WHS raid5 or Solaris Raidz?!??

Drufire

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Aug 16, 2008
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I'm wanting to build a small, but expandable media server(raid5/6 or zfs raidz/z2). I've been watching some of the builds on the forums here and over at avsforums. Cost/Gig is gona be the big factor for me. I grabin one of the norco 4020 or 4220's as they seem to be the best solution for the dollar and most popular. Plan on starting with 8-10 TB's and expanding it as needed.

Ive noticed alot of people are using inexpensive sata cards w/ WHS and doing software raid5. But to make things simple for me(or my mac's anyways) i was thinking of going with OpenSolaris and raidz or z2. I haven't seen many solaris builds and was wondering what people thought of the zfs raidz.

Does WHS have an Iscsi option? can i turn a whs box into a map'd iscsi drive for my hacked Apple tv? or future htpc.

also, what whould need to be done to access the server over a *Vpn? so i could have access on my notebook while im @work.. or away on vacation?
 
WHS does not do software RAID5. The Drive Extender essentially does spanning without the loss of the entier spanned set on a single drive failure. Redundency is done on a folder level by the duplication feature rather than the drive level. A majority of people around here are happy with WHS as a media repository.

Whatever OS you go with, you can't go wrong with the Norco cases.
 
I run a Solaris file server with RAIDZ and have been very satisfied with the performance and ease of setup. The main advantages to Solaris vs WHS are speed, infinite snapshots, iSCSI (in addition to CIFs/Samba fileshares) and scalability. WHS is obviously going to be more user friendly but the learning curve to setup a Solaris file server is really very low. There are plenty of setup guides and loads of documentation and as a bonus you get to learn about Solaris along the way. Just my two cents worth. The only thing I can say is make sure if you do decide to go Solaris that you check out all the hardware you select on the Solaris hardware support matrix as you will save yourself a lot of trouble trying to make unsupported hardware work.
 
WHS is not synonymous to RAID5.
Yes you can use RAID5 with WHS but 99% of people do not.
Redundancy is handled by a folder by folder basis of YOUR choosing. You decide what data to keep redundant.

WHS can do iSCSI, so can any OS....the real question you need to ask yourself is "Do you need iSCSI?"

The reason I ask is because I know for a fact that appleTVs....and HTPCs for that matter do not need iSCSI and it will add Zero Value to your setup.
Only that it will add is slow performance on consumer hardware, and headaches.

Norco Cases are awesome.
The 4020s are quieter BTW.
 
WHS does not include iSCSI target capabilities built in, the only version of windows that comes with a software iSCSI target is Windows Storage Server. iSCSI is critical if you ever plan to expand and use your file server for something like back-end disk for Vmware ESX or Xenserver for instance. Not sure what Nitrobass meant by 'slow performance on consumer hardware' the software iSCSI initiator (not to be confused with an iSCSI target) on Windows is generally considered to be one of the best initiator implementations out there for performance and consistency. If you are accessing a network share with just one machine iSCSI will typically exceed the speed of a Windows file share by a fair margin as the CIFs protocol was optimized for 10 and 100Mbit networks back when it was designed. iSCSI was made for scalable networks beyond 100Mbit and it definitely shows when you can push more than 40MB/s consistently with it. It would be one of the better ways to provide additional storage to an HTPC for recording and is in fact what I've been doing for nearly two years now without a hiccup.

WHS in its native non-raid implementation is not doing parity verification and scrubbing which means you still hit issues with data reliability which will be quietly replicated to your 'mirrored' file level copy on your second drive... ouch! WHS is really about user friendliness not the largest feature set or the best performance as I said before. I would argue (as I have) that if you are willing to spend less money on the software and slightly more time on setup that Solaris with ZFS and RAIDZ is the way to go. Queue legions of WHS fanboys who refute everything I just said here: ;)
 
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WHS does not include iSCSI target capabilities built in, the only version of windows that comes with a software iSCSI target is Windows Storage Server. iSCSI is critical if you ever plan to expand and use your file server for something like back-end disk for Vmware ESX or Xenserver for instance. Not sure what Nitrobass meant by 'slow performance on consumer hardware' the software iSCSI initiator (not to be confused with an iSCSI target) on Windows is generally considered to be one of the best initiator implementations out there for performance and consistency. If you are accessing a network share with just one machine iSCSI will typically exceed the speed of a Windows file share by a fair margin as the CIFs protocol was optimized for 10 and 100Mbit networks back when it was designed. iSCSI was made for scalable networks beyond 100Mbit and it definitely shows when you can push more than 40MB/s consistently with it. It would be one of the better ways to provide additional storage to an HTPC for recording and is in fact what I've been doing for nearly two years now without a hiccup.

WHS in its native non-raid implementation is not doing parity verification and scrubbing which means you still hit issues with data reliability which will be quietly replicated to your 'mirrored' file level copy on your second drive... ouch! WHS is really about user friendliness not the largest feature set or the best performance as I said before. I would argue (as I have) that if you are willing to spend less money on the software and slightly more time on setup that Solaris with ZFS and RAIDZ is the way to go. Queue legions of WHS fanboys who refute everything I just said here: ;)

Got news for you, I'm consistently pushing more than 40MB/s over my network and it ain't using iSCSI. WHS is the easy way to go. For the most part it just works. 90% of the issues with the 2 WHS systems I've setup thus far have been hardware problems.
 
WHS does not include iSCSI target capabilities built in, the only version of windows that comes with a software iSCSI target is Windows Storage Server.
True....but there is free software that will add iSCSI Target to any windows Host you so desire.:)

iSCSI is critical if you ever plan to expand and use your file server for something like back-end disk for Vmware ESX or Xenserver for instance.
Again completely true...but the OP is just trying to access media on an apple TV, hence my question does he really need iSCSI?

Not sure what Nitrobass meant by 'slow performance on consumer hardware' the software iSCSI initiator (not to be confused with an iSCSI target) on Windows is generally considered to be one of the best initiator implementations out there for performance and consistency.
While it works try setting up an iSCSI target on your home LAN and access it from your desktop. Speeds will be complete shit, and it will drag the rest of the network down.
If your gonna do iSCSI you should do a dedicated fabric.
If you are accessing a network share with just one machine iSCSI will typically exceed the speed of a Windows file share by a fair margin as the CIFs protocol was optimized for 10 and 100Mbit networks back when it was designed. iSCSI was made for scalable networks beyond 100Mbit and it definitely shows when you can push more than 40MB/s consistently with it.
*Nitrobass24 LOLs at 40MB/s
Using single disk with SMB shares should yeild at least 70MB/s sustained.

WHS in its native non-raid implementation is not doing parity verification and scrubbing which means you still hit issues with data reliability which will be quietly replicated to your 'mirrored' file level copy on your second drive... ouch!
True, but it doesnt need to do any scrubbing because there is no parity, all it is really is a JBOD with NTFS juctions.
WHS is really about user friendliness not the largest feature set or the best performance as I said before. I would argue (as I have) that if you are willing to spend less money on the software and slightly more time on setup that Solaris with ZFS and RAIDZ is the way to go.

It doesnt have the largest feature set....out of the box...neither does linux, solaris, {other OS goes here}. You have to configure them to do so.
WHS is no different it can do iSCSI or whatever you just have to set it up to do so.

Performance wise I have not found anything else that performs better for home use?:confused:
Yea OK you can build a RAID array that can do close to 1gb/s BUT you are still limited by the 1GbE LAN so does it really matter?
I mean modern HDDs can max out a 1GbE LAN in throughput so anything over and above that is just wasted.

Also yes it is more expensive thant OpenSolaris, Linux, BSD, etc. but theres no learning curve, nothing to maintain.

Queue legions of WHS fanboys who refute everything I just said here: ;)
:p:cool:
 
sorry it took me awhile to get back to this...

To give you a better idea of what i'd like to do. Lets say 10TB of storage(expandable in the future) that is accessable to my ATV as well as to my and my wifes macbook pro's and our 24" Imac in the home office.

AS well.... i would like for our macbook pro's to be able to access the 10tb while we are away from the house. ie: @work.. On vacation.. (i'm under the impression i need to set up a VPN for this?) Ive never set one up, not 100% sure.

so.. i was thinking, seting up a box with freenas, whs, solaris or (insert random OS name here) and seting it as an iscsi target that would be link'd to my Imac. Then shared from the imac to the network. Then seting up a vpn from the macbook pro's to the imac. Does that sound right? Is there a better/easier way?

As far as preformance goes. as long as i can stream(at max ) 2 hd feeds over the network it should be a good starting point for me. my network is on a gigabit router and switch using cat6 cables. cept for the MBP's which are 5ghz wireless N.
 
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Your setup is way too complicated. Just use the built-in filesharing in {insert OS here} if you want to go that route; they all support CIFS (Windows) file sharing, as well as FTP or it's easy to add (useful for accessing your files remotely if you don't want a VPN), and at least FreeNAS supports AFP (AppleTalk) too (and your Mac can access the CIFS shares anyway).

I am running a Debian Linux box with software RAID5 and Samba file shares. It does well, I can get about 90MB/s when the disks in my desktop are having a good day, though I wouldn't say it's the easiest route to go for maintenance if you're not a *nix guy. I'd say go the FreeNAS route myself. Just beware that expansion will be 'add an array' and not 'add a disk' as FreeNAS doesn't support array expansion, so be prepared for that. Linux softraid does if you're willing to get your hands dirty. I wouldn't run more than 6-7 disks in a single RAID5 anyway, though ZFS would be a bit more robust.

Basically any solution available can meet your needs. WHS: ease of use, FreeNAS: cost/storage efficiency (though personally I find *nix in general and web appliances especially, easier to maintain than Windows, I realize most will differ on this point).
 
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