Need advice on NAS upgrade from WHS

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DangerIsGo

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 16, 2005
Messages
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Greetings fellow data storage gurus.
I currently have a WHSv1 NAS with ~18TB of storage (random disks between 750GB and 2TB). Specs are:

Norco RPC-4020 case
Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W PSU
Biostar TForce TF720 A2+ Motherboard
AMD Athlon X2 BE-2300 CPU
G.Skill 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2-800 Memory
2x Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 Controller cards
A few 1.5TB Western Digital Green HDDs
A few 2TB Western Digital Red HDDs
A few 1TB Western Digital Black HDDs
1-2 Western Digital 750GB HDDs (I think!)

With performance being relatively crap and mostly due to the fact that support has ended for it, I'm currently seeking an alternative. WHS 2011 was immediately off the list as it did not included DE. Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials was also off the list as I'm not paying $400. So I was looking into open source alternatives and RAID controllers. I've been out of the loop for quite some time but my interest was piqued when I found out that RAID-5 can be dynamically expanded via OCE (in the past, I didn't think it was possible, was this a recent development?). So now I'm at a crossroads.

I love the idea that I can pull a HDD out of my server and throw it in another PC and read its contents (as Greyhole and WHS provides me) but the more I think about it, I have honestly never used it. The problem I have with a solution like that is I really sacrifice data as it is almost halved with the replication enabled. So in essence, a 16TB server after replication is technically 8TB (if you replicate all your data).

Then I was looking at ZFS. I like how it acts like a RAID5/6 with the parity drive(s), able to rebuild your data and provide you more storage in your pool. Unfortunately, I have heard from my places that streaming performance is sub par. As this is mostly going to be a storage/streaming box, that doesn't sit well with me.

Finally, I was looking at a dedicated hardware RAID controller but I have no idea where to start or what brand/model is good or what to look for. I *think* I would get better performance than ZFS but I don't know for sure (since its done in hardware)...correct me if I'm mistaken here. The only downside I see is that if the controller dies, I'm dead in the water until I replace it and I don't know how that would go if that controller is no longer available. In the past, I know it was incredibly iffy to use your array on a different controller but with times changing, maybe that's no longer the case? You tell me!

Sorry for having this so long, I just wanted to be thorough in my discoveries. Since this box is holding data that I have collected over the span over 10+ years, It's pretty darn important to me.

My end goal is to replace all the drives with 3/4TBs so greater than 2TB support is a must.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
 
I have or had mostly the same setup as you. My Norco 4220 box is mostly a backup box now. Instead of WHS and DE, I just use Windows 8 and Snapraid. Any OS could work for Snapraid. I was going to play with the Storage Spaces and the Media Center features, but decided not to.

With Snapraid you designate a number (in my case: 2) of your largest disks as parity disks. All the other disks are normal NTFS disks that can be read by any PC. You'd have to look elsewhere for pooling because Snapraid's pooling is not great. I don't use pooling; I share all the disks and use Synctoy to perform my backup.

I added a flashed IBM M1015 to support 3TB disks. The smaller disks are still connected to an SASLP-MV8.
 
Unfortunately, I have heard from my places that streaming performance is sub par.
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I do not see how ZFS will be too slow to stream. I mean streaming HD is only a few MB/s. I have zfs servers easily that do 600 MB/s reads and writes.

However with that said it seems like you are building a server for HTPC streaming. For that purpose I also recommend Snapraid. It will allow you to mix and match drives. Just make sure your 2 or 3 parity disks are the largest drives you use. I also do not use pooling from snapraid because my linux based HTPC software can use more than 1 folder to store its data. It will balance between the folders. With that said I have heard a few times on this forum windows users recommending using stablebit to pool their disks together.
 
Thanks for your replies. Honestly, I want to completely stay away from Windows and go to open source solutions.
It's not so much streaming HD movies but also file transfers as well, which do occur quite frequently. Large file transfers to be exact (8-15GB a file). Going at 20-30MB/s is pretty insufficient when I have a gigabit network in place. I tried out ZFS last night and was able to get a sustained 80-90MB/s when writing an 8GB file. But then again, I heard that you need a lot of RAM for ZFS, approximately 1GB for every 1TB and I only have 4GB.

I also tried out Amahi with the same setup as ZFS (2x1TB drives) and I got about 30-40MB/s average. It would jump between 1-10 to 30-50MB/s which I didn't fully understand why.

Has anyone had any experience with FlexRAID?
 
I get consistent 100-110MB/s throughput transferring large files within my gigabit network. This is on an old Areca 1281ML, WD Reds on raid 5s and 6s, running under openfiler, xfs volumes, serving files and streaming content mostly through smb (some through nfs).
 
But then again, I heard that you need a lot of RAM for ZFS, approximately 1GB for every 1TB and I only have 4GB.
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I call the 1GB per TB requirement FUD. Totally unnecessary unless you are doing deduplication. I have no where near 1GB per TB on any of my ZoL servers at work or at home.
 
You should try researching all the mayor solutions out there for you, including ZFS, FreeNas/Nas4Free, Amahi, unRiad, WHS/W7/W8 + Flexraid or Snapraid, etc.

Im also in a similar situation, moving from my old WHSv1 + DE, since it doesn't support higher than 2tb,, but i have chosen WHS 2011 as my main OS, i tested it out, and very similar to W7, so there is little learning aside from the exclusive things. Still deciding on weather i will go with Flexraid or just a pooling solution like Stablebit/Drivebender, im not considering atm snapraid because i want good pooling for my drives, i want a similar experience to WHS just with 2tb+ support, im more inclining toward stablebit out of mainly what i have in storage is movies that i have ripped, so if i lose a drive i would just rerip the movies, i have accepted that i will need to invest time on this, but i prefer it into having a parity solution like flexriad, but still testing atm.

Now if you want to have high sustained transfer rates, then go into a raid solution (software or hardware), this is the only way to more or less garantee to have good throughput, setups like WSH+Flexraid will transmits as fast as the hdd the info is allowing.
 
Abula said:
You should try researching all the mayor solutions out there for you, including ZFS, FreeNas/Nas4Free, Amahi, unRiad, WHS/W7/W8 + Flexraid or Snapraid, etc.
Click to expand...

Is there a source that provides and overview and comparison of these various solutions? I have to admit that I am a "storage newbie," and I find the various debates in this group interesting, but I lack the context to understand the issues.

x509
 
Here's another question. Say I wanted to try out stablebit, is there a way to convert my drives to/from the WHSv1 format (/root/DE/shares) to the stablebit format, if it has any seemlessly or does it do it automatically or do I have to start from scratch?
 
I ended up ditching my WHS and moving to a Synology Diskstation DS213j.
I am really happy with it. I put 2 WD Red 3TB drives in it and things couldn't be better.
Even though I did my research and knew the software was robust I was really surprised just how versatile and extensive it was.
I am really happy with this choice.
 
One nice thing about Synology is they run linux software raid instead of proprietary solution so that if the unit dies you should be able to put the disks into any PC and boot off of a linux live USB stick and and have access to your data without much issue.
 
DangerIsGo said:
But then again, I heard that you need a lot of RAM for ZFS, approximately 1GB for every 1TB and I only have 4GB.
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Nope. That guideline is more accurate for something like dedup (but even that varies). If you don't plan on running dedup or plan on having multiple connections to the same file you can get by with having 4 - 8 GB of RAM.
 
Last night I tried just installing Ubuntu 14.04 and installing Greyhole & Samba. After some finagling to get things configured properly, I was able to get a share working successfully and transfer rates were pretty darn sufficient. avg 80MB/s.

I wish there was a solution that was a mix of RAID and Greyhole/DE. Meaning, you can pull the drives out to read the data but they also have one or several dedicated parity disks to rebuild the data if the drive dies. That way you'd get the storage pool space of a RAID-5 like system, the redundancy of a RAID system and the ability to read the data elsewhere.

Honestly, reading the data as is I think would be kind of a high requirement. I never had to do it in the past but now that I'm migrating, I would need to mount the NTFS drive on the NAS and transfer the data to the pool. If it was a true RAID or ZFS system, I would not be able to do that since theres no other place for me to store 14TB worth of data (unless I build a secondary NAS which just is not happening at this time!). If I ever want to migrate my data again in the future (which is most certainly a possibility due to system/OS upgrades), then I would need to be able to view the data on each drive.

So technically I think i just answered my own question. It's going to be Greyhole unless there are other solutions that store data without splitting it up.

Stablebit seems it does that but I'd REALLY prefer to stay away from Windows. mhddfs is another solution I came across but there are two things I didn't like about it. There is no backup/replication solution built into it and it fills up a drive before moving onto the next which I prefer to have the data evenly distributed across multiple drives.

Ubuntu 14.04 and Greyhole should support 3/4TB drives, right? Also, whats a good controller card that has support for this OS, 3/4TB drives and SATA II / III? Id like to upgrade my Supermicros to support larger drives. I was looking at the IBM ServeRAID M1015.
 
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drescherjm said:
I call the 1GB per TB requirement FUD. Totally unnecessary unless you are doing deduplication. I have no where near 1GB per TB on any of my ZoL servers at work or at home.
Click to expand...

Totally agree with you on the FUD argument.
I have a home server with 16gb ram and 50TB data so 0.32GB/TB or ~ 1/3 of the "1gb per TB".

Would i do this for a "work" system, probably not? For a home server I have no issues with this system at all (it is a streaming media server, typically with 5 or 6 clients at a time).

This idea ZFS needs gobs of ram is false. it benefits from it by being able to cache data, but it is not a requirement.

For a random-read workload home server having a ton of ARC probably would not matter as the chances of it streaming the same data is low anyhow.
 
Another question I did have that I might have overlooked:

Disk Management was/is an absolute fantastic add-in that I've used with WHSv1 and honestly, is a must have for my next NAS. The ability to look at every drives stats (usage/temp) on one page, see a 3D mockup of my server and have any flagged drives show up in red on the mockup is wonderful. Also, the ability to name each drive is also great so I can go "oh this drive is failing? OK I know exactly where is in my NAS and what its serial number is." I never have to pull the drive out as the name of the drive is the model/serial (in my setup).

Does anything like that exist for say OMV, Amahi, Drivepool, etc...?
 
DangerIsGo said:
see a 3D mockup of my server and have any flagged drives show up in red on the mockup is wonderful. Also, the ability to name each drive is also great so I can go "oh this drive is failing? OK I know exactly where is in my NAS and what its serial number is." I never have to pull the drive out as the name of the drive is the model/serial (in my setup).

Does anything like that exist for say OMV, Amahi, Drivepool, etc...?
Click to expand...

I doubt it, but there's a simple solution to your problem.

http://www.amazon.com/DYMO-LabelMan...s&ie=UTF8&qid=1402983504&sr=1-1&keywords=dymo
 
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