need NAS for multicomputer suggestions

[sdadept]

so I finally realized it's probably better to have one NAS device that I can manage instead of having several computers with various large drives on them.

My needs are that multiple computers should be able to hit the NAS at the same time and have it perform well (SATA NCQ a must). Most of these machine would be doing things like long development builds.

I would like to run raid 0+1 (although I've considered raid 6 but am not sure about the performance of that).

I've read a lot of reviews for systems on newegg but it's not immediately obvious which one is the best these days. All suggestions are welcome!

[criccio]

Are you open to building one yourself? It would be much more cost effective and you would have the option to run any OS you want.

[sdadept]

I'm open to anything. I build most of my own systems. I hadn't really thought of building my own NAS though. What options do I have?

[drgnfang]

Pretty much anything from a "simple" mid tower to a full on Norco 4020 with 20 drives. OS could be anything from unRAID, WHS, Windows 2003/2008, Linux, BSD, etc...

[criccio]

Are you more familiar with Windows or Linux when it comes to servers?

[sdadept]

more familiar with windows, but I've done enough linux to know my way around that. I would think linux would be a better choice for something like this.

so i've looked into it a bit and it looks like building my own might be a great way to go. So I have some more questions.

I'm looking to get about 4 to 6 terraybytes.
I'm fond of 0+1 raid but I'm willing to consider raid 6 as well if it has comparable speed.
Would it be better to get a motherboard that supports 4 to 6 SATA II connections or better (read more reliable) to get a SATA II specialty card? Does anyone know if freenas supports addon cards?

I'd most prefer to do this as a 2u so it can fit into my rack. Any recommendations on a good case?

any and all suggestions are welcome

[nitrobass24]

I'd build your own with server 2008.

You can get a mobo that supports raid 10 and can spend money on better/bigger/more drives opposed to buying an expensive raid card.

[criccio]

True, but how much is Server 2008 going to cost him?

I vote for unRaid even though I am a WHS fan. WHS doesn't seem to be a good fit for his situation.

[nitrobass24]

Server 2008 I think is just easier to manage.
Also he said he's more familiar with it.

You know I'm a fan of WHS but it doesn't seem to be what he needs.

I found a guy on craigslist that had a couple licenses for sale and got it for 150.

If this is for a business then it really shouldn't matter.
Also he's saving a ton by building his own, that savings can be put towards that.

Also if your a microsoft partner you can get it cheap or a student you can get it for free, or he said this was development so if he has a msdn subscription then that's kind of free.

There's lots of ways to get a legit license for less than retail price.

EDIT: also unraid cost money when you have so many drives.

[sdadept]

I'm a developer, so I get server 2008 (every flavor) free with my paid MSDN subscription as long as it's used for development (which it will be). Why would 2008 be better than freenas though? I would think 2008 would take more resources. I'm willing to do either one, I just want to get the best for this use case.

what are the considerations for having on board raid (ich10r probably) vs buying a raid card? I would think a raid card would be less susceptable to loading on the server itself.

am I ok going with a 2u for this? I'm looking at this case. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=400035922033

any recommendations for the other parts of this? ie, motherboard and cpu? I'm thinking a low end / low power xeon.

also, for the drives. I'd really like to get 4 to 6 1.5t drives but i've heard horrible things about the seagates. So maybe I should get the WD 1t blacks and just get 6 of them.

[nitrobass24]

Well low power and xeon don't really go together.

I would go with 6 WD 1tb black editions.

As far as I know you can't access solutions or db files directly on the server from vs2008 becuase it does not support unc paths.

You would need to setup svn for the solution and sql server for the database.

[drgnfang]

Things to keep in mind:
1) Drive speed will only get you so far before you saturate your network. I regularly saturate my gig-ethernet, even with USB drives hooked up to my WHS box.
2) RAID is great, but you still need an actual backup solution.
3) If you are developing for windows, go ahead and go with Server 2008. At some point you will want to toss up an SQL or ISS server for testing and this will make it much simpler. Also a great place to run VisualSVN server (or which ever VCS you use).
4) Rack mount is great if you have a rack to put it in, and do not mind the noise associated with a small rack case.

With all that being said I would suggest a full-tower case, like the CM HAF or Cosmos. Make sure it has enough room for the number of drives you want.

I would go with a consumer level mobo, probably with the P35 or P45 chipset. Make sure it has enough SATA ports on a single chipset to support the drives you pick. ICH10r supports a max of 6 drives - boards that have more sata ports have multiple sata controllers. There are a few ATX boards with G45 or Q45 chipsets - which means onboard video. It might also be worth looking at mATX boards, specially if you go with a hw raid card.

I can't advise for or against hw-raid vs sw-raid vs onboard - I don't have enough experience using it with RAID 01.

Unless you plan on running a very busy SQL and ISS server on the box I would stick with a good dual core 775 CPU. Something like the E7200 or E8400 would be more than enough. Just watch for things like virtualization support (if you think you might want to run some VM's).

I would max out on RAM as much as makes sense. P45 supports 16g DDR2, but that will cost you about $450-500 shipped.

Drives, would just be as many as your case can handle, 1tb or larger. People seem to like the WD black and the Seagate ES I believe (I'm cheap, I use WD green).

[drgnfang]

Well low power and xeon don't really go together.Actually the LV xeons are great - compared to regular xeons and high end C2D quads.

[sdadept]

great suggestions!

I hadn't considered that it could saturate my gigabit ethernet. Thanks for pointing that out. I wish there were something above giga that I could use. My entire house is wired with cat6 (every room has an rj45 outlet) and I have a full 16port full duplex gigaswitch.

I do have a rack in my basement so that's not a problem. Noise isn't a problem either for the same reason. I think a 2u will work out well if I can find the right case.

I've read up a bit on w2008 and I'm very impressed with it's capabilities. I think that's what I'm going to use. Also as you mention, the added benefit will be that I can install more dev tools on the box to get them closer to the storage as needed.

I was going to rely on the raid1 portion of the array for the backup. The sheer amount of data is going to make backup for this system really difficult.

I'm considering 2 velociraptors in raid 1 for the boot and system areas.

the advice on consumer level mobos is well taken, I'm looking at the g45s. I don't get the difference between those and q45's though.

ram is super cheap right now so I'll probably get 16gb.

[brons2]

I use freenas myself and I love it but it sounds like your application is more mission critical.

Let me be the one to suggest hardware RAID with battery backed write cache. (BBWC). If you are running RAID 6 and the power goes out you are at risk of data loss unless you have BBWC. If you do have it then the cache will be dumped back to disk as soon as environmental power is restored and all will be well.

You can put RAID arrays in write-through mode of course but that impacts performance.

$0.02

[drgnfang]

IF your switch supports it, AND you are willing to suck up the cost... You could team a couple of gig ports together.

I'll say it before someone else can... RAID1 is not backup. Do not rely on it. It is great for high availability, but it is not back up. Make sure that you have spare drives on hand (preferably purchased at a different shop), or are able to get them very quickly. All of us here to play with large data stores at home have to fight the backup battle. I have yet to see a good answer.

The G45 has the GMA X4500 HD IGP
The Q45 has the GMA 4500 IGP

Any other differences would likely be board specific. Double check the south bridge unless you plan on going with a hwraid.

For disks, remember that with the ICH9r/ICH10r you can short stroke the drives, using the fastest part of the drive for os/system and use the rest for the data. This will give you speeds equal to the vraptor (drive dependent, but the WD 640 black kicks much ass). The bad part of doing this is that you can't just swap out the OS drives without affecting the data drives.

If you have a rack, and do not yet have a UPS, get one. If you do go with a hwraid card you probably will want a bbwc (assuming this matters for RAID01).

[sdadept]

I have 2 900w battery backup units. I didn't mention them before because it didn't come up. I've had them last up to 2 hours with my current servers.

I'm doing more research on the hw raid cards right now. What are the primary advantages / disadvantages of going with them instead of the connectors onboard?

[drgnfang]

I'll let other (more experienced with them) users chime in on the raid cards.

Generally the best advantage that I can think of is that it won't sap power from your CPU, and has dedicated cache ram onboard (assuming a good card).

[nitrobass24]

Yea you can do teaming for higher throughput on the server side for the Nics if your switch supports it.
But you will still be limited to 1gbe to the desktop. Meaning a single user will at max get 1gbs but you can have more users simultaneously accessing the data.

Raid Card is really only needed if your going to do a R5/6/50/60 because of the parity calculation involved.

[Syntax Error]

Exactly, RAID cards are really only advantageous for people who want good performance from the more complicated RAID levels like 5 or 6, as it has redundancy of a single (or dual if you're doing RAID 6) drive failures which minimizes the amount of overhead required.

RAID 10 is fine and dandy if you have no need for massive storage in the long-run, it provides plenty of storage and provides redundancy, but for many of us, 50% usable space is a bit more than we can chew.

Hardware RAID cards also tend to be more robust in its array management utilities as well as features such as a battery backup unit to preserve data on cache in the event of power loss, the offloading of CPU load through parity calculation to the RAID controller card's CPU (again, if you're using RAID 5/6) and as well as other management and array expansion utilities, such as online capacity expansion.

Really, the number one reason for a RAID card is the increased performance over onboard RAID solutions. These things are designed for enterprise use so they also feature lots of functions as well as overall stability with arrays, something that some onboard RAID controllers (*cough* NVRAID *cough) can't do. For RAID 0/1/0+1/10 which are considered "simple" RAID functions in that there isn't any parity to calculate, ICH10R Intel RAID should be sufficient, though I can't speak towards the expandability of the array in the future.

Again, RAID is not a backup nor was it ever intended to be. :)

[sdadept]

ok, after reading up a bit I think I will end up with a hardware raid card. Mostly because I've read a lot of posts where people were able to recover raids after problems much more easily. I'm seeing too many 'lost my raid array and couldnt get it back' posts from onboard raid.

I'm still fuzzy on how raid5 and 6 don't reduce the capacity of an array by more than %50. Don't you have to have the data in more than one spot? I'm going to have to read up on that a bit.

[drgnfang]

My understanding is that you only have parity information on more than one drive.

[brons2]

My understanding is that you only have parity information on more than one drive.

Correct. The capacity of a RAID 5 logical array can be summed up as:

Xn-n=c

Where X is the number of drives, n is the capacity of drives and c is the total capacity.

So on a 5 drive RAID array with 5 1TB drives, you would end up with a usable capacity of 4TB.

On RAID6 it's Xn-2n=c as there are two parity drives.

[sdadept]

after reading up alot on this, I think I may do raid 6 with a hardware raid card. I like the idea of being able to lose 2 drives and still not lose data.