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Just a heads up, N40L is $259.99 and free shipping at Newegg right now. It rarely goes this low, and it hasn't since August. You can also get a combo deal to add a single 3TB ST3000DM001 hard drive for $80, which is pretty good.
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Any reason I couldn't use that as an HTPC/File storage twofer? I was planning on getting a Synology box, but if all I had to do was get an OS for it maybe it makes more sense to pick that up instead...
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Mutar posted:Any reason I couldn't use that as an HTPC/File storage twofer? I was planning on getting a Synology box, but if all I had to do was get an OS for it maybe it makes more sense to pick that up instead... You can always run Plexmediaserver on it and run the client on a Roku or if you have a PS3/XBOX, they will pick up the DLNA server. I left FreeBSD/ZFS for Linux and mdadm RAID because I stopped worrying about the write hole on my home files since I have Crashplan backing up my super important stuff (and a UPS) and my choices in media serving got way better.
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Would it be a problem to just grab an HDMI video card and toss in and skip the step of having the Roku/AppleTV? At the moment I have a POS nettop doing my HTPC duties, and it is pretty shitty in general, so if I can replace that in the process I'd be just fine with that.
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Anyone know where I can find the 6 drives in an N40L guide?
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Mutar posted:Would it be a problem to just grab an HDMI video card and toss in and skip the step of having the Roku/AppleTV? At the moment I have a POS nettop doing my HTPC duties, and it is pretty shitty in general, so if I can replace that in the process I'd be just fine with that. Yeah, thats an option too, but more for the HTPC thread.
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N40L still lets you install full linux on it, right? Its smaller and probably quieter than my current box, but I'd really prefer an 8 bay option...
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ilkhan posted:N40L still lets you install full linux on it, right? Its smaller and probably quieter than my current box, but I'd really prefer an 8 bay option... Yes. Why wouldn't it?
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IT Guy posted:Anyone know where I can find the 6 drives in an N40L guide? I'll post it tomorrow. I'm doing exactly this.
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Col posted:Is BTRFS the answer if I want to be able to enjoy some of the advanced ZFS features, especially data verification, but add new drives to the array over a period of time? I'd like the entire dataset to be spread over all the drives, which I gather isn't possible with ZFS, as I'd need new vdevs for the additional drives. Sorry to bump, but can anyone confirm my understanding please? Steakandchips posted:I'll post it tomorrow. I'm doing exactly this. Thanks! Just a couple more days of the £100 cashback on the N40L so your timing is perfect. vv Thank you! Prince John fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Nov 28, 2012 |
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Col posted:Sorry to bump, but can anyone confirm my understanding please? Yes, adding devices to a btrfs pool will do basically what you expect. Start out with at least 2 devices to save yourself some trouble in the future.
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Wasn't there a data corruption but that was just fixed in btrfs? I'm not sure I'd trust it yet. My N40L has ECC RAM in it and the BIOS is set to Parity: Auto but MemTest86+ says ECC: Disabled. Should MemTest86+ recognize the ECC?
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Ninja Rope posted:Wasn't there a data corruption but that was just fixed in btrfs? I'm not sure I'd trust it yet. Are you thinking of the ext4 non news that got blown up recently? Btrfs gets fixes constantly but severe data corruption would probably be notable. Longinus00 fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Nov 28, 2012 |
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Anyone have experience with HP SMART ARRAY P400? There are several on eBay for $30 or less. Aiming for a hardware RAID 5 (maybe 10 if I can find a deal on another 3TB) for NFS/SMB on my openstack lab system.
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So I'm going through and updating my storage box at the moment, which right now consists of an md/LVM RAID5 striped across 5x2TB volumes. It works well enough but there's not quite enough flexibility for my liking. Probably 70% of what this particular array holds is media that gets fed to xbmc boxes in every room of my place, and like all RAID5/6-based setups, to read anything off the array it has to fire up every drive in the array. Just playing music off the array results in about a 35W draw increase over idle/spun-down at the wall. I'm currently planning to use something like SnapRAID to allow selective parity on essentially a bunch of individual filesystems. There's other tools that are similar at this, I think unRAID does the same sort of thing as does FlexRAID and disParity, but snapraid seems to be one of the more flexible to me at the moment and it's free/runs on linux. I'm also going to put a 2x3TB mirrored volume on the system for shit that actually needs to be protected, like system backups from all computers on the network. So questions to everyone: 1) Has anyone had any experiences with SnapRAID or any similar tools? Is this something I should spend time on or is it going to be a non-functional shitheap like so many of these things were when I originally set up my md RAID in the first place. 2) Is btrfs's mirroring functional enough that I should use it for the 2x3TB array instead of ext4-on-md RAID1? I was kind of hoping btrfs would be far enough along to use it for everything by now but that's not the case, but if I can use it for the mirrored volume that'd be nice. 3) In a follow-on to the first question, has anyone got any opinions on mhddfs vs aufs to create a union FS out of multiple drives? The former seems more robust than aufs in most regards, but aufs's write balancing seems more configurable (mhddfs only seems to support writing to the first free point in the union, whereas aufs seems to be able to choose the one that is least full). The storage box in question is: ASUS P8H67-M EVO motherboard Intel i5-2400S CPU 8 GB RAM Generic SiL3124 4-port SATA card 120 GB Vertex 2 boot SSD 4x2TB WD Green HDDs 1x3TB Hitachi 7200 RPM HDD 2x3TB Seagate 7200 RPM HDDs Ubuntu 12.04 Server
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Just a heads up, I'm selling a qnap ts439 pro II+. http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...hreadid=3516325
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Coldharbour posted:Anyone have experience with HP SMART ARRAY P400? There are several on eBay for $30 or less. Aiming for a hardware RAID 5 (maybe 10 if I can find a deal on another 3TB) for NFS/SMB on my openstack lab system. I have plenty of experience with the P410s we have in our brand office servers, and they're absolute garbage. I've lost count of the number of times we've had a drive fail, get it replaced under warranty, and suddenly during the rebuild process lose the entire logical volume because of bad blocks that it had propagated through the raid5. Thankfully it's not critical data and is no big deal to blow away the array and recreate it, but still. I don't even know if they will work with non-hp firmware drives. e: oh yeah, and the firmware updates are fucked up too - i'm getting alerts in hpsim in mandarin now, even though it's a supposed english firmware update.
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devmd01 posted:I have plenty of experience with the P410s we have in our brand office servers, and they're absolute garbage. I've lost count of the number of times we've had a drive fail, get it replaced under warranty, and suddenly during the rebuild process lose the entire logical volume because of bad blocks that it had propagated through the raid5. Thankfully it's not critical data and is no big deal to blow away the array and recreate it, but still. I don't even know if they will work with non-hp firmware drives. *closes ebay tabs on the P400* welp, thanks for the info.
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So I just finished building my new system and now that everything is up and running I need a bit of help getting my storage situation figured out. I am trying to get rid of the three external harddrives that I have been using for years as media storage. My plan was to get either 4x2TB or 3x3TB drives and set up a RAID5 inside the case. That way I can get rid of all the extra power/USB cables that I need to run the externals, increase my storage capacity and at the same time add in some form of data security by using RAID5. My question mainly is does all of this sound like a good idea? I have never used/created a RAID setup so I don't know anything about them. Will I be fine just using the onboard RAID controller(ASRock Z77 Extreme4 mobo) or should I get something else? Are there any particular type of drives I should be looking at(or not looking at) for a RAID5 setup? Since this is going to be a long term solution I am not exactly in a huge rush or anything, should I wait a little bit to see if the 3TB drives start dropping in price a bit? Would there be any benefit to running 4x 2TB drives vs 3x 3TB drives(data security, speed, price, etc)?
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It's certainly not a bad idea to set up some sort of RAID5. You will likely be fine with the onboard controller, assuming you have enough SATA ports for everything (if not, look into the IBM M1015, which you can often get on eBay for ~$75). The "best" drive for tossing into RAID right now are the WD Red series, so if you're getting new disks, those are what I'd get. I wouldn't really expect the 3TB prices to come down too much in the near future, but you might find them dropping into the $140 range with a sale. The benefit of 4x2TB vice a 3x3TB setup in RAID5 is that you'll end up with (theoretically) a slightly faster array, though you've also increased your failure probability, and obviously are taking up another port. Price-wise it'd depend on what sales you could grab, but they should be pretty close.
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DrDork posted:The benefit of 4x2TB vice a 3x3TB setup in RAID5 is that you'll end up with (theoretically) a slightly faster array, though you've also increased your failure probability, and obviously are taking up another port. Price-wise it'd depend on what sales you could grab, but they should be pretty close. Would having 4x 2TB drives make rebuilding the volume easier/faster/more data integrity vs having the 3x 3TB drives if a single drive died at some point? I understand that with both setups I will have basically 6TB of storage, but in one setup I have 3TB of data(theoretically) to rebuild vs 2TB in the other setup. Just trying to figure out the pros and cons of going either way. I'm honestly leaning towards going for the 3x 3TB drives just so I don't have to put the other drive bay cage back into my case and since it'll be less wires to hide.
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InfernoBlade posted:So I'm going through and updating my storage box at the moment, which right now consists of an md/LVM RAID5 striped across 5x2TB volumes. It works well enough but there's not quite enough flexibility for my liking. Probably 70% of what this particular array holds is media that gets fed to xbmc boxes in every room of my place, and like all RAID5/6-based setups, to read anything off the array it has to fire up every drive in the array. Just playing music off the array results in about a 35W draw increase over idle/spun-down at the wall. I use snapraid on my Win7 HTPC to provide parity to a bunch of random NTFS drives. I have it on a 3 hour sync schedule. When I lost a drive, I was able to rebuild all the drives data to a backup drive without any problem. I can't offer much more than that, but it did do what I wanted, which was to allow me to recover a drive if it failed.
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What's the next step up from the N40L? I'd like something with more than 4 drives, as I'm looking for a RAID6 setup and hopefully > 8 or 10 TB of storage with room to expand. It seems prices really jump after the N40L - I'm looking at Synology, and the DS413 is $530 for 4 bays, but the DS1512 is $840 for 15 bays. I'd rather not go quite that expensive if possible. I see a few cases with mounts for more drives (such as this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16811147164), and it seems to me it'd be possible to build a computer with enough SATA connections to utilize all 15 connections for cheaper than $840, but will I start to see bottlenecks in through put, and would it just be safer to go with something like Synology rather than homebrewing a solution? I don't know if building a solution with one of those 15 bay cases is a plain worse option for the cost than buying a Synology, or if the savings + FreeNAS are worth it or not. This isn't anything mission critical - family video and photos over the years, copies of work backups for a second off site location. Nothing I desperately need top of the line stuff to keep copies of.
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Mortanis posted:I'm looking at Synology, and the DS413 is $530 for 4 bays, but the DS1512 is $840 for 15 bays. I think you mean 5 bays for the 1512 at $799 (amazon), with 2 extension bays possible to attach for ~$500 each.
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Hmmm. I see now. The title on Newegg just says 15 drives, but reading into it, I see what you mean. Blah. Okay, I think I'll just self-construct a NAS with a case that holds more drives and find a motherboard with a decent number of SATA ports or enough expansion card slots for this project. Thank you for the clarification. EDIT: Bah, makes more sense to get an N40L and get 4 3TB WD Reds in a Raid 5 and just buy additional N40Ls if I need more than 9TB of space down the line I suppose, rather than trying to part everything myself and cobble together a FrankenNAS. The N40L is proven, and 9TB isn't bad by any stretch. Mortanis fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Nov 30, 2012 |
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I've got 5 drives in my N40L, and I'm pretty sure you can do some hacking to get a 6th on there.
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A 6th drive will fit in the N40L with no hacking necessary. All that is required is this and this.
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Mortanis posted:EDIT: Bah, makes more sense to get an N40L and get 4 3TB WD Reds in a Raid 5 and just buy additional N40Ls if I need more than 9TB of space down the line I suppose, rather than trying to part everything myself and cobble together a FrankenNAS. The N40L is proven, and 9TB isn't bad by any stretch. Case: Corsair 550D (you can pick whatever, but I got it for build quality and because it's pretty quiet) Case Add On: 4-in-3 (for a total of 10 3.5" bays in the case) Mobo: ASRock PRO4-M (well-rated with 8 SATA ports) RAM: 16GB of whatever CPU: i3-2100 PSU: Antec VP-450 NIC: Some Intel Pro chipset If you need more SATA ports: IBM M1015 (you can put two on the ASRock--well, 3 but the 3rd will be limited to 500MB/s) Total price: ~$450 Obviously the physical footprint is much larger than a N40L, but it's also faster, has lots of space for me to keep stuffing drives into it, and the internals would be just as happy sitting in a server case with 15+ HDD bays. DrDork fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Dec 1, 2012 |
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I'm trying to decide between getting my wife a USB3 or Thunderbolt/USB3 external hard drive for Christmas for her 2012 Macbook Air. The Thunderbolt one I'm looking at is this Buffalo one. Thunderbolt/USB3 pros: - More flexible, can use either USB or Thunderbolt port (useful if we have 2 other USB devices I guess) - Marginally faster on Thunderbolt - Comes with a (usually expensive) Thunderbolt cable USB3 pros: - Costs about half as much (~$200 vs ~$100). Does that sound about right? Is there anything else I should take into consideration? Cicero fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Dec 1, 2012 |
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For that much of a price premium and what your wife will use it for, I see no reason to go Thunderbolt.
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DrDork posted:If you know from the outset that you're going to want more than 5 or 6 drives, it's quite easy to put together a custom rolled NAS that will both out-perform the N40L and allow you far more drives--and you can do it cheaper than the ~$600 that two N40L's would cost. I just upgraded from a N40L, myself, and this is what I ended up with: i3's get no intel VTx and can't use ecc memory. For cheap servers/file serving things like this it might make more sense to go AMD. Also a Bronze rated power supply would be even better. Something like this. Longinus00 fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Dec 1, 2012 |
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I have a large RAID 5 array of files that contains a bunch of media, as well as my pictures, and other essential work files. I have a Windows 7 machine that's dedicated to this array. Now, this is going to initially seem overly redundant, but--what I'd like to do is hook up an external USB or eSATA drive to the same computer and periodically backup the RAID 5 array to the single external drive on a nightly basis. More specifically, I'd like to have the software do the initial full backup, and then scan for changes to the drive on a nightly basis and then automatically copy any changes that have been made to the external drive. (Thereby, achieving a quick way to go back to the last nightly backup of the data.) As a bonus, I would also ideally love for this software (while it's doing it's daily backup) to be able to do the same "compare and copy" with a remote FTP server (or similar server) to help protect against catastrophic events (i.e. - if my house burns down). What's the best software available to do this? Can Acronis do this? (I haven't used Acronis in years--but I seem to remember it was focused on imaging, and not managing a specific set of files...) Oh, and... I (ideally) don't want to spend a ton of money. ![]() Thanks in advance for your help!
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mirror with robocopy.
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Cicero posted:Does that sound about right? Is there anything else I should take into consideration?
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Frank Zappa posted:I have a large RAID 5 array of files that contains a bunch of media, as well as my pictures, and other essential work files. I have a Windows 7 machine that's dedicated to this array. For windows environments, I hear this is good: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy
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Mantle posted:For windows environments, I hear this is good: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy Awesome... thanks Mantle and Evil Bunny. It seems to be working perfectly.
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So I got my freenas box with 4 disks up and running, but I have a few questions to get it up to par with the synology I used to use. I've created a volume over 4 disks, so the permissions scheme is 777 so everyone can write to it. But I would like to have 1 drop folder that is 777 and all other folders are 111. How would I go about doing this? I don't see a way to split permissions at the folder level anywhere. Also, I currently have 4 disks, all of wildly different sizes in a RAIDZ2, is it bad to start this way? My question is, how to I put a new disk in that I know will be the standard size eventually for the set and tell zfs that the old disk needs it data drained or transferred to the other drive such that I can mark it decommissioned?
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One more question, when ZFS is started up I've noticed that it just sits at a question prompt that anyone is allowed to access physically on the server itself. Should I be selecting "shell" then logging out of that account? How does everyone else handle post boot security on the server cli? edit - turns out that going to shell and logging out brings you right back to the question prompt so that idea is no good
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I don't have an answer for that specific scenario, but it's relevant to note that at the end of the day, no matter how secure you think your server is, if someone has physical access to the box, they have access to your data. Just accept it, and do the bare minimum unless you have seriously confidential stuff on there. Disconnect the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and call it a day.
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Megaman posted:...FreeNAS questions... If you want to simply replace a smaller drive in your current array with a larger one, there's a GUI option to offline the drive--you then shut the system down, replace the drive, boot up, find the old drive in the GUI, and use the "replace" option, and let it resilver. Done. I'll admit I'm not sure if you can do this going from a larger drive to a smaller one--never tried. Now if you're talking about adding another drive, you cannot do that easily--once created, a RAID2Z pool is locked to that number of physical drives, and to add more you'd need to add an entire RAID2Z pool. That is, you can't really add just one drive, but if you wanted to add another pool of 4, you can do that. No one that I know of does anything about the prompt--if you have physical access, you've already won. However, if you're really concerned, there's an option that I believe is in System/Settings/Advanced "Enable Console Menu" that can be disabled. This will make the console ask for credentials, which sounds like is what you want.
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