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FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams


Fancy_Lad posted:

I had posted a few pages ago about what controller card to look at if I wanted SMART information in Windows and was recommended an IBM M1015. Someone finally posted a batch of them for ~$70 on eBay and I got it in the other day.

Ugh, looks like these are gone already. There's one for bid at $71 but it's got a day and a half left on it.

IT Guy
Jan 12, 2010

You people drink like you don't want to live!

Anyone see any compatibility issues with these drives Hitachi 4TB Deskstar 7K4000 in an N40L with FreeNAS?

DEAD MAN'S SHOE
Nov 23, 2003

We will become evil and the stars will come alive


Who the hell remembers the I in RAID anymore? Gonna start sourcing all my drives off ebay and see where it gets me in a raidz2

Civil
Apr 21, 2003

Do you see this? This means "Have a nice day".

IT Guy posted:

Anyone see any compatibility issues with these drives Hitachi 4TB Deskstar 7K4000 in an N40L with FreeNAS?

I've read the n40l's SATA controller can't see anything bigger than 3.something tb, so you'd be paying for storage you couldn't use.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003



DEAD MAN'S SHOE posted:

Who the hell remembers the I in RAID anymore? Gonna start sourcing all my drives off ebay and see where it gets me in a raidz2
Trust me, whatever you put in a raidz2 costs peanuts compared to what we pay for enterprise arrays.

movax
Aug 30, 2008



evil_bunnY posted:

Trust me, whatever you put in a raidz2 costs peanuts compared to what we pay for enterprise arrays.

I am really impressed my consumer-grade hardware essentially remained up and running for a year straight in my apartment closet, even after drive failure. Hot-swapping drives actually worked, which really surprised the hell out of me, I didn't think my controllers or backplanes really supported it.

It's been off/in pieces for the past month though, I really need to make that Ikea run this weekend to pick up a larger Lack or some other table for it to live on. Need to get all the gross dust out of it too

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

Nap Ghost

error1 posted:

I'm sure it's more complicated than that, and for sequential writes I suspect the drive will hold the 512 byte writes in cache until it has enough of them to write a whole 4k sector efficiently.
Sequential 512 byte reads are kept in the SATA command queue and scheduled accordingly into continuous sequences with various elevator algorithms to maintain fairness for new requests, but because you can specify a range of a read or write in a buffer, this in practice isn't so bad for sequential performance. It does get extremely inefficient when performing random I/O and that's a substantial part of throughput in practice, so it'll matter for workloads with lots of users or lots of small files like e-mail, source control, etc.

DEAD MAN'S SHOE posted:

Who the hell remembers the I in RAID anymore? Gonna start sourcing all my drives off ebay and see where it gets me in a raidz2
The one downside here is that buying old, out of warranty drives means you're totally out the cost of the drive when it dies. For maybe a $30 savings per drive up-front you'd have to have a rather small rate of failure to make it worthwhile.

Furthermore, there's an asymptotic point of diminishing hard drive prices where a 500GB drive now doesn't cost, say, $20 - it costs ~$40 while 2TB drives can be had for ~$100. The lowest capacity new drives on the market at any given moment are among the worst in cost per unit storage. This is related to the general PC building problem of trying to "future-proof" your system (read: it ain't happening).

If you want to get some sourcing diversity, you could always order your drives from several different vendors.

whiskas
May 30, 2005


I have a budget of roughly $350

My goal is to provide a home backup for all my irreplaceable files: pictures, videos, documents, etc. Files would be backed up at least once a month to this device, along with a redundant copy stored on my main PC.

Requirements are:
- Convenient - to encourage frequent backups
- Reliable - should contain some form of redundancy to account for hard drive failures (Raid 1 is not a solution to this)
- Portable - I need to be able to carry a backup in one arm, in the event of evacuation. This also means I need to be able to quickly power down and disconnect the device. Either the device itself is portable or something like ejecting a hard drive would work as well.

From my research so far, this is what I've come up with:

DLink DNS-325 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure, (2) 3.5" Bays, SATA, RAID 0/1, Gigabit Ethernet Port ($140)


1TB Seagate Barracuda SATA III w/ 64MB Cache ($90)

1TB Western Digital Blue 7200rpm SATA III w/ 64MB Cache ($90)

I would install the hard-drives into the DLink NAS in standard mode (ie. two separate drives). I would backup my files to one drive and schedule the NAS to sync this drive to the other drive regularly.

Any thoughts on this? Can I do any better given my budget?

I do have a small HTPC I could use, however if I were to use it as a form of NAS it must have some way of keeping my backup disks off unless I specifically walk over to my HTPC and turn them on. I don't want the extra load of them powering up/down constantly to wear them out. Would something like this:

Vantec NexStar MX Dual 3.5" SATA to USB 2.0 & eSATA External Hard Drive Enclosure
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Produc...N82E16817392024

Be a better solution than the NAS? If anything I would save a good 50-60 dollars

whiskas fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Aug 15, 2012

frumpsnake
Jan 30, 2001

The sad part is, he wasn't always evil.

Civil posted:

I've read the n40l's SATA controller can't see anything bigger than 3.something tb, so you'd be paying for storage you couldn't use.

Like the 8GB RAM limit that turned out to be false, the 3TB HDD limit isn't true either.

4TB drives actually work just fine in the N40L.

frumpsnake fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Aug 16, 2012

luigionlsd
Jan 9, 2006

i dont know what this is i think its some kind of nazi giraffe or nazi mountains or something i dont know

Ended up buying the Synology DS411j. Everything's great except for 10 MB/s writes from a server on the same GigE switch using cat 6. Please tell me this is some bad configuration setting on my part and not a limit of the product...

DEAD MAN'S SHOE
Nov 23, 2003

We will become evil and the stars will come alive


frumpsnake posted:

Like the 8GB RAM limit that turned out to be false, the 3TB HDD limit isn't true either.

Are there noticable benefits to >8GB ram in the N40L?

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003



whiskas posted:

My goal is to provide a home backup for all my irreplaceable files: pictures, videos, documents, etc. Files would be backed up at least once a month to this device, along with a redundant copy stored on my main PC.
If you just want backups use an online service.

sellouts
Apr 23, 2003



luigionlsd posted:

Ended up buying the Synology DS411j. Everything's great except for 10 MB/s writes from a server on the same GigE switch using cat 6. Please tell me this is some bad configuration setting on my part and not a limit of the product...

How are you connecting to and transferring the files to the NAS?

Edit: Is anyone buying a special enclosure for their set up or just using a spare case that they have around?

I don't have any spare cases and want 5+ drive bays, hot swap would be nice, and a level of RAID that provides some level of redundancy. I'm sharing media and doing backups from a few computers, nothing crazy.

Is there a solid case for this? Or would I be better off by just going with one of the off the shelf solutions?

sellouts fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Aug 16, 2012

IT Guy
Jan 12, 2010

You people drink like you don't want to live!

frumpsnake posted:

Like the 8GB RAM limit that turned out to be false, the 3TB HDD limit isn't true either.

4TB drives actually work just fine in the N40L.

Thank you for this.

Delta-Wye
Sep 29, 2005

Represent!

sellouts posted:

How are you connecting to and transferring the files to the NAS?

Edit: Is anyone buying a special enclosure for their set up or just using a spare case that they have around?

I don't have any spare cases and want 5+ drive bays, hot swap would be nice, and a level of RAID that provides some level of redundancy. I'm sharing media and doing backups from a few computers, nothing crazy.

Is there a solid case for this? Or would I be better off by just going with one of the off the shelf solutions?

I rolled my own previously using a Chenbro NAS case and liked it but it got all smashed up so I'm going to get a LianLi PC-Q25B and roll my own next. There are a ton of posts on the previous page with my questions and people chiming in.

To be honest, I think it's probably more effort than it's worth to make your own vs. using an off-the-shelf unit but I enjoy it so it's personally worth it to me. If I wanted a simple effective turnkey solution slapping one together myself would be a bit silly.

Longinus00
Dec 29, 2005
Ur-Quan

DEAD MAN'S SHOE posted:

Are there noticable benefits to >8GB ram in the N40L?

This is a question that's almost entirely dependent on workload.

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

Nap Ghost

The only reason I suspect you'd want to have that much RAM in an N40L is if you've got a number of memory-hungry VMs that don't really do a whole lot. Thing is, there's almost no way we'll see a 32GB RAM N40L server given that 16GB DDR3 UDIMMs won't be made at the rate we're going with the DDR3 standard. Just the clocking requirements on such a stick would be prohibitive and you'd get better cost-effectiveness from an RDIMM.

sleepy gary
Jan 11, 2006



Someone buy this http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...hreadid=3501918

astr0man
Feb 21, 2007

hollyeo deuroga


Nap Ghost

I've been running openindiana on my N36 for months without any problems, and about a week ago it started locking up at random times. I can't talk to the box at all, either to access a network share or just ssh into it. The only way to fix it is to do a hard power reset which can't be a good thing. Any ideas what this might be? Everything in openindiana is up to date, and as far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with any of my zpools or drives.

Nam Taf
Jun 25, 2005

I am Fat Man, hear me roar!



Can you plug in a screen and see what the terminal is doing? It will likely throw error codes that you can see immediately the cause of.

astr0man
Feb 21, 2007

hollyeo deuroga


Nap Ghost

I'll do that tomorrow. I have to dig through a big box of crap to find a vga -> dvi adapter first.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003



Have you looked at the logs at all?

astr0man
Feb 21, 2007

hollyeo deuroga


Nap Ghost

No, where should I be looking?

Also, I plugged in a monitor this morning, and based on the error I think it's a problem with waking one of the disks back up after it goes to sleep. But then I stupidly restarted the machine before I wrote down the actual message. I'll have to check it again later today I guess.

Napp-it reports soft disk errors on the smart test page, but I'm not sure how to see what the specific error is.

Delta-Wye
Sep 29, 2005

Represent!

Maybe it's just me, but too many Calvin and Hobbes avatars leaves this conversation very difficult to follow

astr0man
Feb 21, 2007

hollyeo deuroga


Nap Ghost

Ok, so the console error is:
code:
gda: Sense Key: aborted command
gda: Vendor 'Gen-ATA' error code: 0x3
genunix: ata_disk_start: select failed
gda: WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@14,1/ide@0/cmdk@1,0 (Disk 0): Error for command 'read sector' Error Level: Informational
And it repeats that error over and over. I'm guessing I need to replace one of the drives in my raidz array, but I don't know which drive that is.

edit: Actually I figured out what disk it is, but have any of you seen this before with a microserver and openindiana? I'd like to know for sure that it's a problem with that drive before I buy a replacement.

Also, as a general zfs question, right now my array is 4 1TB drives, but I'd like to eventually change that to 4 2TB drives. Can I do that easily by just replacing one of them at a time? Or is the zpool size locked at 4TB now?

astr0man fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Aug 19, 2012

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

Nap Ghost

You can replace & resilver drives one at a time to expand your array later, yes.

luigionlsd
Jan 9, 2006

i dont know what this is i think its some kind of nazi giraffe or nazi mountains or something i dont know

sellouts posted:

How are you connecting to and transferring the files to the NAS?

Edit: Is anyone buying a special enclosure for their set up or just using a spare case that they have around?

I don't have any spare cases and want 5+ drive bays, hot swap would be nice, and a level of RAID that provides some level of redundancy. I'm sharing media and doing backups from a few computers, nothing crazy.

Is there a solid case for this? Or would I be better off by just going with one of the off the shelf solutions?
connecting via gigabit Ethernet on a server connected to the same switch. Running 2008 R2 and it has 2 gig E cards with cat 6 cables on all ends (even the synology)

DEAD MAN'S SHOE
Nov 23, 2003

We will become evil and the stars will come alive


Almost got all I need for a raidz2 nas4free install on an n40l now I just got to migrate all my files over.. argh.

DEAD MAN'S SHOE fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Aug 22, 2012

Bonobos
Jan 26, 2004


DEAD MAN'S SHOE posted:

Almost got all I need for a raidz2 nas4free install on an n40l now I just got to migrate all my files over.. argh.

So is NAS4FREE like the official recommendation for a NAS with ZFS and BT client nowadays?

I'd just like something low-maintenance with ZFS that can handle 12 TB under raidz1 that I can actively dump files to and from throughout my network.

G-Prime
Apr 30, 2003

Baby, when it's love,
if it's not rough it isn't fun.


Bonobos posted:

So is NAS4FREE like the official recommendation for a NAS with ZFS and BT client nowadays?

I'd just like something low-maintenance with ZFS that can handle 12 TB under raidz1 that I can actively dump files to and from throughout my network.

I'm wondering the same thing. From what I can tell NAS4Free is just a forked FreeNAS that includes a far newer version of ZFS and is a full install of FreeBSD instead of NanoBSD.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

Looking at NAS4Free I'm not seeing any features that would make me change my storage server. It seems to have some interesting features that I would probably never use. Does anyone have a practical comparison of the two in terms of performance? What features are in the newer version of ZFS that would be useful?

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Release_history

Top Quark
Aug 2, 2010

"Going where no man has gone before."

So I've got a few things I have in mind for my next apartment but I've never done this sort of thing before and would like some advice on whether or not the things I want to do are actually possible at all.

Basically the plan is thus:
FreeNAS box with sabnzbd/couchpotato/sickbeard installed
HTPC box running XBMC or other similar media control program

I want to be able to stream movies downloaded via sabnzbd etc from the freenas box on to the htpc. My questions basically are:
Can freenas run the usenet programs?
Can it serve up the movie files to a htpc for streaming? (do I need a specific OS/program for example?)

I think that's about it. I just want to make sure I can actually do all these things before I start buying things. Also, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask (this isn't a htpc thread after all), but it seemed the most fitting.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

If you really want to do the sickbeard/htpc thing try the following thread.
http://lifehacker.com/5838169/how-t...-and-sick-beard

Myself, I'm too lazy to spend that much time configuring stuff. You could run freenas to provide the network shares, and just use another PC on the network to run ps3mediaserver (for PS3, xbox or to a network enabled tv) or to play the files directly.

g0del
Jan 9, 2001





Fun Shoe

Top Quark posted:

So I've got a few things I have in mind for my next apartment but I've never done this sort of thing before and would like some advice on whether or not the things I want to do are actually possible at all.

Basically the plan is thus:
FreeNAS box with sabnzbd/couchpotato/sickbeard installed
HTPC box running XBMC or other similar media control program

I want to be able to stream movies downloaded via sabnzbd etc from the freenas box on to the htpc. My questions basically are:
Can freenas run the usenet programs?
Can it serve up the movie files to a htpc for streaming? (do I need a specific OS/program for example?)

I think that's about it. I just want to make sure I can actually do all these things before I start buying things. Also, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask (this isn't a htpc thread after all), but it seemed the most fitting.
Yes, this will work fine. I currently have a single freenas box running sabnzbd/couchpotato/sickbeard and everything works. I'm also running mysql on it so that I can share the xbmc library. I've currently got two htpcs and two regular computers all sharing the same library without issues.

First off, you don't want to follow the lifehacker guide, it's written for an older version of freenas which is currently unsupported. You can get the sabnzbd/sickbeard/etc. plugins here with some documentation here, but the plugins are still undergoing development so plan on reading the whole thread.

For the shared library there's no mysql plugin yet but you can follow the instructions here to get everything set up.

I'll warn you, the plugins are undergoing active development and there aren't any really good idiot's guides to setting everything up. Plan to spend some time getting everything configured, and right now it helps a lot if you're comfortable using a unix command line. But once everything is set up it's required pretty minimal maintenance, and when everything is working it's like living in the future. All the copyright-free public domain videos I could ever want are downloaded and renamed, placed in the correct folder, and have metadata downloaded then added to the XBMC library automatically. My children commonly start watching a movie in one room, then stop it and start it again in a different room and it picks up where they left off. I haven't done any stress-testing, but just from our regular usage I can say that the NAS has served 3 different movies simultaneously without any issues. It was probably downloading at the same time too.

Let me know if you have any specific questions.

Le0
Mar 18, 2009

Rotten investigator!


Guess I come here at the best time, I'm also looking to get a NAS to put sabdznbd/sickbeard/couchpotato and streaming the library to XBMC.

Just what kind of hardware for the NAS would you guys recommend? I don't know shit about NAS and there are so much possibilities.

EDIT: To clarify my question, I'm looking for a already in a box NAS (not to build one myself from scratch) and I'm wondering on which I can easily install the softwares without having to change OS or something?

Le0 fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Aug 25, 2012

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

It sounds like you just want a PC with a shared folder that's able to run the software that you want.

Most people are getting into building NAS boxes so they can run multiple drives often with a raid configuration to reduce the chance of data loss. Most of the off the shelf NAS boxes are exensive solutions that you can't run software on, and as I've found they can't do what's advertised on the box.

At home I tend to run a router with a shared drive as a low power server and have another computer on the network serving the files to ps3, Xbox, iPad networked tv or appletv.

Le0
Mar 18, 2009

Rotten investigator!


well I've been looking at a QNAP or something like that already all built in device.
Thinking about the TS-212, I checked and there are already packages to install sickbeard and couchpotato on the QNAP OS

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

Nap Ghost

Le0 posted:

EDIT: To clarify my question, I'm looking for a already in a box NAS (not to build one myself from scratch) and I'm wondering on which I can easily install the softwares without having to change OS or something?
The sort of box that can do all that with an OEM OS and some utilities is going to be expensive because there's a huge market gap between the smaller D-Link / WD provided NASes running up to a couple hundred, the Thecus and Q-NAP NASes for several hundred... and $1.2k+ machines with 8 bays, Xeon processors and all that, including all the new higher-end NASes from Thecus. The lowest priced unit I know of that can support all these things are cheap because they're not paying a Microsoft tax nor have to support software at all. The HP Microserver N40L is picked by a great number of people in this thread for reasons like yours. If you want an OS to come from the manufacturer, there's the (unreleased but hopefully soon) Acer AC100 if you need more CPU for some reason but I think it'll be around $800 without drives. If you want to just pay for someone to install all this stuff for you on an HP Microserver, I'm sure someone here would be willing to do it for a couple hundred dollars.

I'm running an HP Microserver as my sabnzbd/couchpotato server/sickbeard setup and I watch my movies and TV shows on it with XBMC. My desktop is only required if I'm trying to transcode stuff to an iOS device on the fly or for offline viewing.

If you're the type to be running a desktop all the time anyway, I'd recommend adding more drives to your machine and sharing functions because it'll almost certainly be more cost-effective than a separate NAS that consumes even more power on top of what you already use + you're out the cost of the NAS itself.

EdEddnEddy
Apr 5, 2012





Still have a lot to read but I am still kicking around what I can afford/want to do as far as a NAS/DAS is concerned.

I ran across this little combo gem on Newegg that looks like the start of a powerful NAS as long as one picks the right SATA/SAS card and drives. Sadly I need a little guidance on what people are recommending for a SATA card as all the reviews on Newegg really point to all of them being crap in one way or another, not like the reviews are gold but it does worry me a tad.

My current setup is a bunch of Raid 1 action on my main desktop rig. Currently it is my main OS drive using 2 Raid 0 SSD's, 2 2TB Raid 1 drives with Games, Installed apps, etc not needing to be on the SSD's, and 2 more 750G drives Raid 1 with a lot of data and such I have downloaded but doesn't need to be accessed a lot, (but is important enough to start this whole Raid 1 mess way back when.) I also have a Raid 1 of 2 more 750G in a Thermaltake Raid Duo that works well, but is limited to 1TB or smaller drives.

The current goal in my head as I am trying to figure out how to get more space for Movies/Music etc while keeping reliability, is to take the 4 750G drives and put them in an external DAS/NAS Raid 5 (or Raid-Z as I keep reading), and figure out something to do with the 2TB drives.. They are pretty quick drives but the sort of built in standby/click they do causes anything run on them to pause for 1-2 seconds when they do their click reset, much less painful then the click of death they started out life with. Not sure what would replace them except possibly 2 good 7200RPM drives.

The more I read about this sabnzbd/couchpotato/sickbeard stuff, the more I want to give it a shot even though I still have extremely limited experience outside of the Windows world.


I have been shooting for a DAS setup using the eSATA offered on my motherboard, but it would be best if it was like my Raid Duo and was Hardware raid but sadly, the selection for reliable DAS kits with 4+ bays seems to be expensive/unreliable or feature lacking.

As far as NAS goes, I could either build my own, or get things like the D-Link dns-343 or something similar. With Gigabit network I am not worried about a simple NAS where I would have to stream from the NAS, through PC, back to the PS3/Xbox/etc., but again, talk of the FreeNas/NAS4Free stuff, those plugins to auto download, and Raid-Z + more control, is always nice too.

I am just trying to figure out what I am going to have to spend as I know I won’t be with these 750G's forever and will want a setup that can expand to the 3-4tb drives down the line. And running Raid 1 really is not great for space, but it has saved my ass a few times already.

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