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0x17h
Feb 24, 2011


necrobobsledder posted:

The HP Microserver was basically made for this sort of common need.
Thanks! I looked into those a while ago but forgot about them, as the DIY method seemed to be better than buying a prebuilt system.

I picked up an N36 Microserver and a few drives. While doing research on it I discovered you can add a 6-bay SATA hotplug enclosure to it, and with a BIOS mod get 2 extra SATA ports!

Looks like this system will last me quite some time, assuming hard drive prices go back to reasonable levels eventually.

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005

[A]sk me about OS/2 WARP


Cool Matty posted:

Hey all, I'm not sure if this is the best megathread for this question or not, but I figure you guys can either help point me in the right direction or answer it outright!

There's a small company I do small jobs for (building machines, fixing their shoddy network, etc). After getting their terrible ~8 year old Linksys HUB and trashy cables out, there's one last improvement they need, some sort of solid backup system.

This company does a lot of design and videography work. They have terabytes of 1080p footage to keep track of, and to keep backed up. They don't necessarily need all of it on hand all the time (the video guy just copies over whatever he needs), but right now their only backup "solution" are external hard drives.

I'm thinking some sort of NAS with easy expandability is exactly what they need. Am I wrong? I'm really looking for some good recommendations here, along with what sort of software I could use to automate this process for them.

I would post this in the enterprise NAS thread, but this is decidedly far from that. They need something cheap, appropriate for a small business, that can hold a lot of data and can be expanded easily. Speed's not important, and they are finally running a gigabit network.

Ahh, I remember my days of "Hey we saw terabyte drives are $49 we need 8 of them so if we give you a whole FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS can you build us a file server? Oh also we need to serve multiple machines at gigabit wire speed, we have an unmanaged switch and instead of giving you the service hours after the sale we will just have our thirteen year old nephew manage it, then call you weeping when he hot-yanks the wrong drive out of the degraded RAID."

I realize that it's work and you need it, and this is not really on-topic, but MAN, doing network storage for small biz is a fucking Sisyphean ordeal, every god damn time.

edit: Ironically my worst job was for a mac based design/video shop. Their entire 3-year body of work was stored on a whitebox Linux machine with four 500GB Caviar Blacks in RAID10. I dragged a 2tb external and rsynced them up a copy out of pity. Waiting for the restore job call, should be any day now.

chizad
Jul 9, 2001

'Cus we find ourselves in the same old mess
Singin' drunken lullabies

Well, I was planning on building a HP Microserver based NAS in the near future. But with the flooding in Thailand and the resulting price increases and possible drive shortages it looks like I'm going to be waiting a while. So in the meantime, I've set up a little sandbox NAS out of some spare parts I had and a pair of 1TB drives I picked up at MicroCenter before they raised prices. I've got FreeNAS 8 on there right now, but I also want to play around with other options (napp-it, nexentastor, maybe pure Solaris/FreeBSD) on this same hardware. That raises a few questions since I'm not that familiar with ZFS and FreeBSD/Solaris.

1) As long as I don't upgrade the zpool/zfs versions, I can take the mirrored pool I built in FreeNAS and move it over to a napp-it or pure Solaris or whatever based setup, right? Is it really as simple as doing a zpool export in FreeNAS, installing something else, and then doing a zpool import? T

2) Can Solaris/OpenIndiana/Nexenta run from a USB drive like FreeNAS can? I do have a couple spare drives I can use for the OS if I have to, but I'd rather have it running off a thumbdrive if possible.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


OpenSolaris/Nexenta/OpenIndiana will have no problems with exported ZFS (v28). FreeBSD supports v15, though 9.0RC1 supports v28 too (i'm running 9.0RC1 and imported an OpenIndiana array).

Viktor
Nov 12, 2005



Anecdotal, have had 2 WD30EZRX fail in less then 24hrs in a Synology RS411. Thankfully the device was running with a 4hr backup window to a second Synology but totally spooked at how quickly the drives failed.

One drive is totally poohed throwing SATA errors the other has 1000+ rewritten sectors and unable to restart the raid array in Linux.

movax
Aug 30, 2008



Viktor posted:

Anecdotal, have had 2 WD30EZRX fail in less then 24hrs in a Synology RS411. Thankfully the device was running with a 4hr backup window to a second Synology but totally spooked at how quickly the drives failed.

One drive is totally poohed throwing SATA errors the other has 1000+ rewritten sectors and unable to restart the raid array in Linux.

Were they shipped from Newegg?

Viktor
Nov 12, 2005



movax posted:

Were they shipped from Newegg?

Nope NCIX, but stupidly I did buy them in a single batch.

jet_dee
May 20, 2007
Blah blah blah Nationstates is cool blah blah blah

I've got an iMac and a Macbook, both connect to the internet over wi-fi (N). Is it easier & better to get an external USB/Firewire drive (either wall-powered or portable) or a consumer NAS which I plug into my router?
I'd rather my family not be able to access the drive if it's plugged into the router.

[Edit]

Never mind. I checked prices for NAS and they were out of my reach, not to mention a severe shortage of stock (Thai floods, I'm guessing).

jet_dee fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Nov 1, 2011

Odette
Mar 19, 2011





So it looks like I'll have to be saving up for a NAS sometime soon. I also have 2 1TB drives in storage though, both are around 60% full.

Before I go into detail as to what requirements are, I'm pretty sure you guys will kill me if there's some other thread for this kind of thing. So, is this the right thread to be enquiring about this kind of stuff?

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.


I dunno, what does the thread title say?

Odette
Mar 19, 2011



Factory Factory posted:

I dunno, what does the thread title say?

I have exams this week, my brain is actually not working properly. OKAY. I guess I am in the right thread. Just wanted to make sure.

I don't really care about enclosure/case size. I saw this linked in this thread and thought it was pretty cool. I want something like 8TB capacity (5x 2TB drives in RAID5 + 80GB OS drive?), low power consumption, able to stream 1080p via HDMI output.

I would actually prefer to go the custom route, rather than buying some prebuilt NAS.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


Odette posted:

I have exams this week, my brain is actually not working properly. OKAY. I guess I am in the right thread. Just wanted to make sure.

I don't really care about enclosure/case size. I saw this linked in this thread and thought it was pretty cool. I want something like 8TB capacity (5x 2TB drives in RAID5 + 80GB OS drive?), low power consumption, able to stream 1080p via HDMI output.

I would actually prefer to go the custom route, rather than buying some prebuilt NAS.

It's a pretty shitty time to be building a NAS right now with hard drive prices going up due to the floods in SE Asia.

But an Atom board, with 4 gigs of ram and an nvidia chipset will probably be your best bet if you need HDMI out (and CUDA).

If you want to go ZFS, you're going to want a decent JBOD controller (I use an IBM M1015 flashed to IT mode) and ECC ram (which means no Atom EDIT: unless theres a supermicro board that supports Atom and ECC).

Matt Zerella fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Nov 2, 2011

devmd01
Mar 7, 2006

Elektronik
Supersonik


Odette posted:

low power consumption, able to stream 1080p via HDMI output.

Separate your storage and your playback. Get a boxee box or wdtv live to go along with your storage server. I did this and it's been the best thing ever for the all important waf and ease of use.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget

Grimey Drawer

devmd01 posted:

Separate your storage and your playback. Get a boxee box or wdtv live to go along with your storage server. I did this and it's been the best thing ever for the all important waf and ease of use.
if you do split it out, which i also recommend (with a hacked apple tv), you can use a zacate board for even lower power usage in the NAS.

Odette
Mar 19, 2011



Splitting out makes a lot more sense. I thought that boxee boxes/AppleTVs etc were like $400 or something overpriced!

Going a bit off topic here, but how well do AppleTVs play 1080p content?

Starting to get a feel for which components to use.

Is this (Asus E35M1-I Deluxe) decent for a 5/6 HDD NAS or is there something cheaper/better that I could use?

What I'd like (now) is basically to have a storage device to chuck things on and forget about.

Modern Pragmatist
Aug 20, 2008


Odette posted:

Splitting out makes a lot more sense. I thought that boxee boxes/AppleTVs etc were like $400 or something overpriced!

Going a bit off topic here, but how well do AppleTVs play 1080p content?

ATV is $99.

ATV plays 1080p content fine, although maximum output resolution is 720p.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





My ATV2 pukes a bit on 1080p content, but that may be the wireless network. Of course, I also have it hooked up to a 720p screen.

alecm
Aug 20, 2004

Lorraine, I'm your density. I mean . . . your destiny.

A Boxee Box is $180 and will output at 1080p. For local playback, I think it is a much more robust device than an Apple TV.

Longinus00
Dec 29, 2005
Ur-Quan

IOwnCalculus posted:

My ATV2 pukes a bit on 1080p content, but that may be the wireless network. Of course, I also have it hooked up to a 720p screen.

Anything less than 802.11n will likely choke on 1080p. The best way to make sure is to do a bandwidth test between the two computers over the wireless.

BlackMK4
Aug 23, 2006

wat.

Megamarm

IOwnCalculus posted:

My ATV2 pukes a bit on 1080p content, but that may be the wireless network. Of course, I also have it hooked up to a 720p screen.

Mine pukes a bit over 10/100. I never deal with 1080i so it's a non issue though.

Manc Hill
Jul 19, 2001




^^this is u ^^this is me

The UK Microserver £100 cashback offer has been extended to the end of November, and also includes the new 1.5GHz Turion N40L model. http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/campaign/f...b/solution.html

I was in a bit of a panic because I bought one on the 27th but it didn't ship til the 1st November and my invoice states the 1st so I thought I might miss the cut off. Happy days.

Now I'm wishing I'd held off for the new model!

Evilkiksass
Jun 30, 2007
I am literally Bowbles IRL

DO A KEGSTAND BRAH


Grez posted:

The UK Microserver £100 cashback offer has been extended to the end of November, and also includes the new 1.5GHz Turion N40L model. http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/campaign/f...b/solution.html

I was in a bit of a panic because I bought one on the 27th but it didn't ship til the 1st November and my invoice states the 1st so I thought I might miss the cut off. Happy days.

Now I'm wishing I'd held off for the new model!

request an exchange?

Steakandchips
Apr 30, 2009



The new N40 is £25 more than the N36, even after the cashback.

It's not worth an extra £25 to me, considering the after cashback price of the N36 was £125 from ebuyer (now it's £150 for the N40).

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Why won't HP do a similar offer for the US?

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

Nap Ghost

Probably because HP has more or less given up on the North American market for penetration (Walmart barely competes against Target in the sense that they're not so concerned with their demographic) and are looking for inroads into EMEA and APJ like almost every other Fortune 500 tech company. Also, I think it's partly to make some headway in a market that has a history of price sensitivity due to VAT.

Azhais
Feb 5, 2007


Cybernetic Crumb

alecm posted:

A Boxee Box is $180 and will output at 1080p. For local playback, I think it is a much more robust device than an Apple TV.

The Dune D1 is also an excellent playback device for this purpose.

Evilkiksass
Jun 30, 2007
I am literally Bowbles IRL

DO A KEGSTAND BRAH


I am looking for recommendations for an ExpressCard 34 storage controller which supports 2x3 esata port multiplier for up to 6 drives total (most will do 10). Ideally it could support Raid 6. I am also looking for advice for a enclosure that would house 6ish drives in ideally, raid 6. I guess I can run this whole thing as Raid 5 + Spare, but I feel like that is kind of weird. My best understanding is that the result is raid 5 auto repairs vs running a 1 drive degraded raid 6. So then you are exposed to failure during the rebuild time.

Edit: I think I am stupid. I am planning to use mdadm to handle raid. So the raid support needs to just be jbod right?

Evilkiksass fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Nov 5, 2011

movax
Aug 30, 2008



Evilkiksass posted:

I am looking for recommendations for an ExpressCard 34 storage controller which supports 2x3 esata port multiplier for up to 6 drives total (most will do 10). Ideally it could support Raid 6. I am also looking for advice for a enclosure that would house 6ish drives in ideally, raid 6. I guess I can run this whole thing as Raid 5 + Spare, but I feel like that is kind of weird. My best understanding is that the result is raid 5 auto repairs vs running a 1 drive degraded raid 6. So then you are exposed to failure during the rebuild time.

Edit: I think I am stupid. I am planning to use mdadm to handle raid. So the raid support needs to just be jbod right?

Hmm, ExpressCard currently at best is limited to a single PCI Express 2.0 link, so you'd get a theoeretical 500MB/s bi-directional at most; with 8b/10b encoding overhead (just assuming a rough .8 efficiency) that's going to drop to 400MB/s already.

Still pretty quick though. I don't recall if people make EC "RAID" controllers, but maybe you could find an EC card based on a Silicon Image/similar chipset that supports FIS/other types of port multiplication. Though, these cards may likely be in the EC 54 formfactor.

ante
Apr 9, 2005

SUNSHINE AND RAINBOWS

I'm looking to get a probably 2-bay NAS that can run a webserver for as cheap as possible. Is the DLink 320 the best option?

0x17h
Feb 24, 2011


Evilkiksass posted:

I am looking for recommendations for an ExpressCard 34 storage controller which supports 2x3 esata port multiplier for up to 6 drives total (most will do 10)
Check out Sonnet cards. These cards use Silicon Image and JMicron chips, so you may be able to find a cheaper generic card elsewhere.
However, Sonnet also claims to provide special drivers for OSX that other manufacturers don't, and they explicitly support OS X support for all their products.

Evilkiksass
Jun 30, 2007
I am literally Bowbles IRL

DO A KEGSTAND BRAH


movax posted:

Hmm, ExpressCard currently at best is limited to a single PCI Express 2.0 link, so you'd get a theoeretical 500MB/s bi-directional at most; with 8b/10b encoding overhead (just assuming a rough .8 efficiency) that's going to drop to 400MB/s already.

I don't mind this at all. This would mostly just be another location to store important files which would be infrequently accessed. To archive old photos that I am no longer actively working on, etc...

I was wondering if it would make more sense to just use USB3 instead of e-sata to set this up (drastically reduces hardware requirements for use AND recovery). Any input on this?

astr0man
Feb 21, 2007

hollyeo deuroga


Nap Ghost

Are there any major drawbacks to using ZFS on Linux vs just running FreeNAS? I'm putting together a microserver based NAS and was planning on running Ubuntu Server 10.04 since I'm a lot more comfortable working in Ubuntu/Debian Linux vs FreeBSD.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


astr0man posted:

Are there any major drawbacks to using ZFS on Linux vs just running FreeNAS? I'm putting together a microserver based NAS and was planning on running Ubuntu Server 10.04 since I'm a lot more comfortable working in Ubuntu/Debian Linux vs FreeBSD.

You're running it in user mode, not kernel so there's a bunch of overhead.

If you're comfortable with the commandline, it's not that hard to run FreeBSD and set up a ZFS array and the sharing protocol of your choosing through the Ports system.

I know the userland tools of *BSD act differently but the main thing I had to get used to was everything being underneath /usr.

Your other choice is kFreeBSD which will run ZFS natively with the Debian userland/apt packaging system. But it's an older version of ZFS.

Personally I'm running FreeBSD 9.0-RC1 and it hasn't been too big of an adjustment. Play around with them in VMs and see what you like.

(also what else do you plan on running)

EDIT: Just fired up kFreeBSD in a VM. You can install the 8.1 kernel, which has ZFS version 15. Everything else, including apt works exactly like Debian. Heck, I might start using it once it switches to the 9.x kernel. ("apt-get install zfsutils")

Matt Zerella fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Nov 8, 2011

karoshi
Nov 4, 2008

"Can somebody mspaint eyes on the steaming packages? TIA" yeah well fuck you too buddy, this is the best you're gonna get. Is this even "work-safe"? Let's find out!

LmaoTheKid posted:

You're running it in user mode, not kernel so there's a bunch of overhead.

If you're comfortable with the commandline, it's not that hard to run FreeBSD and set up a ZFS array and the sharing protocol of your choosing through the Ports system.

I know the userland tools of *BSD act differently but the main thing I had to get used to was everything being underneath /usr.

Your other choice is kFreeBSD which will run ZFS natively with the Debian userland/apt packaging system. But it's an older version of ZFS.

Personally I'm running FreeBSD 9.0-RC1 and it hasn't been too big of an adjustment. Play around with them in VMs and see what you like.

(also what else do you plan on running)

EDIT: Just fired up kFreeBSD in a VM. You can install the 8.1 kernel, which has ZFS version 15. Everything else, including apt works exactly like Debian. Heck, I might start using it once it switches to the 9.x kernel. ("apt-get install zfsutils")

http://zfsonlinux.org/ links a repository https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/stable for ubuntu that will give you kernel modules for ZFS. I tried it on virtualbox and it read some virtual raid arrays without problems.
I'd say give that a try. But beware, solaris code has been written and tested by a big corporation and shipped in storage products for a some years, BSD code has been integrated from the public release of that code by a bunch of volunteers for a few kernel releases, linux code is an adaption layer (Solaris porting layer (SPL, spl.ko)) and a port of the original code which wont ever be integrated into the linus kernel and probably has less developers than BSD looking at it and has been available for less time than BSD and has seen even less testing.
I might be wrong on some points, I've just been toying with the idea of building a NAS and trying products in VMs.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


karoshi posted:

http://zfsonlinux.org/ links a repository https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/stable for ubuntu that will give you kernel modules for ZFS. I tried it on virtualbox and it read some virtual raid arrays without problems.
I'd say give that a try. But beware, solaris code has been written and tested by a big corporation and shipped in storage products for a some years, BSD code has been integrated from the public release of that code by a bunch of volunteers for a few kernel releases, linux code is an adaption layer (Solaris porting layer (SPL, spl.ko)) and a port of the original code which wont ever be integrated into the linus kernel and probably has less developers than BSD looking at it and has been available for less time than BSD and has seen even less testing.
I might be wrong on some points, I've just been toying with the idea of building a NAS and trying products in VMs.
Yeah, I'm way more inclined to trust FreeBSD/kFreeBSD vs messing around with emulated kernel modules. I honestly think kFreeBSD while a bit immature is a lot nicer in terms of balancing Linux userland with BSD/Solaris ZFS.

Then again I'm running a RC of FreeBSD 9 so i guess i'm playing with fire too.

teamdest
Jul 1, 2007


Running an rc of freebsd is like running a stable version of most other operating systems. That said, I run zfs on linux under debian and. Have seen no performance degradation compared against those same drives in a mdadm xfs array or a freebsd zfs array. Speed and stability seem to be the same, though I think the rc of freebsd 9 has a newer zpool version than the linux one.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


teamdest posted:

Running an rc of freebsd is like running a stable version of most other operating systems. That said, I run zfs on linux under debian and. Have seen no performance degradation compared against those same drives in a mdadm xfs array or a freebsd zfs array. Speed and stability seem to be the same, though I think the rc of freebsd 9 has a newer zpool version than the linux one.

9 is v28

I didn't know that about RC being almost the same as stable. Thanks for the info.

I haven't really benchmarked speed but there are apparently improvements.

My major problem is I live in an area where there are a TON of access points. It really degrades my wifi performance (my AppleTV with XBMC is fine over a wire). So I guess it might be time to look into a Wireless N router just so I can get off of the crowded 2.4ghz frequency (I've tried channels 1,6, and 11 and it's not much better on any of them, everything I read says to stay away from the other channels as there is overlap).

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.



Fun Shoe

LmaoTheKid posted:

My major problem is I live in an area where there are a TON of access points. It really degrades my wifi performance (my AppleTV with XBMC is fine over a wire). So I guess it might be time to look into a Wireless N router just so I can get off of the crowded 2.4ghz frequency (I've tried channels 1,6, and 11 and it's not much better on any of them, everything I read says to stay away from the other channels as there is overlap).

You'll need a dual channel wireless router so that you get 5 GHz wireless. All devices where you want this connection would need to support 5GHz which not everything does. You will also find that 5 GHz has less range and penetration of obstructions compared to 2.4 GHz wireless.

On the upside next to no one uses 5GHz and it's relatively difficult to get crowded unlike 2.4 GHz.

Walked
Apr 14, 2003



Is there a consensus on the best 2.4/5ghz router for home use? Happy to spend if I need to (well, not happy), but I dont want to buy three until I find the right one.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


The N600 looks nice (dual band, gigabit switch)...but no Tomato support.

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