Your INPUT what OS to use please

[Typo91]

Hello, I am trying to decide what to do with my hardware... Windows Home Server is just WAY to slow... its constantly balancing. Streaming HD videos over a 1Gbit LAN (which only takes like 0.9% bandwidth) will hiccup sometimes and I look over and the HD light is going like mad doing lord only knows with 'Drive Extender' they should call that 'drive Exasperater'

My Original Thought was that by using Drive Extender I could have non-raid drives so I wouldn't lose all my data if one failed, plus I wouldn't lose space to a parity drive and for Data storage 60MB/sec should be fine right??? Wrong, if 1 drive is accessing something somewhere, even if its just balancing data at 1 MB/sec to another drive, that drive becomes very very slow to other unrelated read operations..

drives are so cheap now I might as well just go raid-5

here is what I have to work with

Intel Pentium 4 630 Prescott 3.0GHz LGA 775 Single-Core EM64T Processor
Intel SE7221BK1-E LGA 775 Intel E7221 ATX Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott Ready) Intel Motherboard
HighPoint RocketRAID 2220 PCI-X SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card
Kingston HyperX 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 433 (PC 3500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model KHX3500AK2/1G

4 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3750330AS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
6 x Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Thermaltake Armor VA8000SWA Silver Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case
2x Thermaltake A2309 iCage 5.25" bay convert to 3 x 3.5" HDD Module

I used to run Windows Server 2003, before I had the 6x 2tb WD disks I had 8x Maxtor 300gb drives in RAID-0 running for 5 years with no problems. and the first 4x 750gb drives where in raid 0 as well, and before that where also 4x Maxtor 300gb, in raid 0, for a total of 12 orginal maxtor 300gbs drives... never had a problem with that setup.. just needed more space.

So this time, i thought I would try a non-raid setup, so I installed Windows Home Server, with Drive Extender. That was the worst mistake ever. Only after copying all my data to the drive pool did I learn just how bad this operating system is with 4 terabytes or more of data to manage.

Its constantly using disk access. And without raid the highest speed I get out of anything is 60 MB/s, logging into the remote console is like watching paint dry.

So here is my question for you guys on Hardforums...

Keep in mind I have WD20EARS drives. I want to go back to raid, only this time I want a parity drive. I was thinking Raid-5. now I know a lot of people have no problems with WD20EARS in raid setups. but my question here is.

Should I goto FreeNAS with a software RAID configuration? and if so, will it support me using my 4 as of yet empty WD20EARS drives as a raid 5 in software raid, and then add the other 2 drives to the drive pool of that raid-5 after I unload the data from them into the raid itself? (I hear software raid will negate the drawback of no TLER in WD20EARS??)

I know i can expand raid-5 stroage pool Windows using my raid manager from Highpoint.

Should I use Ubuntu or some other Linux OS for function and optional applications? (I dont plan on using the server for anything but storage really) but it would be nice to play with.

Should I worry about using WD20EARS in a hardware/software raid setup?

Should I just go back to Windows 2003 server? (which was always very very fast and snappy)

Any input from the community is appreciated.
Thanks guys

 

[vsboxerboy]

Windows Home Server is just WAY to slow... its constantly balancing. Streaming HD videos over a 1Gbit LAN (which only takes like 0.9% bandwidth) will hiccup sometimes and I look over and the HD light is going like mad doing lord only knows with 'Drive Extender' they should call that 'drive Exasperater'

Before going on such a rant, perhaps it would be wise to look at your hardware - ever think that it might not be up to the task? WHS is by no means WAY toO slow. That being said, check out FreeNAS or one of the related distros

 

[Typo91]

When I first built this machine in 2005, it was for going to IRAQ and running movies for 70+ simultaneous users. with 12 Maxtor 300gb SATA-1 drives in RAID 0. it did this no problem.

I had two logical drives in this configuration. the first one (4 drives) had writes and reads at 150 MB /s The 2nd one (8 drives) had writes and reads of 290 MB/s

And this machine never had to pause or wait on anything, it was a BEAST when it came to responsiveness.

WHS server seemed fine until I its drives in used looked like this (4 of my WD20EARS have not been added to the pool)

ALSO, had no idea you arn't suppose to used WD20EARS with WHS... even though I havn't had any data problems. Maybe thats why it seems so slow when I use remote consoles and try to do more then 1 thing with a drive at once???

 

[450]

If Windows Server 2003 works well on that hardware, why not keep using it?

 

[Typo91]

i agree, I just thought maybe someone would have other insights... Windows 2003 is old.. but your right, if it works why not. Maybe someone would say, YES FreeNAS is the way to go, you shouldn't have any problem expanding your raid 5 with the first four drives in raid-5 to include the other 2 drives once you move your data. or something like that

 

[danswartz]

If the drives are that full, maybe fragmentation?

 

[raiderj]

If the drives are that full, maybe fragmentation?

That's what I was thinking. File systems struggle when they are near capacity. Not sure how WHS handles limited space, but that seems like the most likely cause.

FreeNAS could potentially be faster, but WHS should provide you plenty of speed as well for what you're trying to do. Something else is giving you problems, not the OS.

 

[Typo91]

Fragmentation isn't he issue at all.

A storage location like this just doesn't work that way... as a teaching tool I will post fragmentation analysis for one of each type of drive in the system, both test drives are full.

2 TB full drive report

750 GB full drive report

These drives have been full for months and as you can see there is virtually no fragmentation. I dont know if the balancing process is designed to not fragment or what.

I do know that as a landing zone for files from my network. Files as allocated for the full amount of disk space the moment you begin the move. Same thing with torrent files and such.

tl:dr = This just isn't the environment where you would see file fragmentation. Especially not to the extent of affecting performance

 

[danswartz]

You don't need to be snide. If you are teaching us, why are you here asking for help? And how were we supposed to know there was no fragmentation until you posted the output? In general, no filesystem is going to handle being 95+% full when writing new files.

 

[raiderj]

WHS is probably rebalancing all the time to try and limit the space used on a given drive. Since all drives are basically full, maybe it's a got itself into a loop.

So maybe not fragmentation, but why don't you try offloading some files so you're at 80-90% utilization of space? Seems to me that would be at least an easy check before you switch to another OS and find out it might have issues with 95% utilization.

 

[Typo91]

yea I would test it more, however I decided after using WHS I would rather just eat the parity drive and have some redundancy. I've read that WHS doesn't play nice with RAID volumes, so thats 1 reason for kicking it out, also I am not sure if the WD green drive's 4k sectors are having side effects... this machine even after a fresh boot takes like 60 seconds to getting to remote WHS screen. and 30-50 sec to load the Remote desktop.

I've read about FreeNAS... sounds cool but I guess I would like to hear it from someone that uses it.

Any draw backs to Windows 2008 Server?

 

[JeffBlair]

I've never used FreeNAS, but I have used software RAID in a Linux box. You can add drives, and expand out the partition live if you set it up right. I had LVM build on top of RAID5. And, I had it formatted with XFS. I never had to add a drive, but I played with it before I put it into use, and it worked fine.

But, I've just upgraded to a 3Ware hardware RAID. Found a good deal on one. And, I was out of USB ports...stupid mini-ATX.

I used Gentoo Linux for mine. The only reason I even put a GUI on it was for WINE so I could stream my music over the net. If you're not familiar with Linux, I'd look at getting Webmin. It can make life easier for ya.