Home Server/NAS build

Serephucus

A Pi would definitely be suitable, though it would be running Linux, and I'm not sure how un/comfortable you are with setting network shares up from there, etc.

will56

Never ran it before but I'm willing to learn.
That's why I was thinking the PI cause it won't break the bank if I can't figure it all out.

I assume most of the online tutorials would be enough to get me up and running

vibe666

just be aware of the limitations of the Pi.

as far as i remember, both the usb and nic share the same bandwidth (which isn't great to begin with), so performance streaming/copying files to/from the storage is going to be fairly poor and a definite bottleneck. also don't think the NIC on the Pi is even gigabit?

also, you'll need a drive that can be powered separately as the 5V going into the Pi isn't going to be enough to power most usb hdd's from the usb port alone.

i'm sure there's more i've forgotten, but i looked into it a couple of years ago and very quickly decided not to, although it's possible some of the bottlenecks have been worked around since then?

Johnboy1951

vibe666 wrote: »

just be aware of the limitations of the Pi.

as far as i remember, both the usb and nic share the same bandwidth (which isn't great to begin with), so performance streaming/copying files to/from the storage is going to be fairly poor and a definite bottleneck. also don't think the NIC on the Pi is even gigabit?

also, you'll need a drive that can be powered separately as the 5V going into the Pi isn't going to be enough to power most usb hdd's from the usb port alone.

i'm sure there's more i've forgotten, but i looked into it a couple of years ago and very quickly decided not to, although it's possible some of the bottlenecks have been worked around since then?

I have two R-Pi boards .... both B and one a +

I reckon it cost close to €100 for one of them by the time I had suitable SD card and case & PSU etc included.

They are capable little machines .... but yes have limitations which might or might not worry someone depending on their intended use.

These days I favour the small form factor x86 devices.

Yes they are dearer, but offer so much more versatility that I believe they are worth the extra over the Pi.

BTW .... both my R-Pi devices are in use and doing what I expect of them

will56

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

I have two R-Pi boards .... both B and one a +

I reckon it cost close to €100 for one of them by the time I had suitable SD card and case & PSU etc included.

They are capable little machines .... but yes have limitations which might or might not worry someone depending on their intended use.

These days I favour the small form factor x86 devices.

Yes they are dearer, but offer so much more versatility that I believe they are worth the extra over the Pi.

BTW .... both my R-Pi devices are in use and doing what I expect of them

Right, I thought a bit more about what my needs would be.

Need something that can be left on 24/7 for torrents/couchpotato etc
Can used for saving photos/ docs from laptop
Can either stream over home wi-fi to android tv box
Not likely to need access from outside the home as my broadband connection is not great. If efibre was ebing rolled out to my area I would invest more in the unit

I already have the android tv box
Powered USB hub
Spare router
Spare SD/microSD and USB drives

Johnboy1951

Need something that can be left on 24/7 for torrents/couchpotato etc

The next consideration, IMO, then would be what is your preferred software, and is it available for the Pi.
For my own use I have settled on Openelec which is graphical by design.

As, by your description, you will not need to interface graphically with the device ..... use ssh/whatever .... the graphical 'response' I mentioned earlier should not be a problem.

ED E

Not what I wanted to see....

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Serephucus

The Verify can fail if you've written data to the pool after an update. Did you have a download or a media library going in the background or something? Has happened to me occasionally before, didn't lose anything. You should get a listing in the log of what files failed the verification.

ED E

Looks like some files might have changed since the update. They shouldnt have changed at that time though, so I'll have to see if something is up elsewhere to prompt those writes.

Otherwise she's running pretty well. Others in the house are delighted with the performance of plex vs the previous DLNA server.

ED E

Files that arent changing are failing the validate. Updates fine. Quick validate is fine. Validate fails.

Tried a few times. Each time a different file, or two, fails. Wonder if I've got a dud drive.

ED E

Regarding the above, updates are quite quick. Verifys are SLOOOOOOW. I wasnt allocating enough "off" time to services running on top of the array for the verify to complete. New schedule is Update daily, Verify Sundays.


And. Now TTL has built a new baby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzrjOkog_wg

Finally, this article should be left here in case anyone else is building one.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

Serephucus

Yeah, full verify on my array takes around eight hours, from what I remember. Haven't run one in a while actually (usually just stick with quick validate), should probably do that...

Mental server as usual. Don't think I've heard of anyone strapping an AIO WC unit to a RAID card before. :P

ED E

He doesnt do half measures. Ever.

Wonder what the upper limit for Flex is. Like if you attached two eSata enclosures and a rake more drives, how big could you go?

EDIT: Theoretical is 16mil TB's
http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php?topic=514.0

Serephucus

I'd imagine it's pretty massive. Given that it's also software, file-based, I'd imagine there's an artificial limit to the drives, but it's probably something massive.

Just had a quick Google, and according to Brahim (FS dev), the pool can grow to 16 million TB. I think you'd be fine with an eSATA enclosure so. :P

ED E

If 5k content becomes a thing Ill be putting it to the test.

Serephucus

Hurray for bad eyesight! I can tell the difference between 720 and 1080p content on a TV, though it's only a slight improvement, so I'll be sticking with 1080p movies at the most for the foreseeable future.

ED E

Only have 1080P monitors for now, except my phone (its kinda wrong that my phone is so much higher res than a 22"). Yet. 34" 1440P of some sort will be required very soon.

ED E

Just realised I never benched it as a NAS, not locally. Almost maxes out GigE. Wasnt actually using it at full tilt for a while as windows decided to use the NIC connected to a 10/100 switch, not the one directly onto the router(less hops AND faster).

ED E

Little update in case anyone is using this thread for reference. Expanded the array this weekend to go from 2x3TB + 3TB to 3x3TB +3TB. Usable space from 5.5TB to 8.18TB. Fittingly right after the drive shipped amazon shaved €25 off the price of it (I sourced mine on ebay). Still good that prices look to be falling.

Performance has never been an issue but I was curios to see how the figures are holding up. Local figures didnt change much by adding the drive.


(Think that 512k R is an anomaly )

Unfortunately CIFs has never been the speediest of protocols, only sometimes maxes out the link. GigE gives about 125MB/s peak, transfers tend to start at 110 but then scale back down to 60-85MB/s. Still plenty fast for home use. Maybe I'll go 10Gbps in a year or two for ****s and giggles.




Long term flex has been pretty solid. Updates take 3-12 minutes and run at 6AM, very easy to keep parity with that. Verifys though sometimes roll on for ages, 6hrs plus, at which point one of the services running on the pool may have restarted(I kill activity when the verify starts) and change something, breaking parity. I think thats the nature of reading all 12TB of raw data in one go, so I may just do them less often or expand the time allocated.

Serephucus

About FlexRAID: Can confirm. Mine has been nice and stable too. The verifies fail half the time, but that's just because some obscure file somewhere got a timestamp change or something similar.

This is my array (6x4TB, 5+1). I think it might actually be the first time I've benchmarked it...

Calibos

Gonna be asking both of you to hold my hand in a few weeks once Flexraid supports Windows 10.

The oul lad is in desperate need of a new PC so I've gone back to the idea of picking up an i3 and swapping it out with the i5 in my own uSFF PC and giving that PC to him. He's currently using an atom powered miniPC with Win7 that was originally purchased to be an XBMC/Kodi Openelec machine. It's woefully slow. His monitor was the 1080p LCD TV. His eyesight is getting worse and I found him kneeling in front of the TV using the PC. He said he was grand but I told him, I couldn't be having that and would give him a better PC. Found out a brother had mothballed a Dell 2405. 2005 vintage that he thought had yellowed and dimmed with age. Picked it up and all that was wrong was a film of nicotine and a different menu setting brought back the vibrancy comparable to my own LG LED monitor. So dad will now have a decent little PC and decent large monitor when I'm finished.

The Haswell i5 will go in an AsRock z97 mobo with 10 Sata ports along with another cast off from my brother of a GTX580. The case will be the Corsair Air540 I've had mothballed for over a year waiting for the server build. Remember the renders I posted. 27 3.5" bays. A couple of SAS/Sata cards will go in as needed in the future. This will be dual use Server/Personal PC for the next 9 months or so till I build my custom SFF 5820k/Pascal based Oculus VR gaming PC.

As such, I want Windows 10 on it but that'll postpone the Flexraid install a couple of months till its supported. My current media in my two ancient Dlink NAS's has been unprotected for 7 or 8 years anyway so another few months is no biggy

That said is there anything I need to change about the install on this machine when I build it in the next week or three to take account for the Flexraid install a couple of months later. drive naming, formatting, folder structure etc or is the install a normal windows install in all respects and it's just a case of adding the media drives to the storage pool once I've set up Flexraid.

ED E

Calibos wrote: »

That said is there anything I need to change about the install on this machine when I build it in the next week or three to take account for the Flexraid install a couple of months later. drive naming, formatting, folder structure etc or is the install a normal windows install in all respects and it's just a case of adding the media drives to the storage pool once I've set up Flexraid.

Snapshot raid is raid over the file system, but I've never migrated in full drives. The simplest methodology is probably to keep 1 of your largest single drives and 1 other empty. Then you can build a 1PPU 1DRU array, copy in one full load of DRU data, sync up, then delete that data off the source drive, add it as DRU2 and update. And so on and so forth.

Flexraid locks windows out of mounting the drives once they're added to a pool so lettering etc doest matter much.

One thing I do that might help is number every drive I buy. Record its Model & Serial number and what bay I'm installing it in. Then if you get a drive failure notification for "WD12345678910" you know exactly what bay to go to pull it and swap in a spare. Also helps track which disks are oldest and should be swapped out first if upgrading(looking to 3yrs from now when 8TB may be the norm).

ED E

BTW the 3TB and 4TB perform similarly in benches so I'm curious as to how your figures are that high Serephucus. Not that it matters with GigE.

Do you have "Turn off windows write cache" buffering checked Seph?

EDIT: Nevermind, its diskmark.

Calibos

Can ye lads recommend an 1150 Haswell board either the original or refresh in a micro-ATX form factor that will support 3x 8 Port Sas/Sata controller cards. (ie. 3x x8 capable PCI-E slots???) My Corsair Air540 with the Hotswap caddies I bought will support a max of 29x HDD's and a Bluray drive. Ultimately I'll eventually need 3x 8 port Sas/Sata cards anyway which is 24 drives so whatever motherboard I get can have as few as 6 Sata ports. Will be putting in my Haswell 4570S i5. It needs to be a Micro ATX in order to fit the motherboard in the orientation and position where I need it to fit. You may recall I'm modding this particular case and using it very unconventionally with the HDD caddies filling the side of the case the mobo et al usually goes and actually fitting the mobo on the thin side of the case where the PSU and cables usually go. I can still fit a Noctua C14 CPU cooler so combined with the low powered i5 I have it should make for a very quiet server.

[Edit]How about the AsRock H97M http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/H97M/

Its only €77 from Mindfactory.de

In particular can you look over the PCI specs. I'm assuming a supposedly Quad Crossfire capable board must have PCI-e slots capable of running 3x SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 PCI-Express 2.0 x8 cards. ie any clue what the lane division is. Will I get x8 x8 x8 on 3 of the PCI slots for the Supermicro sas cards?

ED E

Necro, but I wanted to update the thread.

Warning: If upgrading flexraid to 2.1 you may lose all your schedules. This means your array will no longer be anyway redundant!

[StoragePool][UPDATE] SUCCESS 13:18 (30 NOV)
[StoragePool][UPDATE] SUCCESS 14 Nov

Not pleased that this happened with no warning in the changelogs/post about the update. Next time I'm going ZFS/BTRFS I think.

ED E

Just found out SuperMicro have an IPMI app, rather handy if you wanna check something while on your back working in a closet etc.

Serephucus

Ooh, nice! I assume it works remotely as well?

RE other thread: I knew I meant to do something before starting unRAID. I even looked the other day and noticed the updates. I'll do that once this parity check finishes (only 5 hours!)


On unRAID:

I haven't done a huge amount yet in terms of testing. I got two 8TB drives in, and am using a spare 1TB drive, as well as the 4TB parity from my current array to test things out. So I've got a 2+1 and cache arrangement going on.

The initial parity sync took just over 20 hours (ugh), and the parity check looks like it'll take about 16.

For those wondering: A parity sync in unRAID is like a parity update with FlexRAID. The check is like a verify. With unRAID being real-time though, this shouldn't be needed (the parity is updated on write to the array), and only really protects against some sort of silent corruption.

As I want to start out with a known good array before I force failures, I haven't got to testing yet, and I'm a bit limited in what I can test, mainly because I don't have another drive to add to make a cache pool (in this case, a 1:1 mirror) like I'll be running with the final install, but at least I can test the main array parts.

I really, really like all the folder options with this. No more bollocking around with Windows horrible networking permissions. Breaks down like this:

Public - full r/w/x for guests and users
Secure - guests read, r or r/w set per user
private - guests no access, r, r/w or none set per user

You can also choose to export the share or not (whether or not it's browsable over the network), or to export it, but have it hidden (so you need to know it exists and the path beforehand).

And it all just works!

VMs work wonderfully too. You get a little indicator on your dashboard of any VMs or Dockers you have running, and two clicks and you're either looking at the WebUI (Docker) or opening a VNC session (VM).

Then there's Docker, and plugins... Coming from FlexRAID, the whole experience just feels much more polished and cohesive.

ED E

Good to hear its going well, if I was going from scratch I think it would probably win out. Linus putting it through silly stresses and still hold up really highlighted its potential.

Now that its behaving again and assuming that it stays that way I think I'd have been happier with it if the limitations were highlighted. Brahim doesnt make it obvious that while its NTFS, its not real NTFS, not the same as NTFS on a RAID or a Storage Space. That tripped me, but knowing to work around it from Day 1 would have halved the teething.

Also you should be advised to re-create when you upgrade versions. Lots of errors appeared post 2.1 and are gone since the fresh start (data in place).

Important RE C2750D41:
If you update the BMC, things probably will break. Has happened both times for me. Networking and login credentials. The supermicro tool fixes this, but if you don't know to look for this it'll leave you cursing.


Next step is going from 4 to 7 drives, but I'm waiting for the 3TBs to yoyo lower than 74.45 GBP.

Serephucus

ED E wrote: »

Important RE C2750D41:
If you update the BMC, things probably will break. Has happened both times for me. Networking and login credentials. The supermicro tool fixes this, but if you don't know to look for this it'll leave you cursing.

AFAIK, the IP gets reset to 0.0.0.0, but how would the Supermicro app fix this?

ED E

Serephucus wrote: »

AFAIK, the IP gets reset to 0.0.0.0, but how would the Supermicro app fix this?

Its an executable, you run it in the host system and reconfigure the BMC.