Building a 2 TB array..

W

whatuusay1

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Hey all... looking at building a 2TB array.. I'm a long time lurker and its time to finally build a small NAS system.

I'm looking at a relatively low power c2d system and a few 500GB drives. I allready have the mb and cpu, but I'm not sure about the HD's... I'll looking for the best bang for my buck here. I found 500GB Western Digital drives for right at 99 (free shipping) on Newegg --> Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB

I was also thinking of adding in a lower cost raid card - I doubt I'll be able to get hardware raid.. but the price is right. Thoughts?

SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133MHz SATA Controller Card


Thanks,
John
 
Good choices for drives and the controller, the aaks drives are pretty sweet, cool, quiet and pretty fast. Pull the bios chip from the supermicro card and it makes very good controller for software raid. What are you going to use for the os?
 
Please do not use the AAKS drives for RAID. There have been many problems with them dropping from the array (TLER bug). Use RE drives or Seagates.
 
protias said:
Please do not use the AAKS drives for RAID. There have been many problems with them dropping from the array (TLER bug). Use RE drives or Seagates.
Click to expand...

not true, i have 15 aaks drives in various raids (0, 10 and 5) and they all work flawlessly, if your anal about tler you can grab wd tler utility (its posted somewhere on the forum) and you can enable tler on aaks drives
 
whatuusay1 said:
Hey all... looking at building a 2TB array.. I'm a long time lurker and its time to finally build a small NAS system.

I'm looking at a relatively low power c2d system and a few 500GB drives. I allready have the mb and cpu, but I'm not sure about the HD's... I'll looking for the best bang for my buck here. I found 500GB Western Digital drives for right at 99 (free shipping) on Newegg --> Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB

I was also thinking of adding in a lower cost raid card - I doubt I'll be able to get hardware raid.. but the price is right. Thoughts?

SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133MHz SATA Controller Card


Thanks,
John
Click to expand...

What type of raid are you going? Consider getting many drives instead of say 4 250's if you want even greater speed.
 
You do realize that that card is a PCI-X card? not a PCI express, right???

PCI-X is a now becoming legacy format that is only available in servers and workstations, not desktops.

Very good drives, i have a 2TB raid with a slightly oder model of the same drive (hmm it might the RE2 drives..). no complaints.
I can post my specs later and the speed tests. current, and initial.

there are also a few guides of how to make a dedicated Debian or Linux raid box, its very easy. took me about 2-3 hours of following instructions from install to complete setup
then just load Samba, and any windows box can access it.

if so, you dont need a controller.
 
I also have a 2TB array with 4 WD7500AAKS's and a Promise TX4310 and am happy with it. No issues whatsoever.
 
Megalomaniac said:
You do realize that that card is a PCI-X card? not a PCI express, right???

PCI-X is a now becoming legacy format that is only available in servers and workstations, not desktops.
Click to expand...

You can stick pci-x in plain old pci slots you just don't get the full bandwith
 
axan said:
not true, i have 15 aaks drives in various raids (0, 10 and 5) and they all work flawlessly, if your anal about tler you can grab wd tler utility (its posted somewhere on the forum) and you can enable tler on aaks drives
Click to expand...

I know there were a lot of problems last year when people were complaining their WD drive dropping from their arrays.

Megalomaniac said:
You do realize that that card is a PCI-X card? not a PCI express, right???

PCI-X is a now becoming legacy format that is only available in servers and workstations, not desktops.
Click to expand...

My Super Micro PCI-X works just fine in my PCI slot. ;)
 
Ive got....damn I cant even remember. Like 4 750AAKS drives in R5 on the 2320 and they work just fine. I got mine for 149/drive, not bad at all.
 
I use those same drives for my 2tb raid array. (1.9TB formatted using xfs file system). I use linux software raid 5 with mdadm though. expanded the array twice and no problems what so ever
 
Very cool - I'm beggining to think 2TB isnt big enough.. maybe 4TB? :)

I though about the whs (windows home server) but between the issues with data corruption and the licenses... I think i'll stick with somethink like freenas. Thoughts?
 
whatuusay1 said:
Very cool - I'm beggining to think 2TB isnt big enough.. maybe 4TB? :)

I though about the whs (windows home server) but between the issues with data corruption and the licenses... I think i'll stick with somethink like freenas. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Not possible under windows.
you cannot exceed 2TB, NTFS will not let you.

you could have six 1 TB drives and build two raid 5 arrays. then create a virtual volume (which can exceed 2 TB, i think)
 
Megalomaniac said:
Not possible under windows.
you cannot exceed 2TB, NTFS will not let you.

you could have six 1 TB drives and build two raid 5 arrays. then create a virtual volume (which can exceed 2 TB, i think)
Click to expand...

Actually ntfs can support a lot bigger volume size then 2tb, the limiting thing on windows is that most only support mbr partitions, and mbr partitions are limited to 2tb, some windows version (server, vista ultimate etc) support gpt partitions so you can make volumes bigger then 2tb
 
Saw your post since I was searching for the Western Digital WDTLER utility and it was in one of the replies.

It turns out that your question directly matches my previous setup since I had a 2 TB (1.5 TB usable) array made up of four Western Digital SE16 500 GB WD5000AAKS drives on my Silicon Image 3114 PCI SATA-I 150 MB/s 5 Onboard Controller that was also using Software RAID.

First of all, I want to mention that these are wonderful drives, very quiet during full usage and pretty good performance. I had not had a failure on these four 500 GB drives and I also has two 320 GB and had two 250 GB. I have been very happy with Western Digital's SE16 line of drives for over 3 years now since I build my system. I'm sticking with Western Digital since I have had very good results with them and most importantly because they continue to release new drives with large capacities and features like the GP line for lower prices per GB than their competitors like Seagate and Hitachi.

Do not under any circumstances go with software based RAID controller for RAID 5 (striping with parity) setup. Your array will perform like molasses slowing down drive write speeds to miserable levels and your system performance and responsiveness will take a head drive onto a concrete floor while your array is writing data. You will not be happy with this type of a setup and any money you spend on the controller will be lost until you pay up for a Hardware RAID controller from a well know and reputable vendor like Adaptec, etc.

Invest the money now for Hardware RAID or be sorry later. At best just stick to Software RAID1 (mirroring) but not RAID5 since the parity calculations being deferred to your CPU that require interrupt handling and context switching on every write that will cost you a lot in performance. Also invest money in a better-than-PCI controller such as PCI-E because the bandwidth limits on your PCI bus and also contention problems causing with PCI bus with soundcards such as the Creative Labs X-Fi series and Software RAID PCI performance issue and crackling, freezing, or dropping sounds and other issues such as NIC cards slowing down transfers.

You would definitely have to enable the 7-second TLER (Time-Limited Error Correction) option on your drives using the WDTLER utility if you use the SE, SE16, or GP models because your drives have it disabled by default and will drop out of the RAID array when they encounter an error on the hard drive that takes time to correct. This will break your array requiring your to re-add the dropped drive and rebuild/resynchronize the entire array every time this happens. If you have a RAID5 array and more than one drive drops out because of extended error correction timeout you will lose the entire drive array all at once and if you use a cheap vendor's card which does not have recovery utilities you will not be able to forcibly re-add the drives to the array but will have to re-create the entire array from scratch and restore your data. You can read the post I made about this in the thread below.

Western Digital Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) with RAID and SE, SE16, GP Models


One of the reasons why I replied to your post is because I did my research today to find out why my Western Digital SE16 drive dropped out of my nVIDIA RAID1 array last week for the second time in the last few months. I checked my threads and found the WDTLER utility and the explanation of TLER and this seemed exactly like the problem that happened to me. I have now enabled 7-second TLER for my SE16 drives in my RAID1 arrays after this.

Just a little background so you can learn from my mistakes, my first setup was a RAID5 array using those drives that I mentioned above and I lost the entire array one day only to find out that 3 drives dropped out of the array and one was still there. Using the useless and unhelpful Silicon Image software I was unable to recover and recreate the array and I lost 1.5 TB of data, but 99% of it was backed up and archived except for some easily re-downloadable shows. Turns out after I e-mailed Silicon Image regarding my case, which they ignored as any second rate vendor would, a month later they released a new firmware version 5.3.14 to correct the issue with RAID5 arrays being destroyed. Because the software RAID5 array was dog slow and the entire array failed I gave up on Software RAID5 and re-purposed my drives to a nVidia RAID1 from 2 x 500 GB and then use the other two 500 GB drives for external backup drives, one on-site and another off-site.

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM - $99.99 = 0.19998 cents per 1 GB
Western Digital Caviar GP WD7500AACS 750GB 5400 to 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM - $139.99 = 0.186653... cents per 1 GB
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM - $149.99 = 0.199986... cents per 1 GB
Western Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS 1TB 5400 to 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM - $234.99 = 0.23499 centes per 1 GB

[size=-2]
CPU: AMD Opteron 175 Dual-Core 2.2 GHz 1 MB 90 nm 939 11x CCBWE 0543TPMW - 2,563 MHz (233x11x4), 1.50 V (1.55 V x 100.0 %)
FAN: Zalman CNPS9500 LED 92 mm Fan+Heatsink + Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste 99.9 % - 35 C Idle, 45 C Load
MOB: DFI LanParty UT SLI-DR Expert 939 nF4 PCI-e Rev.AA0 - BIOS: 2006-04-06 Modded, LDT 1.20 V, Chipset 1.52 V, 42 C Load
RAM: Mushkin 4x 1 GB XP4000 Redline 991493 DDR500 3-3-2-8 2.6-2.9 V CE-6 - 233 MHz (1:1) 2T 3-3-2-8, 2.80 V
VID: eVGA nVidia 8800 GTS 512 MB G92 670/972 MHz PCI-e 16x 2xDVI 1xSVid 1xHDTV - 750/1100 MHz Overclock, 65% Fan, 58C Load
SAT: Silicon Image 3114 PCI SATA-I 150 MB/s RAID 0,1,5 Onboard Controller FW: 5.3.14 Modded
HDD: Western Digital Caviar SE16 320 GB 16 MB SATA-II 300 MB/s - 2x in nVidia 298 GB Mirror Array (RAID1)
HDD: Western Digital Caviar SE16 500 GB 16 MB SATA-II 300 MB/s - 2x in nVidia 465 GB Mirror Array (RAID1)
NIC: Marvell Yukon 88E8001 Gigabit Onboard PCI NIC
SOU: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music 24-bit 128-Voice 109dB SNR
SOU: RealTek ALC850 AC'97 Rev 2.3 8-Channel Onboard Audio
DVD: 2x NEC ND-3540A DVD+-RW SL/DL 16X DVD 48X CDR - FW: 1.06
POW: OCZ PowerStream 520W SLI ADJ ATX2.0 EPS12, +3.3V 28A +5V 40A +12V 33A
CAS: Lian-Li PC-V1200 Plus Mid-ATX Aluminum 4x5.25 6x3.5 2x120mm
[/size]
 
I have 5x500wd aaks (es) and I run mdadm Software raid 5 Ubuntu Linux. It is a dedicated home media server so write speeds aren't a huge problem and read speeds are more than adequate to serve up HD content. They all run over the pci bus with a puny athlon xp processor and 512mb or ram.

Since this was a budget server I just used what I had. Using modern equipment for a dedicated server I'd use a faster processor and maybe a motherboard with pci express. mdadm raid 5 works perfectly for the low price of free. I would never use whs I had way to many problems with that software.

I ultimately went with mdadm software raid not only because of the price but because you can expand the raid 5 array just by adding another drive. xfs is a better file system than ntfs imo. and mdadm doesn't care what position the drives are installed in because it uses the uuid so even if you take the thing apart and change systems or even linux operating systems the raid array will keep on ticking right where it left off.

write speeds aren't blazing but for my home server needs they are more than adequate especially on such low end hardware. .
 
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