NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

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dietcokefiend: Apr 28, 2004; HEY ILL HAV 2 TXT U L8TR I JUST DROVE IN 2 A DAYCARE AND SCRATCHED MY RAZR

scarymonkey posted:

What do you guys recommend for meeting these requirements:

* Small/compact size (something like a enclosure form factor). Mid tower is too big.

* Low power requirements.

* Quiet

* Samba support.

* Treat all drives as one giant source but not in a raid setup. Meaning if one drive fails only the data on that drive is lost, not all drives.

* 4 bays capable of hosting 2tb drives per bay

* Gigabit connectivity with decent throughput.

* As a bonus but not required ability to host apps such a newsgroup client and/or media server (Twonky).

* SSH/SFTP support would be nice too

http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS410j/index.php

Supports JBOD and spanning, individual shares, etc etc as well as RAID5 if you want to lump it together.

# ? Jul 9, 2010 23:38

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# ? May 23, 2024 12:21

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Wanderer89 posted:

Any opensolaris users out there give a quick bit of advice? In the process of moving from an old antecII case with a 4x1tb raidz1 to a new case with 6x1tb raidz, using a pci-e 1x card with two addition sataII controlled by a sil 3132 (thought it was opensolaris compatible...) on svn_134. (destroying 3+1 array and recreating as 5+1)

Anyway, how do you install such a card? Very open-solaris newbie here, and plug-and-play (and reboot) don't seem to cut it... not seeing the two additional drives in the format utility, nor any updates appear in the package manager.

I have this card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124027
It's also based on the 3132 chipset, and I had no problems running it in OpenSolaris. I just plugged it in, and it worked. I don't anymore, because I upgrade.

That being said, not sure how much googling you've done, but search for 3132 on this page:
http://www.dansketcher.com/2006/12/09/solaris-sata-chipsets-i-can-run-zsf-with/
Somebody posted what he had to do to get his to work.

# ? Jul 10, 2010 00:10

paradigmm: May 28, 2002; by Y Kant Ozma Post

@Synology ppl: is there a way to prevent @eaDir poo poo all over the loving place, outside of disabling the services as described at the bottom of this thread? http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=10065#p46607

I'd like to use the iTunes service

# ? Jul 10, 2010 02:12

Echophonic: Sep 16, 2005; ha;lp; Gun Saliva

I've been considering a little NAS device for my house to keep my music and movies on so I don't have to have my old 1TB DeskStar in a USB controller attached to my rarely-on media pc. I don't want to spend a ton, and as much as I'd love a 5-bay 8TB RAID-5 device, I don't really need to spend that much drat :10bux:

or that much space (...yet).

I'm fairly sure I'm going to go with a 2 or 4 bay Synology DSX10, but I don't really know what I want to do for hard drives. My storage sweet spot is 2-4 TB, I think. Should I be looking at 'green' 5-6K drives or would that bite me in the rear end?

These WD AV-GP 2TB drives seem to be pretty solid for the price, two of these in RAID-1 would give me 2TB of redundant storage and I'd be alright with a ~500 dollar total for them and the DS210j. Anything else I should be looking at?

# ? Jul 10, 2010 04:22

dietcokefiend: Apr 28, 2004; HEY ILL HAV 2 TXT U L8TR I JUST DROVE IN 2 A DAYCARE AND SCRATCHED MY RAZR

Echophonic posted:

I've been considering a little NAS device for my house to keep my music and movies on so I don't have to have my old 1TB DeskStar in a USB controller attached to my rarely-on media pc. I don't want to spend a ton, and as much as I'd love a 5-bay 8TB RAID-5 device, I don't really need to spend that much drat or that much space (...yet).

I'm fairly sure I'm going to go with a 2 or 4 bay Synology DSX10, but I don't really know what I want to do for hard drives. My storage sweet spot is 2-4 TB, I think. Should I be looking at 'green' 5-6K drives or would that bite me in the rear end?

These WD AV-GP 2TB drives seem to be pretty solid for the price, two of these in RAID-1 would give me 2TB of redundant storage and I'd be alright with a ~500 dollar total for them and the DS210j. Anything else I should be looking at?

Save 40 bucks and get the standard Caviar Green 2TB drives perhaps?

# ? Jul 10, 2010 04:53

Frinkahedron: Jul 26, 2006; Gobble Gobble

New to this NAS thing, so I'm just doing some research on the Synology DS210j. (Or possibly the DS410j if I really feel like thinking for the future)

My current situation:

-Macbook Pro with 500GB harddrive (nowhere near full) that has my music and school documents on it.
-1 500GB USB External with my photos and ripped DVDs/TV shows. Have a copy of my documents on here. This is approaching full.
-1 120GB USB Portable External that isn't used as much, but has a copy of my documents and music that are probably slightly dated.

I'd like to have a 2nd copy of the 500GB external with my photos/media/documents and have a Time Machine backup of my macbook pro. If I got the Synology DS210j with 2 2TB drives in it, could I throw a time machine backup and copy my pictures/media onto it as a regular file server and have it set up as a RAID-1? Would time machine play nice with sharing a drive with just plain old files?

So after I got it:

-Macbook Pro with my music and documents
-500GB external for my photos
-NAS: Time Machine Backup that has my music and documents in it. A copy of my photos from the 500GB external, and a regular file server for movies/TV/random that I don't want filling up my laptop drive. Everything under a RAID-1.
-120GB Portable: Keep it in my backpack to be used as a gigantic flash drive if I have to copy stuff somewhere. Barely used it in the past 6 months, but I could see it being nice to have around still.

I know RAID isn't backup, but just having my stuff on more than 1 drive would be a nice load off my mind and having a NAS would be useful both now and in the future.

# ? Jul 10, 2010 05:39

Combat Pretzel: Jun 23, 2004; No, seriously... what kurds?!

dietcokefiend posted:

Save 40 bucks and get the standard Caviar Green 2TB drives perhaps?

The Green series are pieces of poo poo.

# ? Jul 10, 2010 12:32

Stewie: Jul 11, 2003; What the deuce?

Frinkahedron posted:

New to this NAS thing, so I'm just doing some research on the Synology DS210j. (Or possibly the DS410j if I really feel like thinking for the future)
...
I'd like to have a 2nd copy of the 500GB external with my photos/media/documents and have a Time Machine backup of my macbook pro. If I got the Synology DS210j with 2 2TB drives in it, could I throw a time machine backup and copy my pictures/media onto it as a regular file server and have it set up as a RAID-1? Would time machine play nice with sharing a drive with just plain old files?

Yes. Time Machine will attempt to consume all available disk space by default, but you can get around this in the Synology by setting up Time Machine to use a user account on the NAS that has a disk quota.

So for example, my DS210J has 2TB of available disk space. I set up an account "TMUser" on the Synology with a 500GB quota and granted it read/write access to the Time Machine share. I then set up my Mac to log on to Time Machine using the TMUser credentials, and everything works automatically.

# ? Jul 10, 2010 18:10

Star War Sex Parrot: Oct 2, 2003

dietcokefiend posted:

Save 40 bucks and get the standard Caviar Green 2TB drives perhaps?

Seriously. They're the same drive. The AV just has firmware optimizations for 24/7 streaming scenarios, like DVRs.

Also I think most of the standard Green drives are transitioning to 4k-sector, while the AV is still 512b.

# ? Jul 10, 2010 18:24

dietcokefiend: Apr 28, 2004; HEY ILL HAV 2 TXT U L8TR I JUST DROVE IN 2 A DAYCARE AND SCRATCHED MY RAZR

Combat Pretzel posted:

The Green series are pieces of poo poo.

No more pieces of poo poo than any other 2TB low-power drive. Also helps if you dont buy them by the bucket and get them all as bare drive assemblies from lovely retailers.

# ? Jul 10, 2010 18:49

scarymonkey: Jul 15, 2003; by angerbeet

dietcokefiend posted:

http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS410j/index.php

Supports JBOD and spanning, individual shares, etc etc as well as RAID5 if you want to lump it together.

Thanks just ordered 1 along with 4x 2tb Western Digital Green Drives. Will give a trip report when it's all, hopefully, running.

Edit: Canceled my order of the DS410j and got the DS410 instead:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003BUMRKM/ref=oss_product

From what I've read in the Synology forums the 410 with it's more powerful CPU and more memory (512mb vs 128mb) is a lot more SabNZBd friendly.

scarymonkey fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jul 10, 2010

# ? Jul 10, 2010 20:30

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

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

Also I think most of the standard Green drives are transitioning to 4k-sector, while the AV is still 512b.

Almost every WD drive that has come out in the past 8 months has been 4KB sectors... with the exception of those, which will likely move to 4K once DVR OEMs sign off on the 4K sector support. I don't know about the AV industry itself much, so I couldn't predict where it'd go.

# ? Jul 10, 2010 20:34

Star War Sex Parrot: Oct 2, 2003

necrobobsledder posted:

Almost every WD drive that has come out in the past 8 months has been 4KB sectors...

This isn't true at all. None of the Raptors, SAS, RE, Caviar Blue, or Caviar Black drives are 4k, with the majority of the 4k adoption being with the Caviar Green drives first.

Star War Sex Parrot fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jul 10, 2010

# ? Jul 10, 2010 20:40

Das MicroKorg: Sep 18, 2005; Vintage Analog Synthesizer

Can someone recommend me a small, external harddrive, that draws power from USB, with a capacity of 500GB, or 1TB if those exist? I've looked around Amazon and the WD My Passport Essential looks nice (and I've never had problems with WD drives in the past).

I need a 500mb drive as a backup drive for my MacBook and I might also buy another 1TB one for general media (music, videos, games, etc.).

# ? Jul 10, 2010 20:49

Frinkahedron: Jul 26, 2006; Gobble Gobble

Stewie posted:

Yes. Time Machine will attempt to consume all available disk space by default, but you can get around this in the Synology by setting up Time Machine to use a user account on the NAS that has a disk quota.

So for example, my DS210J has 2TB of available disk space. I set up an account "TMUser" on the Synology with a 500GB quota and granted it read/write access to the Time Machine share. I then set up my Mac to log on to Time Machine using the TMUser credentials, and everything works automatically.

Awesome, I'll be joining the NAS crew in the next couple of weeks then.

# ? Jul 10, 2010 21:50

dietcokefiend: Apr 28, 2004; HEY ILL HAV 2 TXT U L8TR I JUST DROVE IN 2 A DAYCARE AND SCRATCHED MY RAZR

scarymonkey posted:

Thanks just ordered 1 along with 4x 2tb Western Digital Green Drives. Will give a trip report when it's all, hopefully, running.

Edit: Canceled my order of the DS410j and got the DS410 instead:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003BUMRKM/ref=oss_product

From what I've read in the Synology forums the 410 with it's more powerful CPU and more memory (512mb vs 128mb) is a lot more SabNZBd friendly.

Yea the DS410 is a much nicer product overall and it technically supports 5 SATA drives with the eSATA connection on back.

Generally speaking I just don't recommend it over the DS410j for the average joe since it costs a bit more.

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

This isn't true at all. None of the Raptors, SAS, RE, Caviar Blue, or Caviar Black drives are 4k, with the majority of the 4k adoption being with the Caviar Green drives first.

Well its still pointless to pass over the 4k drives for systems running on a Linux platform. Linux has no trouble handling the 4k physical/512b logical mapping that seems to be causing odd troubles on some Windows systems at the moment. That and they are cheap as hell. Failure rates are about the same as any other drive not counting abnormalities that come up when people order the bare drive over retail since some places ship them loose or handle them improperly. That goes for any drive though.

dietcokefiend fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Jul 10, 2010

# ? Jul 10, 2010 22:19

Star War Sex Parrot: Oct 2, 2003

dietcokefiend posted:

Well its still pointless to pass over the 4k drives for systems running on a Linux platform. Linux has no trouble handling the 4k physical/512b logical mapping that seems to be causing odd troubles on some Windows systems at the moment.

I was merely making clear the differences between the AV and standard Green drives, not trying to steer anyone away from 4k.

# ? Jul 10, 2010 23:27

PopeOnARope: Jul 23, 2007; Hey! Quit touching my junk!

gently caress sakes. My drives just keep dropping; it's driving me up the loving wall. What drives and controller do I need to buy to have this be not poo poo?

# ? Jul 11, 2010 00:48

japtor: Oct 28, 2005

Anyone have a basic multi bay 2.5" enclosure? I've seen a bunch of dual drive ones, but very few with four, this one being one of them:
http://www.raidon-tech.com/content.php?sno=0000285&p_id=75
Can't find it anywhere so I guess it's pretty new, but they have an older USB 2.0 model available here and there. I think the only other ones I've seen (with more than two drives) are Qnap and Synology NAS devices that cost a bunch more.

FLX posted:

Can someone recommend me a small, external harddrive, that draws power from USB, with a capacity of 500GB, or 1TB if those exist? I've looked around Amazon and the WD My Passport Essential looks nice (and I've never had problems with WD drives in the past).

I need a 500mb drive as a backup drive for my MacBook and I might also buy another 1TB one for general media (music, videos, games, etc.).

Passports should work, and I believe there's a slightly fatter 1TB one available too. You may need two USB ports however, most portable drives have a dual head cable where the extra plug gives it more juice. If you have FireWire you can get away with one cable, but the hardware will cost more.

Another option is to buy a bare drive and get your own enclosure. 500GB drives are around $60-70 right now, while an enclosure will be anywhere from $10-60, with most stuff being in the $20-30 range, while the expensive ones are if you want FW800, like this one.

dietcokefiend posted:

Well its still pointless to pass over the 4k drives for systems running on a Linux platform. Linux has no trouble handling the 4k physical/512b logical mapping that seems to be causing odd troubles on some Windows systems at the moment. That and they are cheap as hell. Failure rates are about the same as any other drive not counting abnormalities that come up when people order the bare drive over retail since some places ship them loose or handle them improperly. That goes for any drive though.

Is it just a Windows thing, like is OS X affected? If so do they mark the drives differently in any way?

PopeOnARope posted:

gently caress sakes. My drives just keep dropping; it's driving me up the loving wall. What drives and controller do I need to buy to have this be not poo poo?

Info about your current setup would help. Also if you don't have a UPS it may help to get one.

# ? Jul 11, 2010 02:13

xgalaxy: Jan 27, 2004; i write code

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

Netgear announced their new ReadyNAS Ultras today and they've got me rethinking that Drobo, but ouch at the price:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/08/netgears-readynas-ultra-4-and-ultra-6-stream-to-tivo-mobile-a/

drat lol. I just finished putting together a newegg parts list for drat near that price including the 8 hard drives. That ReadyNAS is hella expensive.

I own the old ReadyNAS NV before they were bought out by Netgear.

# ? Jul 11, 2010 11:51

Wanderer89: Oct 12, 2009

FISHMANPET posted:

I have this card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124027
It's also based on the 3132 chipset, and I had no problems running it in OpenSolaris. I just plugged it in, and it worked. I don't anymore, because I upgrade.

That being said, not sure how much googling you've done, but search for 3132 on this page:
http://www.dansketcher.com/2006/12/09/solaris-sata-chipsets-i-can-run-zsf-with/
Somebody posted what he had to do to get his to work.

Yeah I found that as well, but no luck adding different aliases, thanks for the reply though, and the si3132 card you used... I had just figured it would've been plug n' play after seeing it listed on the opensolaris HCL, I'll post back if I find anything interesting.

# ? Jul 11, 2010 20:28

coffeetable: Feb 5, 2006; TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

I've been looking about for a ready-built NAS that I can set up and run Linux and SVN from, but my problem is that everything I look at is utterly excessive - I only want a few GB of space at most whilst the majority of the market seems to be in the hundreds or thousands of GB. As a cheap/broke/tight student I don't want to splurge out on space I'll never use, so is there anything that hits that niche?

coffeetable fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Jul 12, 2010

# ? Jul 12, 2010 18:24

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

coffeetable posted:

I've been looking about for a ready-built NAS that I can set up and run Linux and SVN from, but my problem is that everything I look at is utterly excessive - I only want a few GB of space at most whilst the majority of the market seems to be in the hundreds or thousands of GB. As a cheap/broke/tight student I don't want to splurge out on space I'll never use, so is there anything that hits that niche?

Ready built and installing Linux don't quite go together. You could pick up just about any Atom based Netop, throw a drive in, and go to down. This plus a compact flash, along with 2 drives (and a 5.5 to 3.5 adapter) and you've got yourself a pretty fancy setup for not a lot of money. And depending on your skill and needs you could dump the CF card and/or the second drive.

# ? Jul 12, 2010 19:35

ATLbeer: Sep 26, 2004; Über nerd

Finished a "cheapo" style build with around the house components and a few pieces from Fry's and NewEgg.

I'll post part numbers and full details this evening when I get home but, the gist is

Ubuntu box with eSATA card connected to external 5-bay cage all mounted with zfs-fuse on a raidz pool

Goal was to find a place to store all my media on a "safer" medium that wasn't my laptop, and provide easy growth options. I can swap out the individual drives at a time till I max out the enclosure, and then buy a new enclosure and use the old drives to populate, rinse repeat till I fill up all 4 external eSATA connections.

code:

dozer                1039416164 183549593 855866571  18% /dozer

$ sudo zpool list
NAME        SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
dozer      1.97T   350G  1.62T    17%  ONLINE  -

$ sudo zpool status
  pool: dozer
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: scrub completed after 0h36m with 0 errors on Sat Jul 10 00:12:18 2010
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	dozer       ONLINE       0     0     0
	  raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    sdb     ONLINE       0     0     0
	    sdc     ONLINE       0     0     0
	  raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    sdd     ONLINE       0     0     0
	    sde     ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
Disk /dev/sdd: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
Disk /dev/sde: 82.0 GB, 81964302336 bytes

ATLbeer fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Jul 12, 2010

# ? Jul 12, 2010 19:49

ATLbeer: Sep 26, 2004; Über nerd

Thread needs more pictures

Click here for the full 1600x1200 image.

SANS Digital TR5M-B
--- http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111057

Addonics ADS3GX4R5-PCIx eSATA Card
--- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816318004

2x 1TB Drives
+2x scrap drives laying around (160G, 80G) first to be swapped out when it starts getting full

# ? Jul 13, 2010 00:28

crm: Oct 24, 2004

Are those SANS Digital enclosures good products? Or at least good enough?

# ? Jul 13, 2010 01:42

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

crm posted:

Are those SANS Digital enclosures good products? Or at least good enough?

Probably better off getting something with gigabit rather than esata. I'm speaking from experience when I say esata is flaky.

# ? Jul 13, 2010 01:52

ATLbeer: Sep 26, 2004; Über nerd

IT Guy posted:

Probably better off getting something with gigabit rather than esata. I'm speaking from experience when I say esata is flaky.

I've had nothing but problems with it so far. I've gotten it functional but it was far from nice.

The PCI -> eSATA -> SATA Multiplier -> HDDs seems like a good concept in theory, in practice it was a pain in the rear end.

Some PCI cards have eSATA controllers that don't understand multipliers and it took me 3 cards to find one that actually worked. I also am still (honestly haven't tried that much) trying to prevent my eSATA drives to be the primary boot drive. So I have to boot my computer without the enclosure turned on, then turn it on after it has successfully booted.

I wanted DAS storage though so I could start to play with and write my own management software for fun. So, gigabit was out for me.

# ? Jul 13, 2010 03:41

Zhentar: Sep 28, 2003; Brilliant Master Genius

Is there any way I can make ZFS favor one vdev over another? I'm currently stuck with a craptacular SATA controller for one of my RAID-Z groups that will frequently crap out briefly under heavy IO.

# ? Jul 13, 2010 05:42

rockarocka: Dec 8, 2003

I'm looking to expand my storage at the moment and want to actually get something suitable (currently just have a bunch of individual drives attached to a server).

It seems that there is a general consensus that the Synology DS410j is one of the better value cheaper brand of NAS, but I have a couple of questions regarding them and RAID in general. I currently have 1x1.5TB and 1x2TB and plan to pick up another 2TB drive along side a NAS.

1) I'm guessing that with that setup I would be hitting 3TB with a RAID5? Would this be recommended?

2) 3TB is fine for me at the moment, but I'd really like to have it set up sufficiently for future expansion. With RAID 5 I have gotten the impression that adding an extra drive is as simple as just adding it to the array? I'd mostly like to make it so that, as more space is required, I can just continue to add volumes, and eventually filter out the 1.5TB to max it out at 6TB. This is what was previously drawing me towards a Drobo.

3) With these enclosures, is it possible to set the drives up as individual volumes?

4) Also, I'm guessing that these NASs won't support drives larger than 2TB when they become available?

Edit: One more... 5) Do these work nicely with Macs?

rockarocka fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Jul 13, 2010

# ? Jul 13, 2010 12:42

what is this: Sep 11, 2001; it is a lemur

Synology devices work great with Macs, Windows PCS, and linux/freebsd.

Most NAS devices are "software" RAID using a custom linux/freebsd stack, so I'd venture to say that vendors will release "firmware" (ie operating system software) updates that address the issue for free.

I put software RAID in quotes because fundamentally all RAID is, in a sense, software RAID. In this case there is no dedicated hardware running the software however, the same processor handles network tasks and RAID parity calculations.

# ? Jul 13, 2010 17:36

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

what is this posted:

I put software RAID in quotes because fundamentally all RAID is, in a sense, software RAID. In this case there is no dedicated hardware running the software however, the same processor handles network tasks and RAID parity calculations.

Hardware RAID cards bring more to the table than just offloading the parity calculations. They are one more piece in the end to end error detection you find in enterprise gear, and they also bring battery backed (usually, at least) cache to safely accelerate write operations. Saying all raid is software is like saying all routing is done in software, because ultimately it is, but it's very disingenuous.

# ? Jul 13, 2010 23:15

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

ATLbeer posted:

Thread needs more pictures

14 drives with sizes ranging from 250GB to 2TB for a total of ~17TB in a WHS.

# ? Jul 13, 2010 23:42

crm: Oct 24, 2004

that makes me warm and fuzzy.

# ? Jul 14, 2010 03:43

PopeOnARope: Jul 23, 2007; Hey! Quit touching my junk!

Thermopyle posted:

14 drives with sizes ranging from 250GB to 2TB for a total of ~17TB in a WHS.

I really like that case. Anybody want to give / sell me one cheap in London, Ontario?

# ? Jul 14, 2010 03:46

heeebrew: Sep 6, 2007; Weed smokin', joint tokin', fake Jew of the Weed thread

So my dad just bought a Seagate BlackArmor 1TB 110 NAS device and wants to know whether he should keep it or not for our home network. I can't find a reputable review on it anywhere. We need it to back up about 8 windows PCs, it comes with Seagate's version of Acronis's Trueimage, and it would be nice to be able to store media as well as certain documents on it and stream it or simply be able to download via FTP. I'm new to the NAS/Server scene. Can I install Linux or WHS on this? I think it was $170 or so, is there a better value out there? Also, can I plug in a USB drive to expand the storage space or upgrade the HDD to a larger one in a while if needed?

# ? Jul 14, 2010 04:28

Falcon2001: Oct 10, 2004; Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.; Pillbug

So, I'm kind of stuck debating what to do here, and hopefully you guys can suggest something.

Right now I've got a dedicated file server (running Windows Server2k8) that handles a lot of my additional workload. It has all my file storage (with zero mirroring or backups right now), handles AirVideo and Orb Transcoding, torrents, and hosting of all media/etc. My desktop PC has an 80 GB SSD and I offload as much as possible to the server. I work for a major software manufacturer and can get most any software I need cheaply and legally, so I'm not really worried about software costs.

However, the server's busted. 1 GB of RAM isn't showing up, I've lost one HDD already and miraculously got it online long enough to pull data off. I'm finally in a position to rebuild it, but with what?

Needs:
Some form of fault tolerance. Partial mirroring through WDS is acceptable.
Low cost, although I have some leeway. I'd prefer a lot cost/GB.
High software compatibility - I need at least AirVideo and Orb to work, and some torrent client.
At least 4 drives.

Unneeded:
Performance - not looking for super high data transfer rates.
100% uptime forever - I'm going to be doing periodic backups of important data to a fire safe and potentially to a PO box via platters, so I don't need enterprise level fault tolerance.
Crazy expandability

My ideas:

1. Set up a mildly powerful box with VMWare ESXi - my question here is how ESXi handles raids / other options. This would give me the ability to roll up whatever I need - a linux box for testing, BSD for NAS stuff, and win2k8 for airvideo, etc. This is my personal favorite option, but if I'm correct implies a full need for a hardware raid controller, probably running Raid-5 or Raid-1. (oh, I guess I need a recommendation for a drive controller.)

2. Run Windows Home Server and use the WFS pseudo-drive spanning tech it has and set up mirroring for important files.

3. Just set up a traditional NAS using BSD or what have you.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Jul 14, 2010

# ? Jul 14, 2010 09:44

dj_pain: Mar 28, 2005

Falcon2001 posted:

1. Set up a mildly powerful box with VMWare ESXi - my question here is how ESXi handles raids / other options. This would give me the ability to roll up whatever I need - a linux box for testing, BSD for NAS stuff, and win2k8 for airvideo, etc. This is my personal favorite option, but if I'm correct implies a full need for a hardware raid controller, probably running Raid-5.

This is the best option. Once you have a OS setup for your raid and with and setup raw device mapping to your hard drives you can pretty much do what ever you want.

# ? Jul 14, 2010 10:16

Falcon2001: Oct 10, 2004; Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.; Pillbug

dj_pain posted:

This is the best option. Once you have a OS setup for your raid and with and setup raw device mapping to your hard drives you can pretty much do what ever you want.

Question I edited in briefly after you replied: given a cost comparison, should I go with Raid-1 or Raid-5? From what I understand, it's a lot easier to handle Raid-1 on a cheap controller card with mediocre drives, right?

# ? Jul 14, 2010 10:35

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# ? May 23, 2024 12:21

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

Anyone know of some cheap tape drives or disk drives to backup a Windows 7 Pro file server for offsite storage?

# ? Jul 14, 2010 12:14

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

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