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Building new server need recomendations

S

seltz

n00b
Joined
Dec 15, 2008
Messages
8
I am going to build a new data server, I know i will be using the norco 4020 chassis and the supermicro server MB but im having some trouble determining what raid card to go with. I want to populate all 20 drive bays most likely with 1.5TB drives. I want to stay with hardware raid so I need either a 24 port card or multiple 8 port cards. Do they make 12 port cards?
 
What is this going to be used for...what do you hope to do with this server?
What raid level do you want?

Yes there are some 12 port cards.
Id look at Areca, Adaptec, LSI, 3ware.....in that order
I'm sure you will find something that fits your needs/budget.

Make a worklog in the case mod forum so we can follow along :D
 
+1 for the worklog. I am looking at the Areca 1280ML-2G, but I don't know if they support 1.5TB drives. I've asked Ockie and he doesn't know either. unhappy_mage probably knows, but I haven't seen him in here for a while.
 
Will be used almost solely as a media server. I will probably backup the laptops to it as well but the "main" use will be media. I was looking at the areca cards and they are pricey but i havent read anything bad about them yet (other than their price)

BTW: have you seen the fanout cables being sold anywhere? I will probably buy the 24 port card but would like to know how much i should plan on spending on cables as well.

My guess is I will probably run linux on the box but not entirely sure, I suspect once its setup i will spend very little time in the OS itself.

Edit: I just read on another forum it looks like seagate is going to 3 year warranties after the new year so if your planning on buying drives now might be a good time to get them.
 
The 1280ML comes with all the cables you need. I also wouldn't buy it with the 2gb of RAM. Get the normal version and then pay $25 for the 2gb stick of ram separately.
 
yea definitely buy the ram separate.

You could always run a WHS box and not have to pay for a RAID card, I know you said your going to go linux but its just a thought.
 
Sorry forgot to answer your question about what Raid i would be running, Raid 5 or 6. If the card supports it i would run 6 and seeing that the 1280 comes with the cables i will most likely be heading that route.

Admittedly, I dont know alot about WHS, can it benefit from the hardware raid or does it rely on software raid via its OS? Also, can it do raid 5 and/or 6?

Thanks for the replies.
 
WHS does not employ RAID
you can make a RAID set and install WHS on it, just like 2K3..but its not supported my Microsoft and IMO defeats the purpose of WHS.
WHS protects your data through a feature called "duplication" It makes a complete second copy of your data on a separate spindle.

What I like about WHS is that it has allowed me to expand my server as Needed.....last week I was almost out of space, and I ordered a 2x 1.5tb drives. I stuck em in there and they were added to the Storage Pool. This is good because I don't have to mass order drives of all the same size and speed anymore...I can mix and match.
I'll expand on how WHS uses storage space
WHS is essential;y a JBOD system. All the disk are added as single drives and each have their own NTFS partition. WHS employs a technology call DriveExtender or DE. This takes all the drives regardless of Size or Speed or Type and adds them to the "StoragePool" . When you write a file to your shares it is written on a single drive, it is not striped across drives. If you have duplication it will copy your file to additional drive.
This is nice because you realize your full capacity and at any time you can pull the drive out and plug it into another computer and see what is on that specific drive, because it has its own file system and contains whole files.The only downside to this implementation is you are essentially limited to single drive speed. But for a Media Server single drive speed is plenty fast.


The "duplication" feature IMO is better then R5/R6 because it allows me to decide what Data I deem important. I can everything duplicated or I can just have like my Photos, and my Documents duplicated.

If you backup your home computers(they must run Windows) its an even better product. My WHS box backups all my comps every night. And the Restore process is a breeze.

WHS also allows for remote access to the server as well as to lan computers.

WHS functionality can be extended through the use of standard programs that you would normally run on 2K3 box and through the use of addins.

For me it was a no brainier for me because I didnt want to spend $1200 on a nice RAID controller, nor did I want to fool around with Linux and mdadm.

Right now I have around 10tb on my WHS box.
I know Ockie has around 50tb or spinning disk on WHS boxes.
Several others have switched their massive RAIDs to WHS as well and all of them seem to be happy with their decision.

On Microsoft's website there is a link for 120 day free trial of WHS
 
nitro,

Thanks for the responses its a great help, I am a little confused on the duplication part.

Do you have to duplicate everything? or can you tell it what you want to duplicate?

Edit I just re-read your post and see its totally optional on what you decide to duplicate.

Also, I realize its not raid but *IF* you elect to duplicate everything will you effectively be running raid 1 mirroring?

I really like the idea of parity over mirroring but it sounds like this is somewhere in between?

I would be filling the 20 bays with 1.5 TB drives, so my expectation was to gain roughly 25TB of storage with parity. Is this possible with WHS?
 
seltz said:
nitro,

Thanks for the responses its a great help, I am a little confused on the duplication part.

Do you have to duplicate everything? or can you tell it what you want to duplicate?

Edit I just re-read your post and see its totally optional on what you decide to duplicate.

Also, I realize its not raid but *IF* you elect to duplicate everything will you effectively be running raid 1 mirroring?

I really like the idea of parity over mirroring but it sounds like this is somewhere in between?

I would be filling the 20 bays with 1.5 TB drives, so my expectation was to gain roughly 25TB of storage with parity. Is this possible with WHS?
Click to expand...

Yes if you duplicate everything, it is essentially a RAID1 ish.

Reason I suggested WHS was because I saw you said you were going to buy 20 1.5 tb hard drives.

So Unlesss you need 25 tb today you dont need to do that.

When I built my server I knew I needed 3 TB immediatley, but in the next year I would be close to 20tb. So instead of buying 20x1tb drives i bought WHS.
I just hit 8Tb of data last month so I bought 2x1.5tb....well in about 2 months those will be full, and Ill go buy 1 or 2 2tb drives. This way I can maximize my Storage and save money because WHS allows me to have JIT(just in time) storage.

How could this work for you....well if you need 8tb now...you could buy a supermicro SAT2-MV8 , 6 1.5tb drives, and keep the other $3000 in your pocket and use it to buy more HDD when the need arises. With they way technology advances and HDD prices fall you are sacrificing a lot of money buy buying HDD's like that in bulk.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Yes if you duplicate everything, it is essentially a RAID1 ish.

Reason I suggested WHS was because I saw you said you were going to buy 20 1.5 tb hard drives.

So Unlesss you need 25 tb today you dont need to do that.

When I built my server I knew I needed 3 TB immediatley, but in the next year I would be close to 20tb. So instead of buying 20x1tb drives i bought WHS.
I just hit 8Tb of data last month so I bought 2x1.5tb....well in about 2 months those will be full, and Ill go buy 1 or 2 2tb drives. This way I can maximize my Storage and save money because WHS allows me to have JIT(just in time) storage.

How could this work for you....well if you need 8tb now...you could buy a supermicro SAT2-MV8 , 6 1.5tb drives, and keep the other $3000 in your pocket and use it to buy more HDD when the need arises. With they way technology advances and HDD prices fall you are sacrificing a lot of money buy buying HDD's like that in bulk.
Click to expand...

Great info Nitro, i think im pretty much sold. Sounds like it will do exactly what im looking for. Ill keep you updated as i build it :)
 
You don't need to duplicate things if you don't want to in WHS.
 
seltz said:
Also, I realize its not raid but *IF* you elect to duplicate everything will you effectively be running raid 1 mirroring?
Click to expand...

Kinda sorta but not really. WHS does file duplication, which has a similar effect to raid but is also very different.

Raid 1 (mirror) is literally a "write to two different disks simultaneously". Notice that EVERYTHING written to disk A is also written to disk B.

File duplication simply writes each FILE to SOME OTHER DISK "eventually". If you have 6 disks, and decide to duplicate everything on disk 6 (and it doesn't work that way either, you duplicate "folders"), there is no guarantee which disk any given file from Disk 6 will go to. You could have files from disk 6 on all five of your other disks.

One consequence of a mirror is that you can literally shut down the system, leave disk A in the system, put Disk B in another system, and each system will have exactly the same information on their disks that you just added.

In the case of WHS and file duplication, in order to remove a disk you really need to inform WHS that you intend to remove the disk. The system will then attempt to find some other place to store the duplicated files. Furthermore if you (without warning) remove a disk with unduplicated files, then those files are no longer stored on your WHS system.

All this is obvious when you think of it that way, but as you can see, WHS file duplication is NOT a mirror.

A mirror stores EVERY SINGLE BIT in two specific disks. File duplication stores specific duplicated files on some other UNSPECIFIED disk.

Furthermore, there is one additional difference not much discussed. If you write the data to a mirror the file is written to the other disk AT THE SAME TIME. AFAIK the two disks are literally being written to at exactly the same moment.

With file duplication, the file is written to one location, then at some point in the future the copy is written to a different location. Thus file duplication has a window of time where if there is a disk failure, the file copy could fail, and you could lose data.

If you MOVE a large file to a mirror, BOTH disks would have to fail before you would lose your Data. If you MOVE a large file to a WHS file share, then during the time that WHS is waiting to do the copy and the time that the file is actually copying, if the disk that the file was MOVED to fails, then your data is lost.

As an example, I have SQL Server files which are well over 200 gigs. It can take MANY minutes to write that file to another disk. If I MOVE that file to a mirror, it is written simultaneously to BOTH disks of the mirror. If I MOVE it to a WHS share, then the file is moved to one disk. EVENTUALLY it will be written somewhere else. However if the disk that I wrote to fails, then it will never get to the second disk. Thus the file will be lost.

As you can see, WHS file copy and a mirror (or other raid, NOT raid 0) are very different in how they work, and as a result they are very different in the level of protection of your data. By and large, WHS file copy is a fine system however it does present specific failure modes that do not exist with RAID.

I am not attempting to "bash" WHS, I am simply clarifying how a MIRROR works and how file copy works, They are very different in several ways.
 
Jcolby is right as well
If you are move a file to the WHS share and that disk fails before it gets duplicated and its the only copy it gets lost.

There are pros and cons to every setup, and there are a ton of situations where I would not use WHS, and I would implement R6 instead....like on my dad's Business Servers.....although I did put a HP WHS box in there to back up the servers and workstations.

RAID6 is great, but for your home prosumer/enthusiast its too expensive to store copies of your dvd's.
 
How many people will be using this server? Do you really need the availability levels of RAID? Do you have a good backup solution?
 
Seltz,
Per your original question, I would consider a true raid for critical data, running on the WHS server. Media (ripped DVDs and CDs and time shifted TV) are not critical data and for that purpose, WHS (not file duplicated at all) is a fine solution. Things like family photos, tax documents, business papers etc might be better served with a true mirror.

WHS is a shell built on top of Windows 2003. You can install WHS on a machine, and then add in a RAID controller specifically to provide a much smaller storage media with more robust protection mechanisms. Do not add these raid volumes to the WHS storage, leave them outside of WHS control, and perform simple shares. Then use a backup facility to store critical data to the RAID shares, but store media on the WHS system.

DO NOT use motherboard raid however. A raid controller card, even an inexpensive SOFTWARE RAID solution, can be moved from any machine to any other machine should the motherboard die, or for that matter should you just decide you want to do that. Motherboard raid solutions require very careful selection of replacement motherboards to ensure that the motherboard raid will survive a move to a new motherboard.
 
Some older screenshots of my WHS setup:








WHS also has the great advantage that it reduces the need to intervene by the user, it'll prompt you if it needs some attention. File managment with the DE is a breeze and the ability to expand at will is awesome, especially as drive prices fall.

I'm not sure your duplication question was fully answered. As you can see on my the first picture not everything is duplicated. I'm only in "partial RAID 1 mirror" ish mode with this since I don't need everything duplicated. Shot 2 shows that only 148gb are duplicated, so that's all the space I've lost to it. 221gb are used for PC backups. The rest is all up for grabs by whichever share (videos, music, photos, etc) needs it.
 
I would not use the MB raid, if i decide to go with raid (and i am seriously considering it after thinking about all my options). I will go with the areca 1280ML. While i would obviously like to save money I also want to do this one time, I really dont like the thought of ripping hundreds of dvd's over again in the case of a hard drive failure. Thats why parity is such an attractive option to me.

Ive purchased the MB, the norco 4020, the cpu and rack. My last decisions are PS, (I think im going with the corsair 800, HD's and whether i go with a hardware raid card or not. At this very moment after alot of consideration i think id rather spend the money and have piece of mind its going to be done once right.I will probably decide by the end of the week.

I appreciate everyone replying and you have all really helped me understand this hing alot more now. While i love the autobackup feature of WHS I will have 5 OS X boxes on the lan and the same amount if XP/Vista boxes. Also, I really never gave a thoiught that 10 seat licenses wouldnt be anough but looking at it now I may actually end upo short. Does each PS3/Xbox360/HTPC that connects toi the nas count as a CAL?
 
Each Windows based PC, and correct me if I'm wrong, each Xbox counts as a CAL. (I don't have an Xbox).

In one of the other recent WHS threads in the last few days someone mentioned that there is a hack to enable Mac OS machines to backup to WHS. My impression was that this does not burn a CAL.

Edit:
Found the thread with Mac OS reference, see post #31 onward: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1374228

Also, if you have additional questions the official forums are pretty good:
http://forums.microsoft.com/windowsHomeServer/default.aspx?siteid=50
 
[LYL]Homer;1033463367 said:
Each Windows based PC, and correct me if I'm wrong, each Xbox counts as a CAL. (I don't have an Xbox).

In one of the other recent WHS threads in the last few days someone mentioned that there is a hack to enable Mac OS machines to backup to WHS. My impression was that this does not burn a CAL.

Edit:
Found the thread with Mac OS reference, see post #31 onward: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1374228

Also, if you have additional questions the official forums are pretty good:
http://forums.microsoft.com/windowsHomeServer/default.aspx?siteid=50
Click to expand...

My impression of the WHS CAL's was 10 users....not 10 machines...I have no evidence to back that up just merely the impression I was under.
 
nitrobass24 said:
My impression of the WHS CAL's was 10 users....not 10 machines...I have no evidence to back that up just merely the impression I was under.
Click to expand...

This could be easily tested using virtual machines. Build a VM with some OS like Windows XP. Install the WHS connector software on it. Copy the VM 12 times and fire them all up.
 
jcolby said:
This could be easily tested using virtual machines. Build a VM with some OS like Windows XP. Install the WHS connector software on it. Copy the VM 12 times and fire them all up.
Click to expand...

I think I will do that.
 
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