Planning media server 2.0 build - Page 2

Thanks again for all the help everyone.

Kermee - to be clear, the 7200.12 I just ordered is for a desktop - not the server I plan to build. The server will get more of the WD green drives I already own. However, I do plan to re-test network transfers once I get the new Seagate.

Last night I tried network x-fers in the opposite direction: from the WinXP machine to the Ubuntu machine. I was peaking at 45 MB/s. I still believe the bottleneck is the old 7200.9 drive in my XP machine. More alarming, though, was the CPU usage on the Ubuntu system: 35-50%! That seems crazy high for a file transfer. This is on a single-core Athlon64 at 1.8GHz (stock) with 1GB of ram. Because I'm an idiot I didn't check to see which process was to blame. I'll double check tonight.

Back to opensolaris & ZFS ... are any of you using this yet? Or am I your guinea pig?

Got the new drive in. Immediately partitioned it 3 ways - 2 ntfs partitions for WinXP and data, and a third unformatted partition for linux later. Downloaded HD Tune Pro demo, because it said fully functional - as in, INCLUDING write testing. Only to find out write testing doesn't work if you've partitioned the drive! Jesus. What's it gonna take? Too late now, I'm not wiping the drive just to test write speed.

Read speed has improved



103.8 MB/s average for the new 7200.12! While probably not directly comparable, the hdparm test on my previous 7200.9 drive yielded 71.87 MB/sec. That's a nice 44% improvement. I'm downloading the opensolaris iso now. Hopefully I can test tomorrow.

I checked this last night - there was no ntfs3g service in the system monitor. It seems to be Samba - smbd was consuming 40-45%.

Running hdparm on the new 7200.12 drive:
Vs the old 7200.9's 71.87 MB/sec, this is a huge increase (77%)! Yay modernity.

Slow progress with OpenSolaris. The install took forever - some 90 minutes to copy files. The system I'm using to test is so freaking loud that I'm kinda avoiding it. I have to wear headphones to get anything done on it.

In other news, what do you all think of this board:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813182164
What I like: 6 sata ports, 2 PCIe 4x slots for additional sata controllers, LGA775 socket for cheap CPUs, takes ECC ram, integrated Intel gigabit LAN, integrated VGA, mATX form factor. There's an version of this board on the Solaris HCL too.

The only con is the price. FUNKY layout - check out that internal(?) PCI slot.

For $10 more, there's a version with 2 gigE ports. Except according to one reviewer link aggregation isn't supported. What a pity.

Yes, no PCI-X. But with the two PCI-Express 4x slots should suffice, don't you think? Supermicro's AOC-SASLP-MV8 is a PCIe 4x 8-port card. And it's pretty cheap ($120 ish). Downside is that the Marvell chipset isn't supported in Solaris at the moment (although it's pretty new).

Anyway, it'll take me a while to exhaust the 6 on-board sata ports. I'm comparing this board to consumer desktop boards with 6 (or more) sata ports - trying to decide if spending extra for a server chipset is going to pay off long-term. The current desktop candidate is this AsRock Intel G43 motherboard w/ICH10 for less than half the price of the Supermicro server board. The single PCI-express 16x slot would limit sata/sas expansion, but honestly given how inexpensive motherboards are, if/when I need additional storage it might make more sense to just buy a new MB instead of investing in a sata/sas card - who knows, by then consumer boards might have 10 on-board sata ports. As I understand it, one of ZFS's strengths is that you don't need hardware RAID controllers - it can turn JBOD into ZRAID. So you just need a lot of SATA ports.

But what do I get over the non-server Intel G4x chipset? I mean, I can go to intel's site to compare features. My question is will my little KISS open solaris server project benefit from any of the 3200's server-specific features?

Thanks, but don't put too much effort into that - I don't see myself exhausting the onboard sata ports any time soon.

Do I understand pooling correctly - as in, it's preferable to actually AVOID hardware raid controllers? Because ZFS wants direct control over disks, and any RAID controllers in between could present some mixed signals?

I'm really struggling to like open solaris. On my test system (P4 1.5GHz, 512MB RDRAM) the CPU idles around 50% and I'm using 100% of the available memory - it's extremely sluggish. I also can't share my zpool to save my life. I've been searching for the right motherboard, and everything that I find either isn't on the Solaris HCL or if it is, some aspect doesn't work properly (usually LAN).

So I'm going to give linux w/BTRFS a shot, since I'll at least be on more familiar footing. BTRFS was officially added to the 2.6.29 kernel. Now that you can install pre-compiled .deb kernels from Canonical, this makes my life easier.

But, how do I enable BTRFS? I mean, if I have to install using a kernel that doesn't have BTRFS (using EXT3 or whatever), and I later update the kernel for BTRFS support, how do I "switch" file systems? Or do I leave the main install on Ext3 and use BTRFS for the storage pool?

Having never manually compiled/upgraded a kernel before, I'm thinking it might also be a good time to attempt to make my own install CD. Has anyone used Remastersys? I'm thinking about installing a minimal server Ubuntu, updating to the 2.6.29 kernel, and then using Remastersys to create an install CD image.

K_ross, thanks. Man - this is all getting too complicated! The reason I want ZFS or BTRFS is the self-healing, end-to-end checksumming, auto-scrubbing, stuff.

I'm testing Nexenta tonight. It's open solaris without the open solaris bits (OpenSolaris core + debian user space, less the GUI).

I hope Oracle GPL's ZFS asap.

I've pretty much decided against a server-class motherboard, mainly because my budget won't allow it .

After searching a little more, I've discovered AMD's 740G chipset. I'm looking specifically at Gigabyte's GA-MA74GM-S2 mATX board. Why? The 740G/SB700 chipset is one of the lowest power chipsets available that also offers 6 SATA ports. It's also incredibly inexpensive! It's on the Open Solaris HCL as "reported to work", with the main hurdles being the graphics (the radeon driver reportedly throws a fit, so the vesa driver is used as a workaround) and Realtek 8111C LAN (work-around). Paired with a 45w Athlon X2 4050e processor, this would make a very cheap, low-powered file server.

This motherboard is discussed all over the place. Reviewed at SPCR. Ubuntu server build gallery/thread at SPCR. Thumbs up from the unRAID community too, should I decide to check it out.

I'm going to order this MB unless anyone sees some serious trouble.

[EDIT] if the Realtek NIC gives me serious trouble, I can always toss my PCI Intel NIC in there.


Is there an echo in here? Look 1 post above yours...

Thanks QS, but I'm going to give Nexenta/OpenSolaris one more shot. Failing that, I'll give BTRFS a whirl.

I just placed an order for the following:

• Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2
• AMD Athlon X2 4050e
• G.SKILL 2 x 2GB DDR2-800

I decided on the 4GB ram kit for 3 reasons: 1) ZFS loves RAM (it caches a lot of data), 2) with only 2 RAM slots on the motherboard I want to be as future-proofed as I can get, 3) low marginal cost over a 2GB kit. I know 4GB will draw more power than 2GB or 1GB, but I'm willing to deal with a few extra watts for the above reasons.

All in all, $138 isn't too bad for motherboard, RAM and CPU. Everything is on sale and/or has free shipping.

I just need the WD10EADS drives to go back on sale for $85...

Well, after fighting with my test box for a week, I don't know if I hate opensolaris or my test machine more. The live CD boots faster than the hard drive. More often than not, the system just hangs while loading the OS (with the progress bar scrolling from side to side). From my few successful boots, I really like ZFS. Everything is slow as hell, but seems to work. And then it hangs on shutdown. So frustrating...

The RAM passes memtest (a few hours at least), and I've tried installing to 3 different hard drives, using both IDE controllers. I tried installing Nexenta, but it also fails while loading (it just reboots). Everything md5sum's OK, and I've burned the install CDs using two different drives just in case... I think something on the motherboard is toast. The machine is a semi-retired work PC that I borrow from time to time. I last used it a few years ago to learn / test Windows Server 2003, and it was working fine then. So I don't know what happened since. I'm giving up on it since my new hardware will arrive in a few days.

BTW, the Western Digital 1TB WD10EADS "green" drives are back on sale for $89. It's as if Newegg read my last post...

I have been following that distro for a little while, actually.

There are a few deal-breakers for me using solaris/opensolaris:
1) Whatever I choose has to be able to run slimserver/squeezecenter. Solaris and opensolaris can without too much trouble. But all the slimmed down NAS-ish distros might not without a lot of work.
2) The last I looked, Solaris/OpenSolaris cannot use the power scaling (Power Now, Cool n Quiet) features of AMD cpu's older than the Phenoms. So my X2 would be running full speed all the time.

From what I've learned while experimenting is that Open/Solaris is a heavy-duty SERVER operating system trying to be a desktop operating system. Linux, by comparison, is a desktop OS moonlighting as a server OS. Solaris is great with specialized hardware, and scales to hundreds of CPU cores and petabytes of data. Linux is great on generic hardware, but doesn't scale as well.

I have the FreeNAS 0.7.4489 iso (amd64 kernel w/ZFS support), but haven't got around to testing it on the new hardware. Bummer is that no one's gotted slimserver/squeezecenter working on FreeNAS 0.7.x yet... It's probably easy if you have another freeBSD system and know what you're doing. But I have neither of these.

Since the weather has gotten nice I haven't had much time for playing with PC's. Work before play, I have a ton of yard work scheduled for this summer. The server is currently running Ubuntu 9.04 server, and frankly it's been great. I'm shopping for a new PSU and case for it. My current PSU is less than 69% efficient at the 40-50W it's drawing. I'm looking at SeaSonic's SS-300ES, which is certified to be 80% efficient at 60W (20% of rated power), so it should still be pretty efficient in the 40's.

So, FreeNAS 0.7.4489 amd64 on a USB flash drive, with the same 2 sata HDD's in a mirror is consuming 10 more watts at idle than ubuntu server 9.04. Setting up drives, vdevs and zpools is IDIOT PROOF though. Like, six clicks and you're done. CIFS/SMB sharing is two clicks (including restarting SMB service!). FreeNAS's web interface is perfect. By comparison, webmin's interface looks like several aborted projects collided by accident.

Also interesting is Newegg's pricing of the Western Digital green drives. For the last 3 weeks in a row, they've gone on sale ($89.99 each) every Saturday thru Sunday. And back to full price ($99.99) on Monday morning. Then mid-week it drops to $94.99.

Your best bet would be to evaluate it on your own hardware, with non-critical data. That, and check out the "Nightly Builds" FreeNAS forum. FreeNAS 0.7x is based on Free BSD 7, and the ZFS version is inferior to the ZFS version in the alpha/beta/testing Free BSD 8.x (ver 13, I think).

I played around with it for a few days, but I cannot use it - SlimNAS doesnt support 0.7 or amd64 flavors of freenas yet.

Since I'm struggling to find a perfect server solution to satisfy all my needs, what do people think about having 2 separate servers?

Basically, it's Squeezecenter (formerly Slimserver) that's giving me trouble. To use Squeezecenter I have to give up some other necessary or desirable features of the two file server OS's I'm planning to use (unRAID or FreeNAS).

I'm pretty much sold on unRAID for my file serving needs. Write speed sucks, but all of its other features more than make up for that. There is a SlimServer install script included with the "BubbaRaid" package - which is really convenient - but using it prohibits hard drive spin-down.

On the FreeNAS side, there is Michael Herger's "SlimNAS" package. But it doesn't support the amd64 kernel or the 0.7x versions of FreeNAS. Which means I can't use ZFS and no driver for my realtek NIC. I can work around the NIC issue (intel PCI NIC). But if I'm going to use FreeNAS I want to use ZFS, and ZFS likes lots of RAM and the amd64 kernel. I asked M Herger for directions on rolling my own amd64 0.7x version of SlimNAS, but the task is way out of my league.

So, I'm thinking that just splitting the Squeezecenter function off of the main file server. This has a few benefits to me.

1. I can use which ever OS works best given the intended application - unRAID on the file server, and real linux on the music server
2. I can use the file server as a backup target of the music server
3. The music server can be built using really low-end hardware for very little money.
4. Overall power consumption would only be higher when both machines are in use at the same time. Otherwise, power consumption should be a little lower if just accessing the music server.

The $135 MSI Wind barebones PC is a perfect fit for Squeezecenter. I already have a drive and a spare 1GB SODIMM. And there's an 18-page thread on this machine over at the slimdevices forum.

What do you all think? Divide and conquer?