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caberham
Mar 18, 2009

by Smythe


Grimey Drawer

Fatal posted:

You could always virtualize. That's what I did, ESXi host with VMs for days.

This sounds very attractive. If I'm going to be getting a big box instead of a N40L, I might as well just get 5 3TB drives, and slap on a server and run whatever services I need right? I do like the idea of Plex simplifying things and am looking at Subsonic with music. If my internet speed is fast enough, that means I can also host a game/mumble server on it right? My neighbourhood supposedly offers a 1000/fast megabit line for a reasonable price, except the draw back is that it's bottlenecked by the pacific ocean. Overseas internet speeds are drastically cut, but domestic traffic is ok. Might as well just start a game server right?

fletcher
Jun 27, 2003

ken park is my favorite movie

Cybernetic Crumb

IOwnCalculus posted:

Also the rate at which the resilver goes seems to be increasing. When it first started it was estimating 200-240 hours

What determines how long the resilvering takes?

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Not sure, it doesn't actually seem to be limited on hardware - it's not maxing out the CPU or RAM allocated to the VM, and at least initially it definitely wasn't maxing out the 5400RPM Samsungs.

Even since I last posted, it's cut 10 hours off of the estimate.

tarepanda
Mar 26, 2011

Living the Dream

I have a homebuilt FreeNAS (8.3.0) setup with four 3 TB WD Red drives in it right now, in RAID-Z.

What should I do when I want to go and add more drives? Make a completely different volume?

Also, I'm having a hell of a time getting the Sickbeard plugin to work. Headphones, Couchpotato, etc. are loaded and working fine, but Sickbeard always has an error. I tried running it manually to see what was up and it claims Cheetah isn't installed? What should I be doing here?

tarepanda fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Jan 9, 2013

PitViper
May 25, 2003

Welcome and thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart!
I love you!


Create another vdev, and add it to the same pool. It should automatically utilize all the new available space without issue. Remember you won't be able to remove anything, so if you're planning on adding bigger drives and moving your existing files to the new drives, you'd have to create a new pool.

Fatal
Jul 29, 2004

I'm gunna kill you BITCH!!!


caberham posted:

This sounds very attractive. If I'm going to be getting a big box instead of a N40L, I might as well just get 5 3TB drives, and slap on a server and run whatever services I need right? I do like the idea of Plex simplifying things and am looking at Subsonic with music. If my internet speed is fast enough, that means I can also host a game/mumble server on it right? My neighbourhood supposedly offers a 1000/fast megabit line for a reasonable price, except the draw back is that it's bottlenecked by the pacific ocean. Overseas internet speeds are drastically cut, but domestic traffic is ok. Might as well just start a game server right?

If you do this make sure to put a little bit into planning. I made sure I ended up with a motherboard/cpu combo that supported vt-d (not most consumer CPUs do, but Intel does have a handy CPU chart that lets you pick out the features you want) and multiple x8 cards. The first mobo I used had two x8 slots but only supported it if you used them for video. I wanted two x8 raid cards (ebay item m1015 reflashed http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/ ) so this was critical. End result is the ability to "pass-through" the raid cards to the virtualized OS which gives almost no performance degradation. All sorts of fun things you can do.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

chizad posted:

I've got a very similar setup with an Intel NIC, and while I haven't crunched the actual numbers, 77MB/sec sounds about right for the average throughput I'm seeing. One thing I've noticed is at least with NAS4Free 9.1 and CIFS shares, throughput seems to be inconsistent. One transfer I'll be up around 90-100MB/sec and the next will struggle to break 40MB/sec, even though it's coming from the same machine and the data being copied in both instances is similar.
I've run into the same thing. I've yet to find any solution, or even a reasonable explanation as to what the problem is. Mine seems to pick good/bad files--some will max out my NICs, others putter along at as low as 20MB/s.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams


So I got the Crashplan Black Friday deal, so I've got that for a year. What I'd like to do is backup my laptops to my Solaris NAS, then backup the NAS to Crashplan's servers. If I use my NAS as a Crashplan source, is that readable in anyway with Crashplan, or is there another way to pull this off?

Krakkles
May 5, 2003

like and subscribe for more passive-aggressive roadway bullshit adventure in Chigcao

FISHMANPET posted:

So I got the Crashplan Black Friday deal, so I've got that for a year. What I'd like to do is backup my laptops to my Solaris NAS, then backup the NAS to Crashplan's servers. If I use my NAS as a Crashplan source, is that readable in anyway with Crashplan, or is there another way to pull this off?
Do you have a Windows 7 PC? edit: Are you saying you want to do it with the NAS sending the files? Probably, sure, but I dunno how.

If so, yes:

Krakkles posted:

Did you follow these directions?

When you browse to your symlinked folder (for example, I have my FreeNAS box mapped to e:\cplan\ - creative, right?) in Windows Explorer, can you reach all of the files?

When I browse to mine, this is what I see:




Other possible idea: You might need to run command prompt as administrator when you make the symlink. Lots of stuff in windows acts weird when you don't.

Basically, symlink the mapped drive, then use Crashplan on a Windows PC to back it up. I'm sure there are other ways of doing this, but this works well and is quite simple.

Krakkles fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jan 9, 2013

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





FISHMANPET posted:

So I got the Crashplan Black Friday deal, so I've got that for a year. What I'd like to do is backup my laptops to my Solaris NAS, then backup the NAS to Crashplan's servers. If I use my NAS as a Crashplan source, is that readable in anyway with Crashplan, or is there another way to pull this off?

Alternate option - Crashplan now supports Solaris. To manage it, you need to install Crashplan to your desktop and tweak ui.conf to point either at forwarded ports via ssh, or directly at the machine actually running it. If you do the latter you also need to tweak the Crashplan config (I think it's in my.service.xml) to make the Crashplan service bind to IPs other than 127.0.0.1.

I'm probably going to keep running it within a Linux VM, myself.

tarepanda
Mar 26, 2011

Living the Dream

Took a sick day today since I had a migraine and a leaky stomach... but couldn't sleep either, so I started doing lots of footwork for upgrading my home network.

Ended up walking to Akihabara and buying a new router, Intel NIC, N adapter for my laptop, and another Cat 5e cable.

Fate smacked me a few times while I was walking home in the form of several burning sharts... but it was worth it.

My network is now easily 4x faster and running smoothly, with the exception of some jail weirdness in FreeNAS -- my jail is and has been set to .201, but it's not working anymore. If I check my router, I have some random connection -- double-checking FreeNAS shows that it's epair0? I have no clue what that is.

tarepanda fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Jan 9, 2013

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





IOwnCalculus posted:

Not sure, it doesn't actually seem to be limited on hardware - it's not maxing out the CPU or RAM allocated to the VM, and at least initially it definitely wasn't maxing out the 5400RPM Samsungs.

Even since I last posted, it's cut 10 hours off of the estimate.

I clearly jumped the gun on thinking that a resilver had fixed that stupid corrupt file, since now that it's almost done the error has popped back up; but despite going to bed last night with ~24h left on the clock, I woke up to:

code:
 scan: resilver in progress since Mon Jan  7 18:35:48 2013
    6.75T scanned out of 6.77T at 53.3M/s, 0h6m to go
    1.12T resilvered, 99.71% done
So I'll be looking at a bit over 36 hours to resilver an ~83% full RAIDZ2 array with six 5400RPM 1.5TB SATA drives, all hanging off of the chipset's SATA controller (passed directly to the VM), with 16GB RAM reserved and one core of an Intel i5-2400, or only 15% of the initial estimate.

Crackbone
May 23, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 30 hours!


Nap Ghost

HTJ posted:

The only difficulty with one of those boxes is that I have several TBs of local media and don't think streaming it from my computer to the box over wireless would work very well, but I may be wrong.

Depends, honestly. With a 5Ghz wireless N I could reliably do most 1080p mkvs (as long as they were under 10GB for the encode). Another alternative is MoCA or Powerline adapters - as long as you can get ~30Mb from them, that's enough for any media streaming and it doesn't suffer from packet loss/interference like wireless can.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll

Nap Ghost

HTJ posted:

Would an N40L make a good HTPC for watching videos and nothing more? A NAS+HTPC solution seems hideously expensive in comparison.
Because the CPU is too underpowered, to watch any HD content you'll need a GPU (even the lowest-end GPUs from AMD and nVidia are plenty). I have an N36L running a GT520 with XBMC for my frontend on top of an mdraid across 4 disks with an SSD for a boot drive while running sabnzbd+, sickbeard, and couchpotato. It's an all-in-one storage and playback machine that's about the lowest total power consumption you could get at this point (maybe an Apple TV or Roku would be lower but it'd be the difference between the GT520 and total consumption of the other machine). No need to worry about networking with my setup besides making sure the box has Internet access for grabbing new content and metadata for the media.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





One more on the rebuild - it's still showing as degraded and as 'replacing-4' even though the resilver completed. Do I just need to shut the box down and actually pull the failed drive out now? Or is there some ZFS magic I can work here that will make it stop treating c2t4d0 as a member of the array and have it permanently replaced with c3t2d0?

code:
 scan: resilvered 1.13T in 37h0m with 1 errors on Wed Jan  9 07:36:09 2013
config:

        NAME             STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        tank             DEGRADED     0     0     2
          raidz2-0       DEGRADED     0     0     2
            c2t0d0       ONLINE       0     0     0
            c2t3d0       ONLINE       0     0     0
            c2t2d0       ONLINE       0     0     0
            c2t1d0       ONLINE       0     0     0
            replacing-4  FAULTED      0     0     0
              c2t4d0     FAULTED      0     0     0  too many errors
              c3t2d0     ONLINE       0     0     0
            c2t5d0       ONLINE       0     0     0
        cache
          c3t3d0         ONLINE       0     0     0
Edit: Just needed to run 'zpool detach tank c2t4d0' and it's gone and everything shows as online again.

IOwnCalculus fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Jan 10, 2013

Sheep
Jul 24, 2003


tarepanda posted:

Took a sick day today since I had a migraine and a leaky stomach... but couldn't sleep either, so I started doing lots of footwork for upgrading my home network.

Ended up walking to Akihabara and buying a new router, Intel NIC, N adapter for my laptop, and another Cat 5e cable.

Fate smacked me a few times while I was walking home in the form of several burning sharts... but it was worth it.

My network is now easily 4x faster and running smoothly, with the exception of some jail weirdness in FreeNAS -- my jail is and has been set to .201, but it's not working anymore. If I check my router, I have some random connection -- double-checking FreeNAS shows that it's epair0? I have no clue what that is.

Which router did you get? I'm thinking of grabbing a new 802.11n (or whatever the latest revision is) router to replace my wonky Buffalo brick. I have to have something that supports PPPoE and vlans in order to get Hikari Fiber to work though, which really cuts down the options.

Also why is like everything here Buffalo!?

tarepanda
Mar 26, 2011

Living the Dream

I have no fucking clue, it was driving me INSANE trying to find a decent Buffalo router for N that ALSO supported DD-WRT. I ended up googling for Japanese blogs and DD-WRT化. I absolutely NEEDED DD-WRT because Japanese router interfaces give me headaches with their shitty 90s design and completely incomprehensible feature arrangement.

I ended up getting the WZR-HP-AG300HA. It's HARD to find new, but I found a place in Akiba that had a couple of them in like-new used condition. I had zero problems putting DD-WRT on it and it performs like a champ -- I tested it a bit last night and was coming pretty close to maxing out my J:Com Ultra connection (160 mbit down) while streaming 1080p to my laptop from the NAS.

It supports PPPoE (I can double-check and screenshot when I get home if you need) and DD-WRT also supports VLAN, I think... though the WZR-HP-AG300HA is a dual-band router or whatever it's called, meaning that it can run two wireless networks simultaneously.

Edit: And hey, you remembered me this time, Sheep! Awww. Best friends forever!

tarepanda fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jan 10, 2013

Sheep
Jul 24, 2003


Japan buds for life

My current router kinda sorta works - I have the problem that my NAS box has tragically low speeds across the network (like 1MB/s to a machine sitting next to it), though whether that's down to the box being an HTPC, shitty wireless connection, crappy cabling, or SMB/Windows Home Sharing just being terrible, I couldn't say. As you said, router interfaces here are terrible and half the features on my current one are just plain broken (no client viewer for me!), but it works, in a sort of precarious "don't touch anything and hope the fiber modem doesn't reboot" sort of way. I'd really like to put DD-WRT on it and sort the thing properly but last time I tried to find an image that included a PPTP server, vlans, and PPPoE support it just wasn't happening, at least not for the model I had. Also the prospect of bricking it and having to drop like $150 on a new router is ... not appealing.

I'd really like to build a dedicated Linux file server/router box but it seems like a massive waste dumping the equivalent of $800 USD on a machine now when I could get twice the bang for my buck with Newegg, plus not have to pay like $200 to ship the parts to my new place in six months when I leave.

I don't even know where I'm going with this post anymore I wish I was in Tokyo so I could go hunt for stuff, but my options are basically super overpriced places like Applied/K's Denki or Amazon.jp, so it's slim pickings for me.

tarepanda
Mar 26, 2011

Living the Dream

I actually price checked Sofmap/Faith/Two-Top/Freet against Newegg and even converted, the prices for my NAS box ended up being about the same as what I'd get on Newegg -- sometimes even cheaper. Hard drives especially were cheaper for me to buy here.

The WZR-HP-AG300HA used (http://iosys.co.jp/cgi-bin/zaiko_list/item.php?GN=56580) ran me only slightly over 4000 yen, if that's a factor in your decision. Ridiculously, ridiculously cheap for a good router here.

This is what I was looking at for myself for reference's sake:

9780 Case https://freet-diy.jp/goods_list/goo...o=4997401141943
8980 Mobo https://freet-diy.jp/goods_list/goo...o=4580147650826
10580 i3 3220 https://freet-diy.jp/goods_list/goo...o=0735858245913 (129.99 on newegg)
5980 PSU https://freet-diy.jp/goods_list/goo...o=0761345106962
5980 2 x 4 GB https://freet-diy.jp/goods_list/goo...o=4580376111112

I ended up going for a cheaper Gigabyte motherboard for around 5300 yen (on sale at Dospara) and 16 GB RAM, also on sale at Dospara for about 8000 yen.

I got four 3 TB WD Reds at around 12000 yen each (169.99 on Newegg, WTF), though I've seen them on sale for slightly over 10000.

You could easily buy everything online and have it shipped to your place. I'm just an impatient motherfucker and wanted to pick up everything myself, though.

So yeah, it comes out to a bit less than 90,000 yen for a power-efficient NAS with an effective 7.9 TB (or something) of storage in RAID-Z... and it actually ends up being slightly cheaper than Newegg in the end. You could further cut costs by getting a cheaper case (I wanted front-accessible hotswap bays and a smaller footprint/case to hide behind my cabinet) and you could also drop down to a core2duo. Hell, you don't need 16 GB of RAM either, so you could probably do it all pretty easily for around 70000, 75000 yen.

Edit: Also, you could obviously drastically lower costs by getting fewer/cheaper hard drives -- Reds are much more expensive than, say, Greens... which I've seen at under 10000 yen for 3 TB. I've seen some random Seagate 3 TB drives as low as 8000 before, but those were probably time sales.

tarepanda fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Jan 10, 2013

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams


IOwnCalculus posted:

Alternate option - Crashplan now supports Solaris. To manage it, you need to install Crashplan to your desktop and tweak ui.conf to point either at forwarded ports via ssh, or directly at the machine actually running it. If you do the latter you also need to tweak the Crashplan config (I think it's in my.service.xml) to make the Crashplan service bind to IPs other than 127.0.0.1.

I'm probably going to keep running it within a Linux VM, myself.

This is what I want to do, but I want to back up all the clients to the NAS, and then backup the NAS to crashplan. I don't want a Windows PC to be doing the sending to Crashplan's servers, because I don't have a Windows machine that stays on all the time.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





You'd need to use something other than Crashplan to handle backing up the files from the laptops to the NAS (built-in OS backups, perhaps?) but once you have Crashplan installed on the Solaris box, you're good - the Windows machine would only be used to administer it.

yomisei
Mar 18, 2011


Looking at MB idle power consumption charts makes me want to kill myself. The power draw often is a big unknown when looking for a good board and with a 30-50% difference in the baseline consumption between those boards you can save quite a bit of money through the electric bill. Sadly those small ones are expensive like hell.

Eight Is Legend
Jan 2, 2008


A friend of mine is selling his NAS, more precisely this one: http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?la...6&t=1658&n=6661

I've been looking for a backup drive for my MacBook for a while and from what I've gathered after five minutes of Googling, I should be able to dedicate 500 GB of it for backing up via Time Machine and the rest to store media for streaming - are my assumptions correct?

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.


Eight Is Legend posted:

A friend of mine is selling his NAS, more precisely this one: http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?la...6&t=1658&n=6661

I've been looking for a backup drive for my MacBook for a while and from what I've gathered after five minutes of Googling, I should be able to dedicate 500 GB of it for backing up via Time Machine and the rest to store media for streaming - are my assumptions correct?

Find atleast a 2 bay unit so you get some redundancy incase of hard drive failure.

Eight Is Legend
Jan 2, 2008


Don Lapre posted:

Find atleast a 2 bay unit so you get some redundancy incase of hard drive failure.

Well, I don't really have the money for that and as long as I got my HDD stored both on my MacBook and the backup on the NAS, I'd have to be pretty unlucky for both of them to fail at the same time, right (or am I misunderstanding something)?

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.


Eight Is Legend posted:

Well, I don't really have the money for that and as long as I got my HDD stored both on my MacBook and the backup on the NAS, I'd have to be pretty unlucky for both of them to fail at the same time, right (or am I misunderstanding something)?

Yea, but most people wouldn't keep all their media on both as well, but if you do or your media is easily replaceable than go hog wild.

Eight Is Legend
Jan 2, 2008


Don Lapre posted:

Yea, but most people wouldn't keep all their media on both as well, but if you do or your media is easily replaceable than go hog wild.

Cool!

EDIT: One more question - can I install Plex Media Server on it?

Telex
Feb 11, 2003



anyone have a recommendation on a windows software that can figure out of a disk is bad, soon to be failing or whatever else?

I swapped my old 2TB drives into my external backup raid, and now the thing is just causing me no end of shit. I can't figure out through the FreeBSD errors which drive is the culprit, so I've got an external drive dock (I can erase the drives, they were 1/2 of my old ZFS volume and are now essentially useless) and I just don't know how to diagnose which drive is spewing CAM errors at FreeBSD which might be causing the whole external port multiplier to fail at reading the rest of the drives in the external chassis.

I got no idea how to figure this out and I'm not in the mood to just go buy 6 new drives to back my raid up. I know most of the drives are still good but something ain't being nice.

Ninja Rope
Oct 22, 2005

Wee.


smartmontools? They will run on windows or freebsd.

Laserface
Dec 24, 2004

Sipping harsh elixir,
the ice above us melting fast


Any reliable way to recover files deleted from a RAID5 array? deleted a bunch of photos mistakenly from the NAS instead of my camera card in a drunken stupor and lost some really nice photos

Probably going to have better luck scanning the SD card but I fear im going to get too many recovered files to know what to do with (and Id already formatted and taken a few more too, so I may have lost some stuff)

E: on os x 10.8.2

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Assuming your RAID array isn't your OS drive, there are a number of file-recovery programs you can use to try to recover stuff. Yes, you will probably pull up a crap ton of files. Yes, you will have to sort through them to find what you want. Yes, you should try it on the SD card first. But there's no "magic" way to go about it, unless you're running some sort of snap-shot routine that would allow you to roll things back.

Laserface
Dec 24, 2004

Sipping harsh elixir,
the ice above us melting fast


DrDork posted:

Assuming your RAID array isn't your OS drive, there are a number of file-recovery programs you can use to try to recover stuff. Yes, you will probably pull up a crap ton of files. Yes, you will have to sort through them to find what you want. Yes, you should try it on the SD card first. But there's no "magic" way to go about it, unless you're running some sort of snap-shot routine that would allow you to roll things back.

even if I had snapshots on the window wouldnt have been short enough to have captured the data anyway. Data Rescue 3 found 1800 files on my SD card so its looking pretty good, I can only hope that after the format of the card that the new files overwrote oldest first.

EDIT: got them all back, phew.

Laserface fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Jan 13, 2013

Don Lapre
Mar 28, 2001

If you're having problems you're either holding the phone wrong or you have tiny girl hands.


Telex posted:

anyone have a recommendation on a windows software that can figure out of a disk is bad, soon to be failing or whatever else?

I swapped my old 2TB drives into my external backup raid, and now the thing is just causing me no end of shit. I can't figure out through the FreeBSD errors which drive is the culprit, so I've got an external drive dock (I can erase the drives, they were 1/2 of my old ZFS volume and are now essentially useless) and I just don't know how to diagnose which drive is spewing CAM errors at FreeBSD which might be causing the whole external port multiplier to fail at reading the rest of the drives in the external chassis.

I got no idea how to figure this out and I'm not in the mood to just go buy 6 new drives to back my raid up. I know most of the drives are still good but something ain't being nice.

Sea tools for windows.

Muslim Wookie
Jul 6, 2005


I've got a really fucking irritating issue with permission on a ZFS pool. I'm using OI, and I've created a local user and given that user full_set permissions to the root folder i.e. tank/mediashare and I've set it to propagate. Only it fucking doesn't. So I get stuck with only being able to write in the root folder area, and any subfolder is READ FUCKING ONLY. What am I supposed to do here? The best I've come up with is creating a new zfs folder and manually copying everything across using the account I want to have full access, because when you create something using that account permissions actually propogate like their supposed to.

Please someone tell me I can spank ZFS into setting the permissions correctly before I have to manually copy terabytes of data

Delta-Wye
Sep 29, 2005

Represent!

Muslim Wookie posted:

I've got a really fucking irritating issue with permission on a ZFS pool. I'm using OI, and I've created a local user and given that user full_set permissions to the root folder i.e. tank/mediashare and I've set it to propagate. Only it fucking doesn't. So I get stuck with only being able to write in the root folder area, and any subfolder is READ FUCKING ONLY. What am I supposed to do here? The best I've come up with is creating a new zfs folder and manually copying everything across using the account I want to have full access, because when you create something using that account permissions actually propogate like their supposed to.

Please someone tell me I can spank ZFS into setting the permissions correctly before I have to manually copy terabytes of data

Is it ZFS settings or OS settings? I had to set mine up with setgid and everyone with write access is a member of the inherited group, but this seemed like a normal operation for a *nix system, not really a ZFS thing.

whsa
Apr 24, 2008


yomisei posted:

Looking at MB idle power consumption charts makes me want to kill myself. The power draw often is a big unknown when looking for a good board and with a 30-50% difference in the baseline consumption between those boards you can save quite a bit of money through the electric bill. Sadly those small ones are expensive like hell.

Looking at this the 10W translates to less than $15 a year

Not worth suicide.

Muslim Wookie
Jul 6, 2005


Delta-Wye posted:

Is it ZFS settings or OS settings? I had to set mine up with setgid and everyone with write access is a member of the inherited group, but this seemed like a normal operation for a *nix system, not really a ZFS thing.

In the end, I used chmod -R A- /zfsroot/share and then chmod -R A+user:username:full_set:allow /zfsroot/share. Now all is working.

Eight Is Legend
Jan 2, 2008


Okay, so I upgraded the firmware on the QNAP NAS I bought from my friend and now I can't log in with the default username and password that worked before. What gives?

EDIT: Hm, had to delete the browser's cache.

Eight Is Legend fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jan 14, 2013

Bent98
Sep 17, 2011


I wanted to setup a NAS for my TV and movie show collection that will stream to my WDlive TV plus and Popcorn Hour A-400. I need to be able to stream Blu-ray 3D ISO’s. My whole house is wired CAT 6 and have a 24 bit gigabyte switch.

I have a pc running i7 @ 3.6 ghz Windows 7 64bit ultimate 16 gigz of memory, 700w PS, GTX 580 vid card that I use for my media server and pc gaming right now. It’s a mish mosh of 5 drives all different sizes ranging from 1.5TB to 3TB. I have data scattered over multiple drives. I am concern I could lose data so I want to migrate to a RAID Array. If one drive fails I could rebuild the array easily.
I want something that is scalable to eight drivers even though I don’t have the money to buy eight 3-4TB drives, eventually, as hard drive prices will drop, I can buy more storage to keep up with my growing movie collection.

I was looking at three options
1) Buy the Synology 1812+
a. Will it become obsolete in a few years?
b. What if it dies after warranty period (lose the investment as its proprietary)
2) Somehow use my current pc and a raid card with additional drives?
a. Don’t have any room left in my case for extra drivers
b. Will power supply hold up?
c. Can I set up an array and still keep a few drives separated
d. Performance
e. Cost of raid card
3) Build a new PC running Windows Server
a. Cost
b. Power Consumption vs Synology 1812+
c. Size


I want to save money but want to have something that’s scalable, small, and low power consumption. Can anyone can make some recommendations for options 2 and 3 or provide some feedback on the Synology 1812+?

yomisei
Mar 18, 2011


If you intend to stash more than 8-10TB on 4+ drives you'd better get a custom-build NAS in a sizeable tower of your choice. Their price can be kept well below of the purchase price of a Synology and you can customize it to all your liking. Power consumption shouldn't be an issue with the right choice of parts, as with a good amount of HDDs they're the big consuming part, and even those can be spun down on inactivity after a set amount of time.

My best guess would be
  • cheap mid/big tower with acceptable cable/hdd management, special NAS cases tend to be expensive
  • a Pentium P2120 (you can also try AMD cpu+mb, they tend to have better idle power but less computing power)
  • some kind of µATX or mini-ITX MB (ASRock B75 Pro3-M is what I use, I also found the Asus P8H77-I)
  • 8-16GB of normal or low voltage RAM
  • low-power silver/gold PSU, best ones I've found: LC-Power LC7300, Sea Sonic G-Series 360W, FSP Fortron/Source 350-60EGN(90) or 250-60EGA(90), which excel at good low prices and high efficiency at 20-50W and still support a lot of high capacity HDDs starting up at the same time
  • Intel NIC if your MB doesn't have one of those or a RTL8111E NIC onboard
  • 2-3 120/140mm fans and an awesome+cheap fan controller

These components are the most cheap ones in their category and still give a lot of power and low power consumption. This kind of setup could go into the 25-30W range idle and should cost maybe 1/3 of that of a Synology 8-bay.

The choice of OS is yours, but most people here tend to throw FreeNAS onto USB sticks and put a raid-z1 or -z2 (1 or 2 parities) on their drives. This setup will give you a huge load of scalability and competitive power consumption to that of a commercial NAS.

Since your data is already on your other drives you'd have to get new ones. My personal favorite are the 3TB WD Reds due to their low power and excellent performance. Other 3TB drives like the WD Caviar Green or Seagate Barracuda XT are a bit louder and need slightly more power.

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