Future planning/setup for home file server

[xoddoza]

I have a storage conundrum; I’m trying to figure out an upgrade path and future proof plan for my home file server. I’ll start by outlining what I currently have and what it does, before looking at the options as I see them. Any and all comments/feedback is most welcome.

Currently I’m running a WHS 1. The Hardware is as follows,

AMD Athlon II x4 620
4 Gigs of DDR2
ECS Black Motherboard (onboard video, onboard gig LAN (unused), 5 sata ports)
ST labs PCIe 4 port Sata Card
ST Labs PCIe 2 port Sata Card
Intel PCIe GIGe network card
460 Watt Cooler master PSU

Hard Drives
1x 320 gig WD OS Drive
3x Samsung F1 1tb Drives
5x Samsung F2 EG 1.5tb Drives
1x Seagate 1tb Drive

For a total of ~11 TB of storage (approx 1tb free)

The Server is one of two (flatmates is other) on a UPS, and network wise is plugged into a Managed 24 port Linksys GIG switch, which in turn is connected to a Linksys router/modem. Entire house is wired with cat 5e.

Server functions

The Server does a lot of stuff in the household, including but not limited to,

Encoding media, (from either DVD or videocams etc)
Transcoding, (for my poor underpowered netbook)
Downloading,
Serves files to the HTPC upstairs,
Serves files to potentially 3-5 other computers,
Storage location for TV being recorded.

The files it stores are mostly video files, however also stored is software, Photos, and Documents (receipts/serials/business docs). The documents and photos themselves are backed up to a portable drive regularly which is kept in a different part of the house. All shares on the server set to Duplication ON.

The problem,

1: Hard Drive thrashing - Due to the way WHS places files on the drives, any new media generally gets stuck on the same drive. Thus downloading, encoding and streaming tend to cluster fuck the one drive that happened to have been added in last.

2: Cost effectiveness of Storage – As the capacity of the machine has been increasing its been getting more and more expensive to add in more hard drives, from a power usage , Case size, sata ports available, and accessories cost points of view.

3: General Speed – Even when optimally setup I find the performance losses in NTFS when drives get so full cause large drops in copy speeds to and from the server. A tangible problem (we often host home LAN parties and the server gets a good going over at those) in some situations that makes it all but impossible to use it for other functions.

What I’m wanting,

1: Better IO performance when multiple people are streaming HD 720/1080p content, + music, + recording TV. Ideally 4 of those. i.e. 4 clients watching movies or 2 watching movies 1 listening to music and 1 recording TV etc.
2: Better value with additional storage purchases.
3: To potentially migrate from 2k3 based os. Just feels a bit unpolished and bitsy, esp. in WHS install (lots of hacks etc)

Possible options in my eyes,

1: Do nothing major, keep adding in hdds and balance them to push data around? (not practical as number of available hdd ports is stretched already and mobo has no more PCIe slots)

2: Wait for WHS 2 and any potential fixes to the problems EDIT just read some reviews of beta. 10 hdd limits is a showstopper.

3: Hardware raid under 2k8 R2. Buy a real raid card. And Raid 6 the 1.5tb drives with an eye towards expanding that array to 8 drives total. (9tb usable).

4: Software raid Under Linux: Raid 6 again with the 1.5tb’s.

5: ZFS raid2? Don’t know much about this option.

Pro’s and Con’s,

My current mindset is leaning towards option number 3. Options 1 and 2 don’t appeal to me in any major way, as they don’t really solve the all the problems.

My current intention would be to drop the 320 gig drive. Boot the OS off either a 2x 1tb Raid 1 or a 4x 1tb Raid 10. Partition the array into something for the OS, and then a scratch drive for downloads, encoding in progress, TV recordings, and a Storage drive for the small files. I.e. Photos, Documents, Maybe even music. Raid 6 the 1.5’s and grab or 2 more initially. Use these for storage and serving of the media, Movies, TV and any Software. Max capacity of 9 TB is just less than double what I currently have so that’s plenty of room for growth. And can always add in another controller and array later. Acquiring a legal copy of 2k8 R2, is not a problem for me.

Moving the downloads off the Raid 6 pool to the Raid 10, allows for the Raid 6 to focus on serving. I can just schedule stuff to be copied across during the night time etc.

Option 4 while it does appeal to me in terms of its price, my last encounter with Linux raid was rather unsatisfying. I had 5x 400 gig drives in raid 5. And it worked ok, despite being quite slow, however the problem was me. I’m not a Linux user, even the most basic things requires me to Google it, and trawl forums. I’m not sure I’ve enough time to jump into that. Esp. while intrusting all my data into it.

The same goes for ZFS Raidz2, with its advantages being really appealing, and quite neat in the geeky way. Lack of understanding of the OS in general is the big problem
So running with the Idea of option 3, what controller should I be looking at?

I’m based in New Zealand, so this sort of thing is uncommon and generally moderately expensive. Options for raid cards that are reasonably affordable and available include Adaptec 4805, a 5805? and of course anything I could potentially import. The 5805 is a Supermicro version which as far as I know means that its just got 256mb cache rather than 512.

Any and all thoughts/comments would be appreciated.

 

[pjkenned]

That supermicro version is a UIO controller. My version just sits on a shelf collecting dust. If you can get even an Adaptec 31605 that would be a decent option with expandability and it will easily be fast enough for that usage.

With Server 2008 R2, you can run WHS in a Hyper-V VM (I do it as well as many others). It is a pretty great feature.

ZFS is cool, as is Linux raid, but there is a learning curve. I still Google a ton.

 

[nitrobass24]

Areca 1680 w/ RAID50 + Server 2008

 

[swatbat]

Server 08 with hardware rail. Gives you a good setup with a lot of speed.

Also it is worth brining up that the 10 drive limit in whs beta is not a hard limit and just what they recomend for the beta. They said they have not made an offical recomendation yet.

 

[sub.mesa]

How safe would you like your data to be? Where do your real priorities lie?

Priorities could be: cost, maintenance, data security, scalability, flexibility, compatibility, learning curve.

The hardware RAID route will get more dangerous with each disk you add; due to BER/corruption that can plague large disks. Windows-based RAIDs have a tendency to split or misbehave in some way; leading to more maintenance than a "configure-once-and-run-10-years" setup.

If you prefer an OS which is user friendly, though still would like to use advanced technology, then perhaps newer FreeNAS builds based on FreeBSD 7.3 will be suitable to you. These will feature ZFS version 13 with web-GUI; basically if you can install Windows you can setup FreeNAS; this should be really easy. The problem with FreeNAS is that is basically is a NAS-only OS; not too much other features. Also not all ZFS features will be available through the GUI.

The general benefit of ZFS is of course having a superior RAID implementation, not requiring expensive hardware and providing more protection for your data. If the learning curve of OpenSolaris/FreeBSD is too high for you to consider ZFS, then FreeNAS might be an alternative.

Since it is free, you can always try it and see if it suits your demands. By the way with 'transcoding' do you mean the server actually performs this function? If so, that would exclude server operating systems; it would not be a server anymore but a workstation running network services as well as a console/GUI.

 

[xoddoza]

Also it is worth brining up that the 10 drive limit in whs beta is not a hard limit and just what they recomend for the beta. They said they have not made an offical recomendation yet.

Interesting, still, the non NTFS filesystem they seem to have implemented is a bit interesting. Certainly removes one advantage in it i liked was that no matter how much shit went wrong you could always pull a drive out plug it in and read whatever had survived off it.

How safe would you like your data to be? Where do your real priorities lie?

Priorities could be: cost, maintenance, data security, scalability, flexibility, compatibility, learning curve.

That is an interesting question, and a difficult one to answer. Some of the data I consider much more valuable, ie Documents and Photos. Other stuff while friends probably have most of it, It would be a real pain in the ass to reacquire and re-sort it all. So while i appreciate that for my documents and photos this isn't a backup solution ( i have a portable HDD i also back them up too and store elsewhere) It would be nice to minimize risk of failure. Scalability is an interesting one too, its the reason why i'm looking for something different right now, so being able to increase size over time is reasonably important. At the current rate the amount of data is increasing by around 200-300 gigs a month. which would give me 18 - 24 months or so until a 8 Drive Raid 6 with 1.5's was full.

Flexibility while not crucial is nice, as this box does lots of other stuff, see below. Compatibility not a huge one. House is 100% windows boxes. Learning curve kinda low. rather not have to spend too much energy at this point. Already working 2 jobs and while i'm happy to spend an hour or two each week sorting new downloads and doing general maintenance on the server.

The hardware RAID route will get more dangerous with each disk you add; due to BER/corruption that can plague large disks. Windows-based RAIDs have a tendency to split or misbehave in some way; leading to more maintenance than a "configure-once-and-run-10-years" setup.

I'm definitely aware of the unrecoverable read error sector problems of raid 5, which is why I was leaning toward a raid 6 array both for software and hardware options. As for windows os hardware raids misbehaving, i'm not aware of this? Is there some common fault?

If you prefer an OS which is user friendly, though still would like to use advanced technology, then perhaps newer FreeNAS builds based on FreeBSD 7.3 will be suitable to you. These will feature ZFS version 13 with web-GUI; basically if you can install Windows you can setup FreeNAS; this should be really easy. The problem with FreeNAS is that is basically is a NAS-only OS; not too much other features. Also not all ZFS features will be available through the GUI.

The general benefit of ZFS is of course having a superior RAID implementation, not requiring expensive hardware and providing more protection for your data. If the learning curve of OpenSolaris/FreeBSD is too high for you to consider ZFS, then FreeNAS might be an alternative.

I wasnt aware that FreeNAS had ZFS in it, thats an interesting possibility, as long as I can find some way around the need to do encoding/transcoding etc. See below.

Since it is free, you can always try it and see if it suits your demands. By the way with 'transcoding' do you mean the server actually performs this function? If so, that would exclude server operating systems; it would not be a server anymore but a workstation running network services as well as a console/GUI.

The server does a lot of encoding, taking raw recorded TV files and re-encoding them to h264 etc using Handbrake.

It also does a bit of Transcoding using VLC to VLC. Ie Server runs VLC and on the fly decodes a 1080p film, re-encodes it at say, 25% the resolution and streams it to the VLC running on my Netbook.

Additionally its running uTorrent, and a download manager for HTTP Downloads.

Hope that helps.

 

[pjkenned]

If you are going to do transcoding/ streaming on the box, you'll want either Linux or a Windows Server based machine. This is pretty common since it lets the server do something other than have <5% CPU utilization, and frees up 90%+ of your workstation's CPU utilization since you don't need to encode/ transcode on that. You might be able to shoehorn handbrake on Openfiler, but that seems like a lot of effort.

Handbrake works fine on WHS and Server 2008 R2 (which is what Windows Server codename Vail will run on). Also, Vail has silverlight based dynamic transcoding/ streaming which could be interesting for you.