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teamdest
Jul 1, 2007

TheChipmunk posted:

And also a rather bad question for RAID-5: Lets say I have two 250gig hard drives and I put them in RAID 5 configuration. Do I see 500Gigs available? Or do I only see 250? Seeing 500gigs available blows my mind if its true.
(I am obviously not speaking of ACTUAL availability but is this theoretically sound?)

No. Raid 5 requires same-sized hard drives, and requires 3 or more. If you have 3 250GB drives, you get 500GB space. 4 250GB drives = 750GB space. you "lose" one drive's worth of capacity, but you gain one drives worth of failure protection. get it?

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Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



Toiletbrush posted:

What I was saying is that, if you were to use a Solaris build with the new revision of the new installer, that you should create a seperate pool on the seperate disk you ran your system on. It'll not be redundant, but you get the advantages of pooled storage making the fixed slices crap go away, and Snap Upgrade, that'll employ snapshots and clones magic to update your system during regular operation (and make it available on reboot). The pool would be seperate from your data pool.

I understand now. I actually named the pool 'pool' because I was being extra clever that day and so I was probably tripping on terminology.

quote:

On boot, it's decided whether it loads the 32bit or 64bit kernel. The userland is mainly 32bit, but ships 64bit versions of most libraries. Components like Xorg are available in both versions, which version's loaded is decided with isaexec magic.

I get that, but I'd much rather just decide for it :)

quote:

That's strange. I figured that with the old ATA chips, the situation is similar to SATA's AHCI, that there's a generic way to operate them.

Yeah, I get 'that's strange' a lot. I really need to spend some time on their forums and figure out if the poo poo I'm dealing with is hardware related or if I'm just having super weird software issues.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

TheChipmunk posted:

Is OpenSolaris a respectable option for ZFS and homebrew NAS boxes? (By NAS I mean old computer
You do know that ZFS originates out of (Open)Solaris?

--edit: What I'm saying is that if you want best stability for ZFS, you should install the turf it's born on. To check if all your hardware's supported, download the Project Indiana preview from opensolaris.org. It's an installable LiveCD. There's an OpenSolaris distro called NexentaStor specialized for NAS crap, comes with a Web UI.

Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Mar 23, 2008

stephenm00
Jun 28, 2006
Fixed

stephenm00 fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Apr 21, 2017

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

teamdest posted:

No. Raid 5 requires same-sized hard drives, and requires 3 or more.

Close! Most redundant raid implementations merely use the smallest sized drive as your size for all other disks. Meaning, 250/250/500gig RAID5 = 500gigs of available space. If you're doing software raid, you may even be able to carve off the remaining 250gigs from that last disk. But thats a big MAYBE.

TheChipmunk
Sep 29, 2003

Eschew Obfuscation

Toiletbrush posted:

You do know that ZFS originates out of (Open)Solaris?

--edit: What I'm saying is that if you want best stability for ZFS, you should install the turf it's born on. To check if all your hardware's supported, download the Project Indiana preview from opensolaris.org. It's an installable LiveCD. There's an OpenSolaris distro called NexentaStor specialized for NAS crap, comes with a Web UI.

Yeah, I knew it originated with Solaris but I thought Solaris was used more for the corporate world and might be overkill for a homebrew situation where I only have a couple drives.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
Works just fine as desktop OS here. On the surface, it's just the same as Linux. GNOME, Compiz, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc blahblah. Memory footprint isn't too different either. You just don't have nice and cosy package management a la Ubuntu. That's coming with Project Indiana, give it at least another 6 months.

teamdest
Jul 1, 2007

H110Hawk posted:

Close! Most redundant raid implementations merely use the smallest sized drive as your size for all other disks. Meaning, 250/250/500gig RAID5 = 500gigs of available space. If you're doing software raid, you may even be able to carve off the remaining 250gigs from that last disk. But thats a big MAYBE.

technically correct, sorry. however you're a fool to use a 250 with 2 500's, due to space loss.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

teamdest posted:

technically correct, sorry. however you're a fool to use a 250 with 2 500's, due to space loss.

Or you use a controller that allows you to swap the 250 with a 500 at a later date, and rebuild to a larger physical array. Then, using something along the lines of gparted, expand your partition and filesystem to encompass the new free space. Just trying to keep the record straight, that it is technically possible, though likely silly.

I believe PERC controllers do this, based upon what I've read on these forums. NetApp's do not appear to, at least not in OnTAP 6, though I have never done a complete replacement cycle. Perhaps I shall try that in the coming weeks.

teamdest
Jul 1, 2007
I think the PERC 5's do it dynamically though I'd prefer not to test it :)

it is pretty silly though. I guess in budget-constraint systems it's pretty nice.

Saukkis
May 16, 2003

Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

teamdest posted:

technically correct, sorry. however you're a fool to use a 250 with 2 500's, due to space loss.
Not a big issue with software RAID. Create a RAID5 from three 250 GB partitions and RAID1 from the remaining two 250 GB. You lose 250 GB compared to three 500 GB drive, but it's better than using the 500 GB drives as RAID1 and keeping the 250 GB drive standalone.

stuph
Aug 31, 2004

donkey punching my way to the top
I just need a cheap PCI (not PCIe) SATA (or SATA2) card with 2 ports to throw into a WHS box for now - what's the cheapest thing out there I can get that's not going to crap itself if I look at it funny? Network speeds really don't bother me that much, I'm mostly just streaming music and video across the network - at this point, backups are incremental and don't really take up much space at all. I just need more SATA ports.

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV - the 4-port guy is perfect. Thanks much!

stuph fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Mar 25, 2008

CrazyLittle
Sep 11, 2001





Clapping Larry

stuph posted:

I just need a cheap PCI (not PCIe) SATA (or SATA2) card with 2 ports to throw into a WHS box for now - what's the cheapest thing out there I can get that's not going to crap itself if I look at it funny? I just need more SATA ports.

$13 SYBA SD-SATA150R PCI SATA Controller Card - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124006
specs: http://www.syba.com/Product/Info/Id/39
Silicon Image SIL 3112 host controller chip

$19 SYBA SD-SATA-4P PCI SATA Controller Card - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124020
specs: http://www.syba.com/Product/Info/Id/34
Silicon Image SIL 3114 host controller chip

kri kri
Jul 18, 2007

CrazyLittle posted:

$13 SYBA SD-SATA150R PCI SATA Controller Card - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124006
specs: http://www.syba.com/Product/Info/Id/39
Silicon Image SIL 3112 host controller chip

$19 SYBA SD-SATA-4P PCI SATA Controller Card - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124020
specs: http://www.syba.com/Product/Info/Id/34
Silicon Image SIL 3114 host controller chip

Is it worth getting 3Gbps cards?

CrazyLittle
Sep 11, 2001





Clapping Larry

kri kri posted:

Is it worth getting 3Gbps cards?

Well no not really, because individual hard disks don't saturate SATA channels right now anyways, and especially not if "Network speeds really don't bother me that much". I picked those cards out simply because they have what's probably one of the most common SATA controller chips out there on the market. He probably won't even need the driver disk if he's running XP Pro SP2 or Vista.

It might be different if you're doing something like that internal RAID-cage device where it's 5 drives running together over the same SATA port.

napking
Aug 31, 2003
awesome thread and it's great to see so much opensolaris/zfs talk. i've been running opensolaris for the past few months now in my diy nas amd64 box. i'm running the 1/2008 release (snv81?) now because of the cifs server release. it's been pretty rock solid for the past two months. i installed azureus with remote web interface as a headless smf service.

the only thing that's missing in my build is something like twonkymedia to share videos to my xbox. i tried porting ushare but i really had no idea what i was doing. :(

Ethereal
Mar 8, 2003

napking posted:

awesome thread and it's great to see so much opensolaris/zfs talk. i've been running opensolaris for the past few months now in my diy nas amd64 box. i'm running the 1/2008 release (snv81?) now because of the cifs server release. it's been pretty rock solid for the past two months. i installed azureus with remote web interface as a headless smf service.

the only thing that's missing in my build is something like twonkymedia to share videos to my xbox. i tried porting ushare but i really had no idea what i was doing. :(

I can't wait for FreeNAS to support ZFS. It will be the perfect NAS solution with RAID-Z. http://freenas.blogspot.com/2008/03/actual-state-of-freenas-07.html

For RAID-Z, the minimum amount of drives is two correct?

stephenm00
Jun 28, 2006
Fixed

stephenm00 fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Apr 21, 2017

Sh1tF4ced
Oct 28, 2004

Funny, I don't remember any of this.
Does anyone know of a moderately priced rackmount server chasis with only 3.5 bays or only 5.25 bays? I was thinking something like this would be perfectly suited for a home nas.

CrazyLittle
Sep 11, 2001





Clapping Larry

Sh1tF4ced posted:

Does anyone know of a moderately priced rackmount server chasis with only 3.5 bays or only 5.25 bays? I was thinking something like this would be perfectly suited for a home nas.

The closest thing to what you're thinking of would be a CoolerMaster Stacker. Any rackmount NAS case worth looking at is over $400. Also you would be insane to run one of them in your house because they're extremely loud.

Here's a search no Newegg for all cases with 8 or more hot-swap trays:
big loving link

CrazyLittle fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Mar 28, 2008

Digitally Mastered
Jul 18, 2006
For Superior Picture and Sound
I am currently looking for some network storage and my search has mostly been coming up empty. My company runs VMWare Server and we currently store the virtual hard disks on the local disks of the virtualization servers. This makes migrating a VM from one server to another difficult and slow, so we would like to get a NAS/SAN box so we can store all of the files centrally.

Basically all I am finding are cheaper/low performance boxes (i.e. ReadyNAS and the like) or enterprise grade SANs/filers that cost an arm and a leg.
The few storage servers I have found in between these 2 extremes run Windows Storage Server which I would like to stay away from since I run a purely linux environment. Also, I am looking for a commercial product with support so that rules out DIY.

So I need about 2-3TB starting and need to be able to scale to as much as 5-8TB in the future. I need to be able to get decent throughput, even when a dozen or so VMs are hitting it at the same time. I have been looking for NAS over NFS but would not be opposed to iSCSI (probably with a software initiator to avoid special hardware). I would however like to avoid extra cabling, which rules out FC or external SCSI/SAS. Budget is around $5000, but I could flex some in either direction if needed.

If anyone could please point me in the right direction, I would be most grateful.


PS. Does anyone have experience with CoRAID.com or with the AoE protocol? It looks interesting and may suit our needs.

LoKout
Apr 2, 2003

Professional Fetus Taster
Enterprise NAS stuff is a little out of the scope of this thread, but to point you at something, we use NetApp (http://www.netapp.com/us/) storage at my work.

This is not something you want to implement on a roll-your-own box. Their boxes can do SAN/iSCSI/NFS and other solutions all on one device. The beauty is that they're easy to expand so if your company is forward-looking you can upgrade instead of replacing hardware. They also have cool features like auto backups, snapshots and a bunch of other stuff that I don't know too much about.

Sh1tF4ced
Oct 28, 2004

Funny, I don't remember any of this.

CrazyLittle posted:

The closest thing to what you're thinking of would be a CoolerMaster Stacker. Any rackmount NAS case worth looking at is over $400. Also you would be insane to run one of them in your house because they're extremely loud.

Here's a search no Newegg for all cases with 8 or more hot-swap trays:
big loving link

Wow, the stacker is almost perfect to what I was looking for, but why the hell is it $240? Yeah, I didn't even think of how loud it would be. I just want to fit as many hard drives in it as I possibly can without spending a ton of money, I don't really care if they're hot-swap.

Digitally Mastered
Jul 18, 2006
For Superior Picture and Sound

LoKout posted:

Enterprise NAS stuff is a little out of the scope of this thread, but to point you at something, we use NetApp (http://www.netapp.com/us/) storage at my work.

This is not something you want to implement on a roll-your-own box. Their boxes can do SAN/iSCSI/NFS and other solutions all on one device. The beauty is that they're easy to expand so if your company is forward-looking you can upgrade instead of replacing hardware. They also have cool features like auto backups, snapshots and a bunch of other stuff that I don't know too much about.

I've looked at NetApp, but most of what they provided is way above my budget. Do you think they are worth the cost? Have you had good success with the equipment?

Also, Sorry if this is out of the scope of this thread.

teamdest
Jul 1, 2007

Sh1tF4ced posted:

Wow, the stacker is almost perfect to what I was looking for, but why the hell is it $240? Yeah, I didn't even think of how loud it would be. I just want to fit as many hard drives in it as I possibly can without spending a ton of money, I don't really care if they're hot-swap.

I use a stacker for my NAS here in my dorm, and it's a great box, lots of space, even has wheels. It is, however, heavy as HELL, to the point of never lifting it.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

stephenm00 posted:

To implement ZFS on a nas, wouldn't that require a lot of ram and cpu?
CPU isn't an issue, unless you've a disk subsystem that can shove god knows how many MB/s. The default checksumming algoritm is pretty fast. If you resort to SHA256 hashes exclusively, there might be a problem, but still would require a decent throughput to turn the CPU into the bottleneck.

RAM isn't either, though the more RAM, the more disk cache and subsequently performance you get out of it. The ZFS cache does more than being a simple LRU caching. ZFS actively prefetches large chunks of data if it sees reason to (i.e. streaming applications or databases).

quote:

also could someone explain "you can't currently expand a VDEV's"
Every device, that includes mirror and RAID-Z pseudo-devices, is a virtual device. A RAID-Z array is a vdev, too. Due to the nature of how RAID-Z works, you can't just add a drive to it and quickly rearrange parity. Well, you could, but the process would be a huge undertaking and not really a sane idea either in the environment ZFS is targetting at (enterprise storage).

stephenm00
Jun 28, 2006
Fixed

stephenm00 fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Apr 21, 2017

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
Single disk expansions aren't possible, you'll have to add another array to the pool to increase it.

As for expansion getting implemented, it isn't as easy as with RAID-5, where you have to move mostly two stripes per row. Each ZFS file system block is spanned across all devices, because of that, stripe sizes are variable. Adding another drive, ZFS would have to comb through the whole data set and restripe ALL data. Quite dangerous.

Last this was brought up in the mailing list, there's stuff being added that would enable such a scenario. Whether it'll be implemented, remains to be seen.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

Digitally Mastered posted:

I've looked at NetApp, but most of what they provided is way above my budget. Do you think they are worth the cost? Have you had good success with the equipment?

New netapp is horribly overpriced, and they are slowly being pushed out of the market by things like ZFS, OnStor, BlueArc, etc. Used netapp is much more reasonable, and they still get awesome performance. By some accounts the 3000 series are actually lower performance than the 900 series for the same money. Only gotcha is the entire 900 series is past EOL, save maybe the 980.

Their hardware is very solid, however, and you will rarely if ever have a problem from which you cannot recover. ZFS has not had nearly as much real world vetting as WAFL.

If you're willing to put up with sales people, though, you can apparently get some pretty decent deals on the hardware. Just remember, the licensing for the software adds 100% to the cost, and then you have service contracts.

technoarch
Feb 16, 2005
Architect Supremo
great thread!

I skimmed the pages thus far and did not notice this new release from HP... its run on a flavor of linux and looks to be a decent alternative to WHS.

http://h71036.www7.hp.com/hho/cache/572544-0-0-225-121.html

Any thoughts on this as a decent NAS solution? I was thinking of ripping the 500gb HD out and replaceing w/ two 1tb drives mirrored.

King Nothing
Apr 26, 2005

Ray was on a stool when he glocked the cow.

technoarch posted:

great thread!

I skimmed the pages thus far and did not notice this new release from HP... its run on a flavor of linux and looks to be a decent alternative to WHS.

http://h71036.www7.hp.com/hho/cache/572544-0-0-225-121.html

Any thoughts on this as a decent NAS solution? I was thinking of ripping the 500gb HD out and replaceing w/ two 1tb drives mirrored.

I'd say the DNS-323 is better, although this has twice the RAM and the ability out of the box to run USB-attached drives. The DNS-323 is about $120 cheaper since it doesn't come with any drives, which may be better for you if you're planning on replacing the 500GB drive anyway. It also can act as a print server out of the box, which is pretty nice. The HP may have better included software, the only backup software the D-Link came with was a 30-day trial of something or other.

napking
Aug 31, 2003
is the readynas nv+ still regarded as the top of the line bee's knees?

tonelok
Sep 29, 2001

Hanukkah came early this year.

technoarch posted:

I skimmed the pages thus far and did not notice this new release from HP... its run on a flavor of linux and looks to be a decent alternative to WHS.

http://h71036.www7.hp.com/hho/cache/572544-0-0-225-121.html

Any thoughts on this as a decent NAS solution? I was thinking of ripping the 500gb HD out and replaceing w/ two 1tb drives mirrored.
It's apparently shipping tomorrow, according to Amazon, for $299.99 so reviews should pop up pretty fast (if they aren't already written).

I liked the Media Smart form factor (4x drives instead of the two of the Media Vault), but I'm gunshy about anything having to do with Windows Home Server.

Like King Nothing said, the DNS-323 is cheaper (unless you plan on using the 500GB drive somewhere else).

Since it runs on Linux, there should be people mucking around with it pretty quick, so we'll have an idea of what can be done with it.

technoarch
Feb 16, 2005
Architect Supremo

tonelok posted:

It's apparently shipping tomorrow, according to Amazon, for $299.99 so reviews should pop up pretty fast (if they aren't already written).

I liked the Media Smart form factor (4x drives instead of the two of the Media Vault), but I'm gunshy about anything having to do with Windows Home Server.

Like King Nothing said, the DNS-323 is cheaper (unless you plan on using the 500GB drive somewhere else).

Since it runs on Linux, there should be people mucking around with it pretty quick, so we'll have an idea of what can be done with it.

The thought was to take the 500gb drive and toss it in a USB enclosure and direct connect it to the HP as a 3rd line of defense backup solution for critial files. The other backup solution involves offsite storage. Ive looked at the Dlink unit and that is still an option for me. Thanks for the input.

CrazyLittle
Sep 11, 2001





Clapping Larry

napking posted:

is the readynas nv+ still regarded as the top of the line bee's knees?

It's a great device feature wise, but the power supplies are getting bad buzz, and the support from Netgear is lame.

flugle
Feb 26, 2004
I bitched until someone bought me an account

CrazyLittle posted:

It's a great device feature wise, but the power supplies are getting bad buzz, and the support from Netgear is lame.


Only the older revs (original releases of the NV) have power supply issues.

And I've found Netgear support to be pretty good - even though my unit was out of warranty, they quickly shipped me a replacement when I logged a call. You don't even need to have a problem with the power supply - mine was in the serial range of possible "bad" power supplies so they shipped one out as a proactive replacement.

King Nothing
Apr 26, 2005

Ray was on a stool when he glocked the cow.

technoarch posted:

The thought was to take the 500gb drive and toss it in a USB enclosure and direct connect it to the HP as a 3rd line of defense backup solution for critial files. The other backup solution involves offsite storage. Ive looked at the Dlink unit and that is still an option for me. Thanks for the input.

It's really easy to set up the DNS-323 to do rsync backups of one drive to the other, and you can weave that into an offsite backup solution very easily as well. I believe if you load debian on the DNS-323 you can connect USB drives to it as well, but I'm not 100% sure about that. Check the wiki link in my review.

teamdest
Jul 1, 2007
here's an interesting question:

I used LVM under Debian to create a Volume group, then logical volume on that volume group. then some bad poo poo happened, and I had to reinstall. I had consigned myself to the loss of what data was on this Logical Volume, but on attempting to rebuild it, i was greeted with "Can't Initialize Physical Volume /dev/hda of volume group a3p without -ff".

It had this error for all 4 of the disks I had planned to reinitialize. is there any way (since the metadata seems to be intact) to recover the array? all four disks are fine, the information regarding them has just been destroyed.

Saukkis
May 16, 2003

Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

teamdest posted:

here's an interesting question:

I used LVM under Debian to create a Volume group, then logical volume on that volume group. then some bad poo poo happened, and I had to reinstall. I had consigned myself to the loss of what data was on this Logical Volume, but on attempting to rebuild it, i was greeted with "Can't Initialize Physical Volume /dev/hda of volume group a3p without -ff".

It had this error for all 4 of the disks I had planned to reinitialize. is there any way (since the metadata seems to be intact) to recover the array? all four disks are fine, the information regarding them has just been destroyed.
What exactly have you done? Did you try commands like pvscan, vgscan, lvscan, vgimport?

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teamdest
Jul 1, 2007
The exact occurrence:

Built a virtual group out of a 120GB ATA HDD, 250GB ATA HDD, 480GB SCSI hardware array, and 500GB External USB drive. this was a very temporary array just meant to hold some data while doing a drive shuffle.

~90% of the way through the procedure, the USB hard drive got bumped, shutting it off and freaking the computer out in general. the bump-er (roommate) decided the proper response was to shut the whole server down. When it came back up, it could not load back into Debian, and after much futzing I decided "well, that data is gone, and it is sad, but I'd rather have this computer back online than sitting here while I try vainly to get Debian booting again" so I proceeded to reinstall Debian, set the first two arrays back up (hardware arrays) like normal, and then decided to just build the third array from the internal disks (which was the final plan anyway), however on running pvcreate it gave that error on the first three drives, and on plugging the fourth in, it gave the same error on all three.

Running pvscan tells me that it sees all three as part of a3p still, type lvm2, and running vgscan returns "Found volume group "a3p" using metadata type lvm2" so it seems promising that I can recover from this comedy of errors.

edit: after trying different google keywords, I've found my solution! I now have 3 arrays again and can make another attempt at this! sorry to bother ya!

teamdest fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Apr 1, 2008

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