Media NAS

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HICKFARM

Gawd
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Jun 18, 2008
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So i am in the market of buying and building a NAS system. I have been building pc's for several years, but never got around to doing the whole Raid thing. I basically just want a system to backup all my media, games, movies, pictures, and all that other digital stuff. I need it to be redundant, and performance isn't a top concern for me, just needs to be able to stream media without skipping(which should be no problem). So i am looking to build something 10TB or bigger.

I currently have my eye on this A24U-G2421 that blue fox is selling. But I believe it is a little bit more then I need, but would be nice for upgrading in the future. So that is pretty much what i have to go off of so far. I have a pc that i could hook up to this as well and control and monitor it.
Basically i don't want to break the bank with 400$ raid cards. So any advice would be appreciated. So my max budget is 1000$ for everything excluding harddrives, but would prefer it to be a lot less.
 
So have you decided on OS and filesystem? If you're building a ZFS box that would need different hardware than a Windows box, or even a Linux software RAID box.

Decide on OS/filesystem first before you buy any hardware. Your choice of hardware is centered around which OS you choose.
 
Well i guess i will be using Windows server 2008. I have a key from school i believe. But couldn't i have a raid array setup from just windows 7 itself if i wanted? Really don't want to mess with linux or anything like that at the moment.
 
sub.mesa said:
So have you decided on OS and filesystem? If you're building a ZFS box that would need different hardware than a Windows box, or even a Linux software RAID box.

Decide on OS/filesystem first before you buy any hardware. Your choice of hardware is centered around which OS you choose.
Click to expand...

Woot woot ZFSGuru
 
HICKFARM said:
But couldn't i have a raid array setup from just windows 7 itself if i wanted?
Click to expand...
Depends on the hardware RAID controller you're getting and that vendor's support for Windows 7.
 
I haven't touched SCSI in years. From what it appears, Blue Fox's solution is DAS, not NAS so you would need a SCSI HBA for that PC yes. A PCI-X one is probably cheaper then a PCI-E one.
 
Well a DAS would be fine for me as well. sure i would have to have a pc up and running all the time. But i already do anyways so it shouldn't matter.
 
So i have changed my mind on the whole direction i am going on this build.

Getting this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811182566

then i have a 8 port sata pci-x card that will work in a regular pci slot. I am going to install server 2008 and setup software raid 6 with 6 2TB HDD's. I can throw my old pc in there to use for the backbone of it. Now the only thing i need to get is 2TB harddrives. This is where i am stuck, i don't know which ones are the most reliable at the moment. I would like to get either western digital or seagate, but i really don't know which brand to get at the moment. 7200 rpm of course.

Also does raid 6 sound like a good choice? Oh and here is the raid card i have if anybody was wondering.

SuperMicro SAT2-MV8 8 Port SATA 2 i only paid 25 bucks for it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...m_re=SuperMicro_SATA_2-_-15-121-009-_-Product
 
The problem is that performance will be really slow due to the PCI slot, that card, and a RAID 5, let alone RAID 6, array. So in other words, it would not matter if the drives are 7200RPM or not: that PCI slot alone is gonna slow down performance. And then the fact that you're using Windows software RAID also hurts performance as well.

For Windows RAID, your best bet are Samsung and Hitachi drives, not Western Digital or Seagate drives. Unless however you want to spring the extra cash for the RAID editions of WD or Seagate drives.
 
why would hitachi be better for a windows raid? although that would be nice since i was thinking about getting these. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145298

How slow are we talking here anyways? like will it be really sluggish just browsing through all the folders or will it take like an hour to transfer 20 gigs from an external hard drive? I figured it will be a little slower but not all that bad.
 
Hitachi/Samsung have CCTL. But as far as i know this has to be supported by the controller and sent on every power up, since the CCTL setting does not survive a power cycle, unlike TLER where it is a permanent setting like APM and AAM. Anyone who can confirm this?

This issue is about disks being disconnected from the RAID, not about being slow or anything. A WD disk would lack TLER unless it's a recent RAID edition drive, so these kind of disks would be detached from windows-based RAIDs and most hardware RAIDs as soon as they encounter a bad sector that prompts recovery for longer than 10 seconds. After the 10 seconds, the RAID engine decides to totally fail that device, even though only one sector was unreadable the entire drive is considered failed and detached. This makes using those drives in combination with these 'Spartan' RAID engines very hazardous.
 
can't say i knew anything about that sub.mesa. So the hitachi drive i linked should work just fine then?
 
PCI is a shared 133MB/s bus. Depending on your setup, this could be shared with audio, network, and many other things. A single modern 7200RPM disk drive can push 80-100MB/s sequentially. This means that any raid setup that you use will have the performance of a single drive due to the PCI bus. If the network is also PCI based, your network and disks share the bandwidth, putting you under 50MB/s for network transfers.

This is still fine for HD video streaming for a small number of users, but there it a large chance of stuttering or buffering issues under any kind of load. Planning on putting 10TB of data on a system that can only run below 50MB/s is a waste of money IMO.

I would honestly recommend a decent prebuilt WHS server. It is dated, even with WHSv2 around the corner, but you can get older HP ones pretty cheap now, and they will perform better than trying to build around a PCI based disk setup.

And one last thing, don't forget RAID is not backup. Always remember your RAID array can fail for a multitude of reasons, and keep backups for things you can't live without other than on the RAID server.
 
adi said:
And one last thing, don't forget RAID is not backup. Always remember your RAID array can fail for a multitude of reasons, and keep backups for things you can't live without other than on the RAID server.
Click to expand...

Well i got to use those for 4 extra 1.5 TB drives that i have now for something :).

I will look into getting a better raid card like a pci-express one or something then. any suggestions for a cheap one?
 
You could have a look at Highpoint. Good features, low price, decent performance.
 
HICKFARM said:
I will look into getting a better raid card like a pci-express one or something then. any suggestions for a cheap one?
Click to expand...
Check these out:
$430 - HighPoint RocketRAID 4320 PCI-Ex8 8 Port SATA and SAS RAID Card
$450 - arece ARC-1222 PCI-Ex4 8 Port SATA and SAS RAID Card
 
lol just a little pricey. I am willing to maybe go 300 bucks for a raid card but no 450$. will those x8 slot cards work in a x16 slot? I know some can, but it seems the majority of them can't.
 
The original poster indicates this is for media storage and that speed is not an issue.

There is no reason for RAID. Just use regular hard drives on any controller and make a backup copy.
 
I want redundancy and don't really want to have a 50% backup ratio. Would rather have an array. Just because i have never done it before and it would be very convenient to just have one area to store stuff. And true speed really isn't an issue, so i think i am just going to take the plunge and try out the 8 port sata card that i have already with a software raid. If it is way to slow then i will consider buying an expensive raid card for pci-express.
 
HICKFARM said:
I want redundancy and don't really want to have a 50% backup ratio. Would rather have an array. Just because i have never done it before and it would be very convenient to just have one area to store stuff. And true speed really isn't an issue, so i think i am just going to take the plunge and try out the 8 port sata card that i have already with a software raid. If it is way to slow then i will consider buying an expensive raid card for pci-express.
Click to expand...

Hopefully you're aware that when, not if, the time comes for you to move to a hardware raid, you will have to run your current SW raid IN TANDEM with new drives in a hardware raid and migrate yourdata to the new array. Then decommission your "old" drives and old SW 'raid' config

That process is much messier and has the additional overhead of new drives than doing it correctly the first time around.

whatever route you go, good luck :)
 
UPDATE on what i have bought so far.

Case: ARK http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811182566

Raid Card INTEL(only 100$ shipped on ebay): http://www.intel.com/products/server/raid-controllers/sasmf8i/sasmf8i-overview.htm

SAS breakout cables( hopefully i got the right ones) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116098

this is the mobo this is all attaching to (from orginal first gaming rig) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813136015

I think i can get by with the AMD 5000+ processor, 4 gigs of ram, pci-express video card in top slot, intel raid card in bottom pci-express slot. Then i can have 4 onboard sata ports for blu-ray drive, DVD burner and then the OS HDD as well.

I wanted to get at least 5 of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145475
but the promo code is only for one per order. I still might get them though, but i was wondering if these type of hard drives would be good for a raid array?
 
HICKFARM said:
Raid Card INTEL(only 100$ shipped on ebay): http://www.intel.com/products/server/raid-controllers/sasmf8i/sasmf8i-overview.htm
Click to expand...
Do note that's a software RAID card. Way faster than the Supermicro card you chose earlier but slower than the Highpoint and areca card I recommended earlier. But still should be ok for file serving.
HICKFARM said:
I wanted to get at least 5 of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145475
but the promo code is only for one per order. I still might get them though, but i was wondering if these type of hard drives would be good for a raid array?
Click to expand...

Seems fine to me.
 
What would i use to power all the harddrives? i doubt i have over 7 sata power connectors on my power supply.
 
HICKFARM said:
What would i use to power all the harddrives? i doubt i have over 7 sata power connectors on my power supply.
Click to expand...

Just use molex to SATA adapters. What PSU will you be using any way?
 
So i should be throwing all this stuff together within the week once it arrives at my doorstep from newegg. From further research i have read nothing but bad reviews for using server 2008 for software raid. I am considering a version of Linux for a raid 5 setup, don't have a clue which one would be the best though( i am not linux savvy). I am going to have 5 of the hitachi 2TB 5K3000 in the array. What would be the best Linux OS to use for this? And should i install windows 7 and then install virtualware and have an install of linux on the virtual machine to manage the array? I figure this would be the best way if my motherboard decides to fail, and i would easily have an image of the virtual machine backed up.
 
So i got my case, HDD's in today. Didn't realize that ARK case only came with one 80mm fan when it has 2 slots. Oh well.
 
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