building a home fileserver

electrofelix

Trying to spec a home file server that may double as a media system depending on what goes into it in the end.

Target Requirements:
Separate OS and filer disks
Support for 6+ disks in RAID6 for the filer, ideally up to 8/10 disks (RAID will be done in software on a Linux OS)
Small SSD for the OS
Hot swap support - I don't want to have to pull apart the case and mess around with cables to be able to pull out a failed disk and replace it.
SATA III - mainly standard NCQ support, but also overall throughput is likely to be better
WOL - want to be able to boot this system on demand rather than manually
Ideally not a full tower case - but I will sacrifice this in order to suit other requirements
Space for a DVD or Blu-ray drive (RW support)
TV Capture card if the system suits

With 6-10 disks, power requirements are going to be an issue, but I'm planning to work around this by not having this on 24/7 and getting the system to use WOL to boot the filer up if someone is looking to access any of the exported filesystems, spin down the disks when not in use, and auto shutdown if the filer isn't being used for >30 minutes. Hoping that having the OS on a decent SSD should get boot times <15 seconds with a trimmed down OS.

SATA Controller card:
Going to want one with >4 SATA III ports, may have to wait a while as the only ones >4 ports seem to be enterprise ones with price tags above €300

Given my requirements, I expect that I'll be looking adding a SATA III controller to the board as well as hoping for decent number of ports on the motherboard. Right now that seems to limit me to AM3 socket systems.

Main problem at the moment is targeting a suitable case + disk storage system.

To fit the storage in place with hotswap and externally accessible (i.e. not opening the case to replace drives), I've been looking at the following two solutions:
Coolermaster Centurion 590 - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Coolermaster-Centurion-590-Black-Mid-Tower-Case-w-o-PSU
2x Jou-Jye ST-3051SS 5.25" (3 Bay) Backplane - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Jou-Jye-ST-3051SS-525-(3-Bay)-Backplane-for-5x-35-SAS-SATA-HDD

Which would support up to 10 drives in hotswap

Alternatively, the following although I would have to open the case for this option:
Silverstone Fortress FT01B - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Silverstone-Fortress-FT01B-Black-Mid-Tower-Full-Aluminum-w-o-PSU
SilverStone CFP52B - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/SilverStone-CFP52B-Cooling-front-Panel-converts-3x525-into-4x-35-bays-Hot-Swap-black-RoHS
+ some 50cm Silverstone CP05 SATAII HotSwap cables - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/50cm-Silverstone-CP05-SATAII-HotSwap-Cable-for-Kublai-Series-Cases

I've yet to check whether these support SATA II only, or its was just written on them when they were released. AFAIK, it should only be the controller and disk that decides this, since these are really just pass thru connections.

Both of these solutions are pretty bulky, so I've been trying to find something a little tidier, rather than going full tower.

So I've been looking around for a case that would work with the following:
http://www.satasite.com/4-drive-2-5-inch-sata-backplane.htm

Ideally a small case with 4 5.25" bays, 3 for the drives + 1 for DVD/Bluray. I think the move to 2.5" disks would also help keep down power usage for this system.

If anyone out there is aware of a case that would fit the bill, would make me real happy.

Last resort I could mod a case to suit, but that's not something that I'd like to do to a case bought over the net.

AlmightyCushion

electrofelix wrote: »

So I've been looking around for a case that would work with the following:
http://www.satasite.com/4-drive-2-5-inch-sata-backplane.htm

Ideally a small case with 4 5.25" bays, 3 for the drives + 1 for DVD/Bluray. I think the move to 2.5" disks would also help keep down power usage for this system.

That isn't going to be much benefit to you. 2.5" hard drives go up to 500GB (for a standard height drive anyways and I can't see anything to suggest that that takes drives with a height of 12.5mm). So you'd be looking at 2TBs storage in a 5.25 bay using 4 sata ports. Seeing as 3.5" drives have up to 2TBs storage space anyways, it would be better to use a single 3.5" drive as it's cheaper, smaller, will use less power and uses less sata connections.

You're not going to get 10 hard drives in to a small case. Plus even if you did it could get pretty noisey which is not what you want from a media pc. I think your best bet is to seperate the file server from the media pc. Have a small media pc in the sitting room and have a file server with lots of storage in another room.

electrofelix

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

That isn't going to be much benefit to you. 2.5" hard drives go up to 500GB (for a standard height drive anyways and I can't see anything to suggest that that takes drives with a height of 12.5mm).

750GB is the current max @9mm height, but yes your right in that I didn't consider whether the 12.5mm disks wouldn't fit. That's certainly something I will have to check. I do think that there could be enough space to fit the 12.5mm disks in a 5 1/4" bay, but whether this one allows it or not is another question.
2x12.5mm + 3x1.5mm for metal frame + 2x2x1mm for each drive cage = 33.5mm
5 1/4 drive height is ~40mm AFAICT (couldn't find an official measurement, so relying on a ruler). That should be enough leeway to allow thicker metal and clearance space to slide them in and out.

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

So you'd be looking at 2TBs storage in a 5.25 bay using 4 sata ports. Seeing as 3.5" drives have up to 2TBs storage space anyways, it would be better to use a single 3.5" drive as it's cheaper, smaller, will use less power and uses less sata connections.

You're not going to get 10 hard drives in to a small case. Plus even if you did it could get pretty noisey which is not what you want from a media pc. I think your best bet is to seperate the file server from the media pc. Have a small media pc in the sitting room and have a file server with lots of storage in another room.

10 3.5" disks would be very noisy and massively power hungry as well. Think typical is >15W power requirements for 1TB while 2.5" generally seem to require less than 5W. Also AFAIK the 2.5" disks can be much quieter, but it does seem to depend on the drive picked.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2.5-hard-drive-charts/Maximum-Power-Consumption,684.html

I think the core of what I'm hearing is, if I end up with 3.5" disks, keep it as a separate server, only if 2.5" disks really suit the design will it be quiet enough to be used for media.

Thanks for the thoughts, more investigation to be done.

electrofelix

Just found it on another site, confirmed that it can take 12.5mm disks as well, which bumps the max size it can take to 4x1TB disks.

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpresentation/index.php?cm_mmc=Feed-_-GoogleMerchant-_-GoogleProducts-_-Product&utm_source=base&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=base&src=FRO1&product_id=SRKSATABY4

Got so excited that I didn't read the rest of the page, seems its limited to 500GB disks based on the backplane. Must learn to read properly

Solitaire

electrofelix wrote: »

10 3.5" disks would be very noisy and massively power hungry as well. Think typical is >15W power requirements for 1TB while 2.5" generally seem to require less than 5W.

No... average load power consumption of a 3.5" SATA HDD varies a bit but generally averages 5W. The big catch is that they have a very high peak power draw of 15-35W for about a second when they spin up their motors from idle. That's the issue with 3.5" HDDs, as many older servers used a ton of power for CPUs (plural!) and would have multiple 12V rails (back then they only allowed ~18A per 12V rail, for pretty much no good reason at all!), all of which would be dedicated to CPU power except for one which would be stuck powering the entire rest of the system! Imagine what would happen if you had half a dozen or more HDDs and their RAID controller demanded they all spin up from off/idle simultaneously...

Nowadays those silly ATX1.1 regs are gone and thus we have these strange things called uni-rail PSUs... a bit harder to trip the OCP if all you have is a single 41-amp 12V rail!

electrofelix

Solitaire wrote: »

No... average load power consumption of a 3.5" SATA HDD varies a bit but generally averages 5W. The big catch is that they have a very high peak power draw of 15-35W for about a second when they spin up their motors from idle.

Interesting, I thought they would be more power hungry than that. Still it imposes a power limit/requirement to avoid problems at start up.

I a took a closer read at Tomshardware, and yes there does seem to be a few 3.5" disks that have power requirements close to 5W, most of them seem to be in the 7-10W range with 20-26W required for start-up.

The 2.5" disks appear to be all in the range of 2-4W with 5-7W start up. At least from what I can remember, I can't seem to put my hands on the webpage that had this information all nicely available at the moment.

I think that start-up power may be the killer, unless today's SATA controllers are supporting staggered spin up, which although it's part of the SATA 2.0 spec, it doesn't seem to be required.



On a plus note, I got confirmation from startech that their 5 1/4" 4 disk drive cage should work with SATA III and larger than 500GB drives, it just happens that they've only tested the product with SATA II and drives no larger than 500GB.

There rep said that the technical guys stated that there was nothing in the backplane that should limit the device to 500GB and SATA II, and as SATA III and 1TB 2.5" drives and larger come out, they expect new test results to update the specifications.


Additionally after some conversations on ilug about RAID6, RAID1, LVM, benefits of ease of data retrieval from hosed RAID1 systems and benefits of being able to use LVM to access the larger space on new disks in the future if I went with RAID1, starting to reconsider what raid I'll be using.


So installing 1 of those with 4x1TB drives for 2TB RAID1, with a second empty one to be installed with 4x2TB disks for an additional 4TB of storage ~1 year later is looking attractive. Will have to check the manufacturers sites to see how long before 2.5" drives >1TB start appearing.

Yes I could get more storage in with the 3.5" disks right now, but the ability to compress this all into such a small space with low power requirements, consequently low heat and hopefully low noise seems better suited to my desires. Seems like very little information on noise from 2.5" disks on the main review sites from what I can see, have yet to really dig into the manufacturer sites.

Solitaire

electrofelix wrote: »

I a took a closer read at Tomshardware, and yes there does seem to be a few 3.5" disks that have power requirements close to 5W, most of them seem to be in the 7-10W range with 20-26W required for start-up.

Bear in mind that many of the drives on those charts are enterprise-grade units or just getting on a bit. Most current consumer-grade 3.5" HDDs will be under 7W; the popular Samsung F3 is a good choice for most applications other than databasing (due to the decision to sacrifice I/O ops for read speed and frugality) and has some mad sustained speeds compared to most current HDDs (it can even outpace the VelociRaptor on some counts!) while still remaining south of 5W operating draw. A round dozen of them would consume ~60W if loaded simultaneously - that's lower than almost any current desktop CPU; in some cases less than half as much!

Yeah, you'd have to worry about the potential peak draw - most cheap and integrated RAID controllers actually run in software and usually go for synchronous rather than staggered starts - but even then it would be ~24A for a dozen of them. The only reason you'd need a big PSU would be if you had a gaming-grade graphics card hidden away in there (as it and the CPU would be polled around the same time as the HDDs at OS startup); without one and just a fairly normal system aside from the RAID array(s) you could easily get away with a 550W unirail PSU (usually ~41A) to cover startups and have an array with lower cost- and energy-consumption per GB than a 2.5" array!

AlmightyCushion

electrofelix wrote: »

Will have to check the manufacturers sites to see how long before 2.5" drives >1TB start appearing.

They have been launched but only the ones that are 12.5mm in height. Western digital and toshiba have released them I believe. They are bigger than standard height so be 100% sure that they will fit in that enclosure before you buy. No idea of prices but I'm thinking they will be expensive.

Solitaire

Most full-size 2.5" backplanes can take 12.5mm drives; many can even take 15mm drives like the SAS enterprise drives and the new SATA3 Velociraptor. Its laptops and some 3.5" bay adaptors that have the problem