New project - BIG storage/media server

[Godmachine]

Well guys , I think its time to move from 2 esata 1.5TB drives for external storage to a proper tower server with UPS backup. I plan on using this server to store some data but mostly my media content.

I want around 10TB of space , SSDs are of course out of the question. I need a good mobo with tons of esata ports , need a good case with tons of room for HDDs.

I plan on using Windows Home Server for its OS , I'm gonna have it stored in a closet with ethernet going out of course.

Question is do I bother with a RAID setup? I was thinking of using 2TB drives but I don't mind using 1.5TB or 1TB if I can get a safer or faster RAID setup.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[pjkenned]

Why would you consider SSD's for media, unless maybe you are NBC?

10TB of usable or 10TB of space? 10TB of space, buy a HP Mediasmart EX490 or EX495, add a fifth 2TB drive and be done. Low cost, best WHS software package by quite a bit. Twonkymedia, Tivo, a built in transcoder... they are awesome if you don't need a huge number of drives. 4 internal drive bays (8TB) plus you can connect external drives and get to 10TB quickly.

If you want ~10TB of usable space and say raid 6 (since with that much data you will want decent redundancy) you need 6x 2TB drives + 2x 2TB Drives in Raid 1 for a total of 8x 2TB drives. WHS needs to use MBR volumes (max 2TB) so the biggest array you can make can only have 2TB x 4 partitions = 8TB then a raid 1 array for the other 2TB. It'll be under 10TB usable because of formatting and TiB to TB conversion. You also need a controller that supports Raid 6.

What kind of CPU power will you need on the server? What are you going to do with it?

Just to give you an idea regarding why this is important, I use mine for VM's, transcoding, and such (actually my WHS is in a VM) so I'm using an x58 based Supermicro board with no eSATA but 14 internal SATA ports, 8 on an onboard Raid 0/1 LSI raid controller. (see http://www.servethehome.com/category/the-big-whs-30-drive-whs/)

You can spend a lot of time and money on this project, so you should probably spend a few days figuring out:
1. What do you want the server to do (i.e. file serving? video transcoding? low power (if in closet)? run VM's)?
2. How much do you want to spend?
3. How much capacity do you NEED (this is versus want) in the next 6, 12, 18, and 24 months? Also good here is how fast your storage needs grow. I'm at about 300GB/mo at this point so some users on here that have closer to 1TB/mo growth obviously have different needs and those with 100GB/mo obviously have other needs as well.
4. Why do you need eSATA ports? If you are building a "big" server, shy away from eSATA. eSATA implies that the connected drives have additional power supplies/ fans (which can fail) and connections that can be easily disrupted. Raid is ment to have drives fail, but you don't want to increase the odds of catastrophic failure.

Those are just some thoughts before you can really start to think about building a WHS. I would highly suggest a HP Mediasmart at this point, but if that won't work for you, take a few days, draw a clear set of requirements, and I'd be more than glad to help.

 

[Godmachine]

I just didn't want people suggesting SSD's for anything, always the random person not understanding my request

10TB of usable space as I want to stream content from the drives to different sources. What kind of raid controller do you suggest for RAID 6?

I'll have a Q6600 at default clock speeds , 8 gigs of ram with a wireless N card and of course ethernet to serve.

I want to transcode video mostly off it but I also want to store some content for long term storage. I don't wanna spend a ton but I want it to be reliable and quiet.
I don't need esata ports was just saying thats how my external drives are hooked up now. 10TB storage should last me the say 18 months + but I want the option to upgrade in the future if at all possible.

Power consumption isn't primary on my mind but not incredibly high. However I won't increase my cost greatly to cover that.

This server will be my back up for my current windows install , my blu-ray rips from my own collection but I want to be able to stream it for transcoding.

 

[malefactor]

I'm a recent convert. That having been said, look into Unraid. (google it).

Don't let the price deter you: this is cheaper than real raid, and the characteristics are likely better. I'm about to build two 11tb unraid servers to dismantle / replace a large Raid-5.

Raid-5 is so much overkill for home video storage + redundancy needs, and it has poor recoverability (WHEN a drive fails. Not IF) and expandability characteristics.

There are a lot of subtleties you probably haven't thought about, but the summary is this: I'm dismantling huge, sophisticated, performant systems and going with Unraid. (one array is primary, one array is full mirrored rsync backup of primary).

 

[Godmachine]

Hmm unraid seems great , it seems like it tolerates failure alot better and its easy to install from the look of it. I take it its a linux distro?

 

[odditory]

Raid-5 is so much overkill for home video storage + redundancy needs, and it has poor recoverability (WHEN a drive fails. Not IF) and expandability characteristics.

poor recoverability and expandability? that statement makes no sense.

 

[nitrobass24]

Isnt Unraid just like RAID4? = Slower version of RAID5?

Instead of distributed parity, it has a dedicated parity drive, so you are limited to the speed of the parity drive for all operations.

 

[pjkenned]

Isnt Unraid just like RAID4? = Slower version of RAID5?

Yes. Also... of note, the only major storage player that uses Raid 4 (NetApp) uses tons of battery backed NVRAM + WAFL to make Raid 4 perform OK. NetApp also says raid 4 for 7 sata drives (6 data) and hasn't brought on 2TB SATA drives yet (this will happen soon). So for unRaid to be a for-pay proprietary raid 4 system that offers to hold more data... it seems a bit scary for me.

Also, I've been less than impressed with unRaid playing around with the trial version. It isn't as fast as a proper WHS setup. Hardware requirements are a bit less, but you basically need to use a USB drive as a boot drive, which I don't like on anything save on motherbaords like my Supermicro that have internal headers for USB flash drives.

On one hand, unRaid is cheap and "easy"... on the other hand being able to run the "small" library of windows applications available is a big WHS perk.

 

[nitrobass24]

Yes. Also... of note, the only major storage player that uses Raid 4 (NetApp) uses tons of battery backed NVRAM + WAFL to make Raid 4 perform OK. NetApp also says raid 4 for 7 sata drives (6 data) and hasn't brought on 2TB SATA drives yet (this will happen soon). So for unRaid to be a for-pay proprietary raid 4 system that offers to hold more data... it seems a bit scary for me.

Also, I've been less than impressed with unRaid playing around with the trial version. It isn't as fast as a proper WHS setup. Hardware requirements are a bit less, but you basically need to use a USB drive as a boot drive, which I don't like on anything save on motherbaords like my Supermicro that have internal headers for USB flash drives.

On one hand, unRaid is cheap and "easy"... on the other hand being able to run the "small" library of windows applications available is a big WHS perk.

Well its cost about the same as WHS, and for the Pro version is actually more expensive.

 

[odditory]

On one hand, unRaid is cheap and "easy"... on the other hand being able to run the "small" library of windows applications available is a big WHS perk.

agreed about the growing ecosystem of third party WHS stuff. plus the backup feature is simply killer if you have multiple PC's in the house. if only Microsoft would see fit to add non-striped Raid4 type ability to the drive extender, there would be no further discussion on the subject required.

 

[nitrobass24]

agreed about the growing ecosystem of third party WHS stuff. plus the backup feature is simply killer if you have multiple PC's in the house. if only Microsoft would see fit to add non-striped Raid4 type ability to the drive extender, there would be no further discussion on the subject required.

They do, its called flex-raid

 

[odditory]

Trouble with Flexraid is it's still not a realtime system- still just snapshotting. Hopefully Flexraid Live will see the light of day at some point. The newest beta that spectrumbx linked shows some promise, but I'm talking more along the lines of a commercial product with a real update roadmap. As well, the fact that integrating flexraid with WHS is such an elaborate exercise, not to mention Flexraid's UI learning curve, well it's a lot to get your head around if you're looking for something simple.

 

[nitrobass24]

Trouble with Flexraid is it's still not a realtime system- still just snapshotting. Hopefully Flexraid Live will see the light of day at some point. The newest beta that spectrumbx linked shows some promise, but I'm talking more along the lines of a commercial product with a real update roadmap. As well, the fact that integrating flexraid with WHS is such an elaborate exercise, not to mention Flexraid's UI learning curve, well it's a lot to get your head around if you're looking for something simple.

Thats a fair statement.

 

[Godmachine]

So to the topic at hand...

Whats going to lend better to my needs? Unraid or Raid 6 setup?

Whats going to be more secure and cheaper.

 

[Krobar]

Unraid will be cheaper, either will allow for disk failures.

You could buy an 8 port raid card or unraid pro and 6x2TB IBM drives and put them in Raid5. This would give you 10TB, allow for a single drive failure and leave room for later expansion to 14TB.

None of these options will work with WHS. Unraid is its own OS, the hardware raid card should work with most OS's that arent limited to a 2TB max vol size (Server 2003 with all the SPs, Server 2008, Centos, Freenas and Fedora would all work).

Cheapest option is a board with 8+ sata ports and FreeNAS running ZFS.

 

[pjkenned]

Unraid will be cheaper, either will allow for disk failures.

You could buy an 8 port raid card or unraid pro and 6x2TB IBM drives and put them in Raid5. This would give you 10TB, allow for a single drive failure and leave room for later expansion to 14TB.

None of these options will work with WHS. Unraid is its own OS, the hardware raid card should work with most OS's that arent limited to a 2TB max vol size (Server 2003 with all the SPs, Server 2008, Centos, Freenas and Fedora would all work).

Cheapest option is a board with 8+ sata ports and FreeNAS running ZFS.

Just to clarify the above:
1. 2TB IBM Drives are hard to come by since IBM hasn't made drives for many years. I'm guessing that 2TB Deskstars are what is being referred to, in which case they are Hitachi drives (Hitachi bought IBM's disk drive operations about 7 years ago). The 2TB Hitachi drives, while not the fastest, have a lot of fans among users with 20+ drive installations.
2. Raid 6 basically uses two parity disks to unRaid/ Raid 4's single parity disk. This means one can withstand two drive failures without data loss with raid 6, versus one drive lost without data loss with unRaid/ Raid 4. Also speed wise, a decent controller will give you 400MB/s-600MB/s using modern 2TB drives and raid 6 while I've yet to see unRaid reach 100MB/s. It matters less with a single GigE link, but the limitation is still there.
3. unRaid will not work with WHS. Raid 6 works fine with WHS. The limitation is you need to create max 8TB array sets (4 MBR Volumes x 2TB/ Volume). So you can have 6x 2TB drives in raid 6, pass the volumes to WHS and be fine. In this case you simply turn off duplication and use raid 6 for fault tolerance. If you want more drives, you can add additional raid 5/6 arrays. If you really want to be creative, you CAN use GPT volumes > 2TB with WHS, but it is a hack and I'm not even comfortable using that for production.

 

[nitrobass24]

If your box's sole purpose is to be a file server, and nothing else. Then there is absolutely no reason to use a RAID card and WHS or UnRaid.

Yes RAID5/6 will work with both but RAID defeats the underlying purpose of these OS.

For risk at being called a hypocrite I do use RAID6 on my WHS. But my WHS is a VM, and my Host OS runs multiple OS, and serves as a part time media encoder.

 

[evandena]

Yes. Also... of note, the only major storage player that uses Raid 4 (NetApp) uses tons of battery backed NVRAM + WAFL to make Raid 4 perform OK. NetApp also says raid 4 for 7 sata drives (6 data) and hasn't brought on 2TB SATA drives yet (this will happen soon). So for unRaid to be a for-pay proprietary raid 4 system that offers to hold more data... it seems a bit scary for me.

Also, I've been less than impressed with unRaid playing around with the trial version. It isn't as fast as a proper WHS setup. Hardware requirements are a bit less, but you basically need to use a USB drive as a boot drive, which I don't like on anything save on motherbaords like my Supermicro that have internal headers for USB flash drives.

On one hand, unRaid is cheap and "easy"... on the other hand being able to run the "small" library of windows applications available is a big WHS perk.

Doesn't NetApp use dual parity, thus making it technically RAID-6?

 

[theinv]

For risk at being called a hypocrite I do use RAID6 on my WHS. But my WHS is a VM, and my Host OS runs multiple OS, and serves as a part time media encoder.

Are you using Hyper V or VMWare?

Does using VM makes it easier to backup the WHS or move it from machine to machine? When u run WHS as VM, how big is the VM　ｓｉｚｅ？Does size increase when u add more drives to the storage pool?

 

[georgexi]

If your box's sole purpose is to be a file server, and nothing else. Then there is absolutely no reason to use a RAID card and WHS or UnRaid.

Yes RAID5/6 will work with both but RAID defeats the underlying purpose of these OS.

For risk at being called a hypocrite I do use RAID6 on my WHS. But my WHS is a VM, and my Host OS runs multiple OS, and serves as a part time media encoder.

if u don't mind me askin, how are you running WHS as a VM? i'm assuming you have some "primary" OS running underneath it. which OS is that?

i'm looking into building a new WHS server w/ folding on the side. figure if my machine is going to be running 24/7, might as well donate some of that cpu to science problem is the folding i want to do (bigadv) requires 6gb+ RAM and WHS only supports 4.
i'm considering just putting Windows7 as a "server" but i lose out on convenient WHS features: particularly drive extender. combining harddrives into one giant pool is pretty much the only reason i'm using it

 

[nitrobass24]

if u don't mind me askin, how are you running WHS as a VM? i'm assuming you have some "primary" OS running underneath it. which OS is that?

i'm looking into building a new WHS server w/ folding on the side. figure if my machine is going to be running 24/7, might as well donate some of that cpu to science problem is the folding i want to do (bigadv) requires 6gb+ RAM and WHS only supports 4.
i'm considering just putting Windows7 as a "server" but i lose out on convenient WHS features: particularly drive extender. combining harddrives into one giant pool is pretty much the only reason i'm using it

I use Hyper-V, but i see significant slow downs on my VMs when i run F@H

 

[pjkenned]

Doesn't NetApp use dual parity, thus making it technically RAID-6?

You are thinking of NetApp's Raid-DP (dual parity) which NetApp also supports (and with higher drive counts per array). A user can select either Raid-DP or Raid 4.

 

[Duck]

You are thinking of NetApp's Raid-DP (dual parity) which NetApp also supports (and with higher drive counts per array). A user can select either Raid-DP or Raid 4.

RAID-DP is now an approved type of RAID6, originally it wasn't as the specific method of doing dual parity was different than the original standard hence the DP moniker. NetApp has used it by default (and as the recommended best practice) for over three years now. RAID-4 is only still supported in order to allow for older datasets to be seamlessly migrated to newer hardware.

Also to an earlier note 2TB drives started shipping in February 2010 along with 600gb SAS