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Be careful about the software implementation of daap that they're using. My Thecus N4100Pro uses the obsolete mt-daapd and with the miniscule bit of RAM they have on there, it dies at about only 4000 songs. Newer NASes should be using Firefly media server I think and I dunno how well it does compared to mt-daapd. The BitTorrent client on my Thecus is limited to 4 torrents as well (it uses rtorrent on the backend) and is lame there. There's always some limitation to the features on these SOHO NASes I've found, which is why I'm planning on getting rid of mine ASAP and going with a homebrew box.
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May 31, 2010 22:50
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Chris Knight posted:Has anyone used the Synology DS210j? It looks about right for what I'd want to use, mainly iTunes library and video storage, with some BitTorrent and NZB downloadin'. And the price seems decent (~CAN$250). I have the DS210j. I bought it specifically because I didn't want to gently caress with a homebrew OS configuration, and because it was the cheapest 2-disk NAS I saw. I run SABnzbd and Sick Beard on it. I can download at 1.50MB/s average which I think is my line's capped speed. Unrar isn't fast but it isn't slow, maybe a few minutes for a 4GB unrar. There's a sabnzbd package here: http://www.mertymade.com/syno/#sabnzbd The hardware on it is crappy, but the software is nice. DiskStation Manager is the same software across all of their devices, so you get everything. It streams to iTunes but I don't know which service it uses to do that.  Click here for the full 626x344 image. I haven't tried rtorrent on it yet but there are guides on how to install it, maybe even a package. You can SSH worst case and gently caress with anything as root.
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May 31, 2010 23:42
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I haven't had much luck in the enterprise storage thread and I thought maybe you guys had some more insight into my problem. I'm going to apologize for cross-posting but I'd really like a strong recommendation by the end of this. I read the OP and McRib Sandwich's post and I think that's a pretty good place to start. Anyhow, content: I'm currently setting up a new file server/backup system for a small video production company. They're currently using a bunch of USB 2.0 external drives (!!) for production and archival purposes and sneaker-netting them to the two production machines in the office. The requirements aren't really intensive compared to the "enterprise" level stuff you guys are playing with. I'd like to set up a main file server running Server 2k8 Foundation (I need to build an intranet site that works across the office LAN) and have it host the archival footage and work files. The transfer rates don't have to be high - though they're working with 1080p footage, the plan is to have the workstations pull the footage over the network and do the actual manipulation on the workstation and put the completed products back onto the file server. They have no backup/disaster recovery plan right now except for duplication of the footage across different external drives which are kept in the office and the original DVPro tapes. I want to build 3 identical file servers and have 2 in the office and one doing off-site replication from the CEO's home using Crashplan. I'll also recommend they start keeping the original footage and the finished product tapes off-site. The amount of storage is minimal by enterprise standards (6-10 Tb) and there will only be a maximum of 2 people accessing the server on a heavy basis (the two production workstations). Cost is a big issue. They have an IT staffer on hand who can deal with any issues with the hardware should problems arise. I'd appreciate recommendations for the server enclosure, raid controller (I'm thinking of RAID 6, 5 or 1+0 for this type of application), and anything else that I've forgotten.
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Jun 1, 2010 00:27
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soj89 posted:Cost is a big issue. This one little sentence will completely define the end result. Literally, the scale could be from $800 spent stuffing a whitebox with some TB drives to $25k for a lower-end enterprise solution. What is your budget?
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Jun 1, 2010 02:05
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I just got an iomega ix4-200d in as a backup destination for our servers (Windows one sbs and one windows server), I'm also going to be doing a bunch of testing to see what happens if I try and run a very low utilization (little linux VM) from via iSCSI using VMWare. So far I'm actually pretty impressed though I haven't had time to put it through its paces speed wise.
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Jun 1, 2010 03:12
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Wow, newegg has a 20-bay real bare bones DAS shelf, for only US$350 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219033 The mentioned cons are not surprising, no documentation and poor build quality.
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Jun 1, 2010 13:57
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DLCinferno posted:This one little sentence will completely define the end result. Literally, the scale could be from $800 spent stuffing a whitebox with some TB drives to $25k for a lower-end enterprise solution. Around $2000 per box. The main server I think will roll with a faster processor (i7?), more RAM, etc. while the other two act as duplicators/"backup". They still have backup in tape form for the original footage, which is the most important thing. I think I'd like to use a hardware raid card in combination with a SATA backplane.
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Jun 1, 2010 14:32
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soj89 posted:Around $2000 per box. The main server I think will roll with a faster processor (i7?), more RAM, etc. while the other two act as duplicators/"backup". They still have backup in tape form for the original footage, which is the most important thing. Quoting myself here, but I think a Synology NAS solution for the backup boxes will be more cost efficient. Thoughts of Raid 6 vs. Raid 10/10e?
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Jun 1, 2010 15:55
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MrMoo posted:Wow, newegg has a 20-bay real bare bones DAS shelf, for only US$350 Norco makes good products. It's pretty simple to figure out the documentation, and I'm not sure how people can find the build quality to be "poor". Perhaps they drive a sherman on a daily basis?
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Jun 7, 2010 02:29
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Anyone else had a backplane go bad on them? Because I think I may have had a 4-in-3 from Lian Li go bad on me; my RAID-6 array kept kicking a couple of drives out and showing read errors from another drive in the same backplane. I moved those two problem drives to spare spots in another backplane and now the array seems to be happy.
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Jun 7, 2010 08:00
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PopeOnARope posted:Norco makes good products. It's pretty simple to figure out the documentation, and I'm not sure how people can find the build quality to be "poor". Perhaps they drive a sherman on a daily basis? I've heard the drive sleds can be flimsy, but honestly for that price that's not a bad tradeoff in the slightest, considering the next higher level of quality will jump the price by several hundred dollars.
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Jun 7, 2010 08:01
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MrMoo posted:Wow, newegg has a 20-bay real bare bones DAS shelf, for only US$350
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Jun 7, 2010 15:22
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I've heard the drive sleds can be flimsy, but honestly for that price that's not a bad tradeoff in the slightest, considering the next higher level of quality will jump the price by several hundred dollars. Yeah, the drive sleds for my -4020 bend pretty easily, but seriously, $250.00 for a 20-bay 4U case w/ backplane and pretty decent(tm) build quality, no real major complaints about it. You get what you pay for.
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Jun 7, 2010 17:46
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Melp posted:Norco has been working on a 24-bay version of this for a few months now. The new model will be called RPC-4224. Supposedly, it will use 120mm fans instead of the noisy 80mm's in the RPC-4020 and -4220. Pics of a mockup and prototype here. Apparently, Norco are also working on "expander" cases that just have enough room for 24 (or 16) drives and a power supply. Those expander cases sound VERY promising.
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Jun 8, 2010 11:21
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The_Frag_Man posted:Those expander cases sound VERY promising. Yeah, they should be short enough that you can fit them back to back in a double sized rack. As long as you're going to be around to support it, I really can't recommended ZFS off an opensolaris box enough. Native kernel mode iSCSI, NFS and CIFS drivers, and a file system that as far as I can tell, refuses to die on you unless you gently caress up and delete it. I have that same Norco 4220 case, you can replace the fan bracket with 3 120mm fans zip tied together if you're feeling half assed, or you can order an actual fan bracket from a few places on the internet. The Drive sleds are a bit flimsy, but then again, they aren't exactly load bearing structures, so who gives a poo poo? I have my current box set up as a media server, 8x 1.5 TB Western Digital Green drives in a RAIDZ2 (raid6) array. The filebench media benchmark showed ~220MB/sec reads and ~180MB/sec writes. You could get better performance by making two 4 disk RAID 5s and striping them together, but I went with increased reliability over increased speed. I have a 2 port Intel server gigabit card running in teamed mode to a managed gigabit switch, and I can saturate any single gigabit connection, and run two seperate clients at about 90MB/sec via CIFS. Once you get used to the few different things solaris does compared to *nix, it's very easy to manage. As far as reliability is concerned, between the block checksumming, ability to create instant snapshots at arbitrary times, and the relative indestructibility of the actual pool, your data is in safe hands. The zpool is completely portable, if something manages to completely gently caress your boot drive or sets fire to your motherboard, you can reimage a spare drive, zpool import and be back in production in about 20 minutes. I actually did that myself, the drive I was using for my boot disk took a poo poo, so I reinstalled solaris, ran the command, and all my data was back in about 3 seconds.
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Jun 8, 2010 11:45
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:Once you get used to the few different things solaris does compared to *nix, it's very easy to manage. Them's fighting words. Zealots will be happy to point out that Solaris is a true Unix, having descended from System V, whereas Linux is just an imposter. But I will agree with the sentiment. Solaris has it's own unique way of doing things.
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Jun 8, 2010 13:23
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:Norco 4220 and RAIDZ2 I remember being all excited about using RAIDZ2 on a future machine but I got talked out of it, and I can't remember how. I'm probably going to end up moving my current (gaming/general computing) setup over to the 4224 and add a massive RAID array to it. All of this will be on Win 7 and 16 of the drives will be on one overpriced RAID card or another, probably in 2 8-disk RAID6 arrays. Has anyone used LDM? I'd like to get more info on it before I consider using it to combine the two RAID6 volumes. The Wikipedia article says there are a lot of problems with it, but I can't figure out if/how they would impact me.
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Jun 8, 2010 15:04
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iomega ix4-200d trip report. I did a couple of non scientific tests of the 2TB iomega ix4-200d NAS using ESXi. I have a windows SBS 2008 server that I'm building on a Dell Vostro i7 box before moving it to a real server. The main purpose of the iomega is to provide a destination for Backup Exec backups/ and snapshots of the server which can easily be copied onto USB disk and taken off site. I set up the host to access a shared NFS volume on the NAS then I cloned the server onto the NAS which only took about 20 minutes as the data hasn't been moved over yet so probably only about 20-40 gigs are used out of 250 gigs of preallocated storage (in three virtual drives. To my surprise the clone booted without problem and didn't appear to be slower than the original (of course exchange wasn't doing any work yet.) Once I did that I tried copying a 1.8 gig (VMWare vCenter iso) file from a physical client to the server then copying the same file from volume to virtual disk to virtual disk using the freeware diskbench. Copying the 1.8 gig file took 6 minutes both to the machine running off the NAS and the machine running off the SATA disks in the machine. (so about 15MB/s) Copying the file between volumes on the guest which are stored host (which are on separate drives)gave a speed of 59MB/s Copying the file between volumes stored on the guest stored on the iomega gave 15MB/s. For reference the same file yields 22 MB/s when copying to a directly connected USB drive. Notes. I'm using a cheap gigabit switch without jumbo frames enabled. I'm going to play around a bit with iSCSI and increasing the frame sizes to see if it makes a difference. Before anyone bugs me about soho gear it's worth stating again that with the exception of being a target for backups, the device won't be used to do any heavy lifting. Overall I don't think it's bad for $500, and if I wanted to dick around with VMWare at home I'd definitely pick up another one. If anyone has any other questions i'll try to answer them.
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Jun 8, 2010 21:36
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Melp posted:Is there enough room in that 4220 for 3x140mm fans? Delta make some insane 350+ CFM 140mm fans that require a 24V power supply and I really want to check them out. No, 3x120mm fans barely fit, so trying to shoehorn 3x140mm fans won't work at all. I suppose you could use two of them, but I'm not sure how the airflow would work without a bracket of some kind to prevent airflow around the fans. Oh god, 24v 100w Delta screamers, why god why? I had a hardware RAID card for a while, and while it was nice, having to deal with the issues involved with gaming and the random bluescreens you'll get with that coupled with a card that REALLY doesn't like hard shutdowns left me with issues a few times. I eventually decided that it was easier to have a separate box with all the drives in it, and a nice little Cooler Master centurion case for my gaming stuff. I love it. Enough local storage to keep all my crap on, enough network storage to archive every blu ray disk I own several times over, and it's in a rack out in the garage, where I never have to listen to it again!
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Jun 8, 2010 23:04
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:I have my current box set up as a media server, 8x 1.5 TB Western Digital Green drives in a RAIDZ2 (raid6) array. The filebench media benchmark showed ~220MB/sec reads and ~180MB/sec writes. You could get better performance by making two 4 disk RAID 5s and striping them together, but I went with increased reliability over increased speed. Hmm, my writes with 8 1.5TB Seagates over CIFS only seem to peak around 70MB/s or so, and slow down from then...my CPU is also a pretty "weak" undervolted Athlon though, and the load average spikes, so maybe upgrading that could help. quote:disk took a poo poo, so I reinstalled solaris, ran the command, and all my data was back in about 3 seconds. Same here, but all the customization/software I had installed/random .conf fixes that took hours to find all died with the original drive. =[ No backups either, naturally... (Boot pool is now a 30GB Vertex SSD!)
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Jun 9, 2010 00:12
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:No, 3x120mm fans barely fit, so trying to shoehorn 3x140mm fans won't work at all. I suppose you could use two of them, but I'm not sure how the airflow would work without a bracket of some kind to prevent airflow around the fans. Oh god, 24v 100w Delta screamers, why god why? Did you have bluescreens/hard shutdowns as a result of the RAID card? The only hard shutdowns I've had in several months are because of power, and I'd be getting a UPS for the machine. I would be moving to two separate machines in time, but I came up with this idea of a combined super-setup to offset some of the cost.
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Jun 9, 2010 00:17
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I've heard the drive sleds can be flimsy, but honestly for that price that's not a bad tradeoff in the slightest, considering the next higher level of quality will jump the price by several hundred dollars. How often are you removing and re-inserting the drives?
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Jun 9, 2010 00:43
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Melp posted:Did you have bluescreens/hard shutdowns as a result of the RAID card? The only hard shutdowns I've had in several months are because of power, and I'd be getting a UPS for the machine. I would be moving to two separate machines in time, but I came up with this idea of a combined super-setup to offset some of the cost. I'm having bluescreens / hard shutdowns because of (as far as I can tell) lovely drivers on Windows 7 x64, and my new hardware RAID (3ware 9650SE-4LPML) also really doesn't like it. I'm getting cache flush failures (expected) followed by cache synchronization failures (not sure if this should be happening) all the time. I ran Memtest86 for a few hours with no problems. Mprime24 (from the Ultimate Boot CD) I ran for sixteen hours but the screen went blank sometime after the first half-hour and I couldn't bring it back to life when I got home from work, so I never found out the results of that. I wish it would save a log file somewhere (I know, it can't, it has no knowledge of my filesystem when I do it from the CD). Anyway, it's really bugging me, because I'm slowly copying everything off my external drive onto the new RAID setup and I'm worried about its stability.
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Jun 9, 2010 02:23
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I've read several pages of this thread, but at 2 years old and 45 pages long it's a bit tough. I've currently got an iMac running time machine and a Windows XP computer with a 1TB hard drive. The Mac backs up to the Windows PC, and the WinPC shares all of it's files to the Mac. I want to replace the WinPC with a NAS (I already have 2 x 1GB drives laying around, and was wondering what my best option is. Ideally, it would have RAID and hot swapping support. What is my best option, that will work well with the Mac? For instance, sometimes when I open iTunes it can't find the networked files right away and I need to manually play a song before it recognizes all of the files on the WinXP computer. Also, I have to "open" each shared directory after rebooting which I guess is like mounting the drives. Will I be able to solve any of my problems and get rid of Windows altogether by going the NAS route?
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Jun 9, 2010 02:26
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Melp posted:I have an unhealthy obsession with really powerful fans, but I guess for the Norco, I'm going to have to stick to the measly 250 CFM 120mm fans... The Bluescreens were because of lovely drivers and games that were at the bleeding edge of what my system could handle. The raid card on more than one occasion told me to gently caress right off if I thought I was going to keep doing that.
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Jun 9, 2010 09:38
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:The Bluescreens were because of lovely drivers and games that were at the bleeding edge of what my system could handle. The raid card on more than one occasion told me to gently caress right off if I thought I was going to keep doing that. What brand was the RAID card?
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Jun 9, 2010 14:32
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movax posted:Hmm, my writes with 8 1.5TB Seagates over CIFS only seem to peak around 70MB/s or so, and slow down from then...my CPU is also a pretty "weak" undervolted Athlon though, and the load average spikes, so maybe upgrading that could help. Have you turned on jumbo frames on your network cards? (And/or, does your network switch support them?)
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Jun 9, 2010 14:56
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Have you turned on jumbo frames on your network cards? (And/or, does your network switch support them?) Jumbo frames makes all the difference. The CIFS protocol has a lot of overhead on a standard packet, with a 9k jumbo frame, that overhead goes way down.
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Jun 9, 2010 19:01
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:Jumbo frames makes all the difference. The CIFS protocol has a lot of overhead on a standard packet, with a 9k jumbo frame, that overhead goes way down. I'm piecing the actual data together from a few sources so the exact numbers may be off but imagine it this way: CIFS/SMB/Windows File Sharing has run off of TCP/IP since 1996. This means that SMB was encoded inside a TCP/IP packet. A standard TCP/IP packet is limited to a maximum of 1500 bytes of data and has roughly 50 bytes of overhead. This means the maximum theoretical efficiency of TCP over Ethernet is 95% efficient (For every 1550 bytes sent, 1500 is data you want.) However, the SMB frame must be encoded in that data payload as well. This is where things get fuzzy. I gather that SMB requires a further ~46 bytes in it's headers and footers to encapsulate that data. (I'm not entirely sure of this number) This costs you 5% of your 95% reducing efficiency further to about 91%. Thus your maximum ceiling with a standard 1500 byte, non jumbo frame is about 91% of the rated speed. The problem is that SMB/CIFS/Sharing requries an acknowlege message for each and every frame. This is what causes the protocol to be called 'chatty' as the response message needs to be received. The response message is very small and thus has a high ratio of overhead. By increasing the frame size you greatly eliminate the overhead percentages. This can reduce your throughput efficiency (actual target data traversing the wire) by as much as 10% (or more depending on latency.) This is why the average 100Mbps ethernet usually gets about 10MB/s instead of the theoretical 12.5 maximum.
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Jun 9, 2010 19:52
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This is a great thread as Dexter6 recently mentioned and I don't know if 2008 stuff is still current (Last OP edit). I'm looking at the Netgear's ReadyNAS NV+ and possibly a comparable Synology NAS (DS410J ?), but leaning towards ReadyNAS b/c of plugins and getting under the hood. If I go with Netgear and buy it with disks, what disks are shipping in it? If I can't find that out, I was going to go with WD RE3 1TB drives which are $149 at Newegg currently. Seems that it's pricey and a bit slow (CPU) with underwhelming default RAM, but it seems that Inferant knew what they were doing when they built this hardware, before Netgear scooped them up. The fact that they are still selling without much modification must be doing something right. I read the specs on the newer nvx offering, which has iSCSI support and is faster but I think that's out of my price range. Am I missing another NAS box that's small, powerful (but doesn't draw much power), controllable with the same feature set in the same price range? I saw the HP Media dealio, Dlink D-323 (which initially I thought I was going to get but I'm not favoring that now for some reason(?),Qnap, and most others from the OP. I appreciate it
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Jun 9, 2010 20:48
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The synology boxes are very controllable...
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Jun 9, 2010 21:04
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friendship waffle posted:The synology boxes are very controllable... I want to hear about the good, the bad and the ugly.  Because my trigger finger is itchy.
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Jun 9, 2010 22:38
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Put together a loving freeNAS box if you want to sperg out about the particular version of Apache your NAS is running. As has been pointed out, smallnetbuilder is a very good website for reviews of NAS appliances but changing out the linux/bsd kernel is not what you do to an appliance.
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Jun 9, 2010 23:56
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I think what he really means is hackable because you're now going into unsupported territory. Some people want to hack up a box that's been made because it's cheaper, sorta like how people approach flashing a router with 3rd party firmware or what people used to do before these NASes with the Linksys NAS extension NSLU2 or whatever. If you want to hack up these boxes for your own software featureset, you're probably best off with the WHS boxes like the HP or Acer models because everything else uses low-power non-x86 chips or an AMD Geode or something else that's cheap and bare minimum in the SOHO market, which could require a recompile of binaries you try to bring onboard. There's also the issue that many can only run headless and can be pretty easily bricked unless you can get access to the onboard flash without the mobo or manage to attach a keyboard to it.
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Jun 10, 2010 01:31
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Most of the NAS appliances support plugins, addons, and have an open SDK for adding stuff. But changing out the default apache? Really?
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Jun 10, 2010 01:46
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friendship waffle posted:Most of the NAS appliances support plugins, addons, and have an open SDK for adding stuff. But changing out the default apache? Really? I just wish to choose the box that has the widest community as you said with options, along with good design, good hardware (good parts) at a nice price. If it runs good enough as is - all the better, a "set it and forget it appliance", don't get me wrong, I understand. Since it's a big investment additional research is required. I was hoping my question would elicit some personal insight from someone from the vantage point of now (2010-06-09) and what they would buy right now if they had the ducats. My dedicated playback server will follow later, on the way to realizing a home theater, and it will be a personal buildout. Probably this and this and who knows maybe this since it's supported. I am going to smallnetbuilder posthaste, thanks.
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Jun 10, 2010 02:18
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I need to upgrade my NAS. I've got an easystore H340 right now that has 3x 1.5tb drives in it and a 1tb drive I'm using for the OS. It runs Ubuntu Server 10.04 on a linux software raid. I'm down to 350ish GB free. Any suggestions on what to get both hardware and software wise? I'd like to switch to OpenSolaris for ZFS but I'm a bit wary of that product since I've had so many bad experiences upgrading between releases.
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Jun 11, 2010 18:41
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FreeNAS does ZFS and is worth looking into. It's a bit unpolished around the edges, particularly if you're running the nightlies, but everything works.
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Jun 11, 2010 22:41
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Have you turned on jumbo frames on your network cards? (And/or, does your network switch support them?) Hmm, they may not be on at the moment...I recently switched switches to a PowerConnect 5324, which I know does jumbo frames. My set-top boxes have issues with them though...will setting jumbo frames to on in the e1000 driver on Solaris screw with them? (Popcorn Hour & clone).
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Jun 11, 2010 22:58
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That's it, I think I'm fed up with using consumer drives inside RAID arrays. I've had a ST341000340AS drop out of my RAID array twice in the last two weeks, thank gently caress that's not my boot array.
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Jun 12, 2010 15:08
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