to hear a new version is coming out which means that this product is popular enough to continue developing it.

I also did not know that WHS has a 2Tb drive limit (although not a problem at the moment).

You can just do a search online:

Vail will be x64 and based on Server 2008/W7

http://mswhs.com/2009/01/10/whs-vail...-the-tip-bits/

Hi All,
I'm a newbie at this media server thing... but feel a need for it after having filled up 3 external drives totalling about 2.5tb. I ran into this thread a while back and it's quite overwhelming to say the least. Want to get some thoughts on whether this is a good idea for a cheap media server:

Get a used rack mount server from ebay, like this one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=370278977631

throw in a raid card ($150) and a cheap OS hard drive ($50), load ubuntu and keep inserting new drives in the bays as the need increases.

Total comes to about $600-$700 without the drives.

That is a nice server. The 2 issues I have with them for home is they are loud and suck power lol. I tried with some commercial servers I had.

I ended up building my own out of parts I had. It's near silent, can hold 15 dives and keeps them current ones at about 26 Celsius steady. I run Ubuntu server 8.04.3 LTS on it using a Super Micro aoc-sat2-mv8 8 port controller and 7 drives. I'm actually growing the raid as we speak I get a steady 50-60MB up and down. I'll be adding another sat2-mv8 card here soon to start a second array.

When I first set up the machine, built the software raid, I was dumping files on it like a mad man via ftp from 2 desktops while it was assembling . Took 24 hrs to transfer everything I had and we watched blu-ray movies/TV Shows from it at the same time and it NEVER skipped a beat once.

I'm sold on linux, and I won't be looking to change anytime soon.

I'm still far from convinced that this type of hardware RAID (especially a commercial one) is the right solution for archiving and serving large media files.

Could someone help me out? The AOC-SASLP-MV8 says "LED cables not included." I'm not sure what cables I need to buy to get the LED working properly. Thanks

Does anyone have opinions on how the backplanes from icydock compare to these from istar?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-001-_-Product

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-048-_-Product

These are the cables I got for the SASLp to connect to my Chenbro cages:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00..._ya_oh_product

I'm still on the fence whether I go with WHS or RAID-5. One of the concerns I have with WHS is that most of my data (DVD rips) is not so important that I would want to utilize folder duplication and basically half my storage pool. However, if I lost a drive it would still be a pain in the ass to re-rip 300 movies. With RAID 5 I would have considerable protection against this event without sacrificing much storage.

If a drive fails in WHS, is there some sort of report you can access in WHS that tells you the names of all the files on that drive? Something that says, "Hey, WHS can no longer find the actual files for these tombstones...". This way, I would at least know which movies I needed to re-rip.

If I decided to do RAID 5 instead of WHS, I would probably go with Windows Server 2008 r2 as the OS. On the otherhand, this is quite costly. What would be the pitfalls of using the Windows 7 operating system on a server? I assume that addressing volumes over 2TB wouldn't be an issue?

In my own view I think you're looking at the wrong two options. If you are deciding between hardware and software based approaches it seems the best would be RAID 6 vs WHS/FlesRAID. You don't want RAID 5, and WHS basically mirrors so as you mentioned it eats up a lot of disk space. With WHS + FlexRAID you just use one large parity disk and can restore that way.

I've not yet looked into a preferred method to index what movies are on what drive, but I agree it would be a nice thing to have. I know there are very basic programs I've used in the past that can be run on a schedule and will dump a text file with the names of everything in a folder or drive - it could be run on a schedule. There may be other solutions built into front ends as well.

Thanks mnn1265. I had never heard of FlexRAID before, but after reading up on a it a little, it seems like WHS+FlexRAID could be the ideal solution for me. Just a bit of a learning curve involved.

Also Just curious you could still run WHS (Windows Home Server) and Raid 5. Raid 5 is less expensive than RAID 6 and has been very beneficial in terms of some of our failed drives, rebuilding arrays etc. We use AMC Raid % cards that are discontinued but still come with 3 year replacement warranty, I have one with windows server 2008, and one with WHS...Drivers were a bit of a problem..but we've over come that hurdle...and I Find WHS to be fantastic when combined with Hardware Raid.

But thats just me, you have options and they are not mutually exclusive. You can have the best of both worlds.

Cheers,

Requis

Requis,

How do you implement RAID 5 in your WHS setup? If I understand things right, you can add the array volume(s) to the storage pool, or you can keep them separate.

If you don't add the RAID array to the storage pool, aren't you limited to volumes 2TB or smaller? So instead of having a single 8 TB volume, you would have four 2 TB volumes. I'm curious, if in this scenario you added 500 GB of data to one of these 2 TB volumes, would the space on this volume be reduced by 500 GB, or would the space on all 4 volumes be reduced by 125 GBs?

If you added the volumes to the the storage pool, this would ruin WHS's file duplication service, right? It would see the volumes at being separate disc drives when in reality they are one the same array. So duplication would no longer serve a purpose.

Norco 20 Bay Chassis -W/20 - 500Gb Drives -divided into five 4 drive configurations giving just a little less than two terabytes per drive cluster. Labeled as Media1, Media2, etc Media3, in WHS.

4 Internal Drives (Mcgyvered although no duct tape as Spares which the AMC Raid controller treats as separate UNITS 6,7,8,9 and labeled as spares that the Raid controller automatically assigns to a specific RAID 5 group in the event of a failure of a drive. This is especially nice when not near home base and a drive fails....only happened once though...and it was a nice automatic notification from the card letting me know I had a drive failure but that it had been replaced with one of the spares.


In this case I believe you are limited to 2TB volumes, which when in a RAID 5 is Something like 1.7TB Have not tried larger drives as Before Service Pack1 you could only do 2Tb max. I believe with the SP3 coming out that this limitation has been addressed..or may have been addressed with SP2. Given the chasis is maxed out with 500Gb Drives, I just bought a new Norco box and am using 1Tb Drives with Windows Server 2008.


Not sure, I have never expanded any one volume, on initial setup I created the 5 volumes as I could not get them to act as 1 Huge Volume in WHS. Today I am expanding into 2 additional Norco 4020's with 1 TB drives, using 2008 Server. I don't use duplication (other than from the other Endpoints and more to back up data to the WHS Server) In this instance WHS is simply treating each volume seperately, and I do not have a need for duplication on the server itself.

Does that help?

Cheers,

Requis


As a side note not sure if any one is playing with the Solid State Drives I picked up a couple of the OCZ 60GB Drives, and rebuilt both the WHS, and Windows 2008 Severs on them...wow very slick, this piece of mind is huge for me as I once lost the main OS drive....and thought...wow everything else is backed up kinda forgot about the old 250GB drive that had the OS....Lessons learned lol, great hobby!

Cheers,

Requis

I have been wondering about this as well.

Is there a raid controller that can make a 20 drive raid 6 with hot spare and then present it to the OS as several 2 TB volumes? you could then add everything to the storage pool, disable duplication in whs, and still have all present itself as one with out the inefficiencies of duplication.

Yes. Areca, 3Ware and LSI all provide options to carve the array and present any size volumes to the OS that you wish. I would imagine pretty much any other quality raid controller would to.

I'm not real sure if this is how I would handle it for WHS, though. Firstly, I find WHS replication sufficient protection and adding the extra disks is probably less expensive than adding one disk and the raid card. The ONLY reason I could see doing this is if you really needed the extra disk read/write performance. And if that was your motivation I probably wouldn't be using WHS at all...

But if you really want to do this - I'd probably use the >2TB hack for WHS that is well documented and community tested. It is not supported, but MS has not bothered to take the posts off their official web site either (wink, wink).

Why not just use unRAID? Simple, easy. Cheap. Works.

At which point on has to ask the question, "What is the point of WHS?"

You have performed the bizarre task of carving up an array into 2 TB chunks so the array could be presented as a single volume? You would have got the result with the RAID array by itself

I am new to the storage realm. I have only used external hard drives before, and while I love the easy plug and play ability, I am starting a ugly collection and always waist space as I try to keep things organized.
My thing is, I am looking for a easy plug and play deivce that will pool whatever hard drives I throw into it, and act like a external hard drive. Is this what I am looking for?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816132015
Will this work in Win7? What's the difference b/w one of these and building a WHS computer?

The better question is "why mix WHS and Raid". What people are suggesting doing is exactly the same as running unRaid - using disks on a raid controller in Raid 5/6 arrays. It just doesn't make any sense...

For 99% of the readers of this forum, all they need is a large, reliable server that can hold their media library, survive single disk failures every time, and handle 3 or 4 HD streams simultaneously. Meeting these requirements does not need the expense or hassle of hardware raid (ever...). There are several good solutions to this, depending upon your experience and personal preferences, including WHS, unRaid, and a few others. The discussion of one vs the other are largely religious in nature and not worth spending any time on...

The users who need raid need high I/O performance. Other than video editing, there are almost no "home" applications that really need this - and editing users (like me) need this performance on their editing workstation, not on their server. That is why I use a really fast raid array on my editing station and WHS for the backup/media server.

Wasn't aware unRAID (or WHS, or flexRAID) was hassle-and-expense free

Just pointing out that there seemed to be little reason to use WHS and RAID together. WHS is mostly a storage solution that avoids RAID. It has it's plusses and minuses.

No, I'm not interested in arguing the relative merits either. We all use what we think best and live with the consequences of our choice.

Anyone else notice, who is using WHS, that when going to your WHS website through firefox(3.5.3) and logging into remote access that the computers tab doesn't exist but when using IE the computer tab is present.

Drove me crazy for half the day trying to figure out why.....

disagree, but so what, lol.

You have your opinion I have mine just thought I would put it out there for posterity.

Piece of mind and Labor are just two reasons for hardware raid. Not to mention an easy way to support twenty four drives in a chassis with SATA connectors, no SAS expanders, and all these other cards etc...all very likely similar but in any case...I have twenty drives hot swappable with 4 spares in the chassis and have never looked back other than maybe to look define what the next server should look like...and well it became a 2008 Server as I added DNS, DHCP, and a whack of other services related to IIS for Web distribution of content. to Which I might add WHS has fit in nicely.


Not to point out the obvious but this is a gross over simplification. I picked up a couple of 3ware cards on ebay for really cheap and started that way..simply because of the ease of use factor. That the cards managed my drives...and WHS managed my content. Now maybe thats just me but all the other stuff your talking about was not as cut and dry....seems like years ago (likely was but my first case had twelve drives..failures...User errors, OS issues etc...I had to spend a tonne of time getting data back on my systems before my RAID controllers. Then things got easy...very easy...and I did not have to wrry about my data. If thats avaialable today through software great...but the poster I was responding too indicated that he did not believe he could have WHS with RAID 5...which I wanted to make sure to point out that yes he could and that others have exactly that and it works fantastic. RAID 6 WOuld be great too...but then again its more money. The older RAID 5 Cards are really inexpensive...and with RAID 5 and a spare setup you don't have to worry as much.



Again disagree...but thats just me.

Cheers,

Requis

lol me too....

There were some other issues I stumbled across with chrome as well...but don't recall off hand exactly what they were...but your post reminded me of how much time I spent trying to figure out why the tab wasn't being published.

And they say this stuff is easy.

Cheers,

Requis

Hello all, been a while since I have visited this thread. Looking for some insight from the ZFS users...anyone have a MB that supports 4 PCI-E x4 slots that's on the Opensolaris HCL? Or is not on the Opensolaris HCL, but still works? I need four to support 3 of the AOC-SASLP-MV8's and 1 Quad NIC.

Thanks for any suggestions, they will be greatly appreciated.

Scratch that, found one.

SuperMicro X8ST3-F

DDR3. Ugh...

BTW, I am not sure I would invest much in opensolaris/ZFS now. With the netapp litigation and competition from the internal oracle nextgen filesystem, my bet is once the Oracle/Sun merger is completed the ZFS group will get disbanded.

It's too bad because ZFS is much more mature than BTRFS, but Oracle is really known for NIH, so I doubt ZFS will survive the merger.

can i convert my media server into a NAS? what's the impact to the data?

currently have twelve 1TB drives in RAID5 on my Areca 1280ML. OS (vista x64) is on a separate, single drive.