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[Z0001]

Hi

I am planning to build a hifi form factor hardware NAS using Addonics port multipliers and their NAS adapter all housed in a large streacom case:

A pair of this PM/NAS combo

2 of these port multiplier cards with 5x 3.5" HDD in raid5 on each card
http://www.addonics.com/products/ad5hpmsxa.php

To one of these NAS adapter cards connected by 2 sata-esata cables
http://www.addonics.com/products/nas4rm.php

Housed in this
http://www.streacom.com/products/f12c-chassis/

I'm exploring how the f12c can be modded to accommodate the HDDs, cards and PSU given there will be no mobo.

Has anyone used any of these products and have an experiences?

I then plan to build a HTPC in one of these
http://www.streacom.com/products/fc10-alpha-fanless-chassis/

But I'm less sure of appropriate HTPC hardware although I'd like to include an ODD, a mobo with M.2 for the OS system, a graphics card to play 3D, and upscale SD content, and a 2.5" SSD for audio files.

Any thoughts?
Z

[blgentry]

Just some general thoughts, which may or may not apply to you:

I wouldn't house a NAS in my home entertainment rack.  It's likely to need cooling, which means fans.  So closed racks are out unless they have active cooling.  Which means noise.  Which you don't want in a home entertainment rack.  Unless it's hidden away in a closet or something.  With an open rack you still have fan noise, so it's the same thing:  It needs to be somewhere where it won't bother the people watching/listening.

As far as NAS goes, it has great benefits, but one big consideration:  How do you back it up?  If you have 24 TB of usable RAID5 space, where will you back it up to?  RAID controllers make drive failure way worse because, any problem with the controller which contaminates the drives potentially means that ALL drives are useless.  Same thing with a double disk failure.  It means the whole RAID set is trash.

For that reason, I'm trying as hard as possible to maintain a one to one backup system with my large drives.  Maintaining a single large drive is best, if your collection will fit on it.  Then just have another identical sized drive to run backups to.  If your collection won't fit on one drive, use two and have two backup drives.  Keep adding as you go along.  But what really should happen is that drive sizes grow too, so you can eventually replace two drives with one and be back to a single drive for the whole collection.

Or if you must, maintain a second RAID array somewhere and do backups from array to array.  This in itself is expensive and problematic, but it's certainly possible.

Just some thoughts.

Brian.

[Z0001]

Thanks Brian.

So if not a raid, and if the disks are external ( say in basement) then what is their home? Is it a Windows based OS? And how do I manage a current location library of 12 disks? Do you suggest some sort of pooling software? And would this be left on 24/7?

Appreciate your thoughts
Z

[mwillems]

I personally think that RAID is a very poor idea for home pools unless you need the added performance that striped RAID can offer for some reason.  Redundant RAID creates the illusion of safety, but when you add in the fragility of RAID in general, I question whether there's any real data safety benefit at all.  "RAID is not a backup" is a mantra for a reason.  Redundant RAID is primarily designed for reliability, i.e. systems that need to be up 24/7 and can't tolerate the downtime it would take to restore from backup.  If your system could be down for long enough to restore a backup of a disk (let's say overnight) and no one would notice, I'm not sure that redundant RAID would be a net benefit you.

In any case you definitely don't need to use RAID to pool disks; *nix OSes have lots of drive pooling tools, but there are several for windows too.  You would need an OS, but most Unix-like's are free, and there are even special purpose distributions designed to make turnkey NAS systems (e.g. FreeNAS).  But with most drive pooling solutions, losing one disk (or one more than parity) means losing the whole pool.  So, as Brian noted, keeping regular backups and using the smallest possible number of disks is the best strategy because increasing the number of drives in a pool increases the chances of failure dramatically.  For example, in a no parity case, if one drive has a 2% chance of failure per year, five such drives in a pool each have an independent 2% chance and if any one fails the whole pool fails, so your annual failure rate pushes closer to 10%.  Parity improves the picture, but it also adds more drives that could fail, and additional failure modes.  So if you can buy one 8TB drive instead of 4 2TB drives, you should do that if at all possible, and generally buy the smallest number of drives that will fit your data.  That also leaves you room to grow into your case as time passes (although HDD sizes are generally growing faster than my media collection FWIW).  

I built my own NAS using a low power celeron processor integrated with a mini-ITX motherboard (I used this OOS one, but there are plenty more in the same class at a similar price: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138393).  The whole system (including the HDDs) uses less than 10W on average (measured at the wall running 24/7 over a period of months).  I run Linux on it, and use LVM to pool two 8TB disks.  Because I'm using a small number of HDD's it fits in a pretty small case which I keep in a closet. I then backup periodically to another small case using the same processor and a pool of 4 older smaller drives (as I keep needing more capacity, I replace older smaller disks with larger ones, so the older disks become the backup disks).

[Z0001]

This is all a great help to me. Thanks. So I need a lite weight second pc. I could put this in the basement which is under the lounge room so connecting by Ethernet is OK.

Is there any reason to have a separate back up machine or should I just get a big enough case and have all the separate disks in there?

Also, by keeping separate drives I am already running out of drive letters in Windows. Is there a solution to this?

Many thanks
Z

[mattkhan]

You may want to look at unraid. It is a pretty simple nas solution that takes relatively little setup to get a nas working that be managed and expanded easily. You want logical drives like "films" or "music" rather than addressing specific disks as windows drives, this is called user shares in unraid.

I don't think there is anything unique in unraid btw, you can certainly roll all this yourself. Just depends on how much effort you want to put in and what your requirements are.

[blgentry]

So if not a raid, and if the disks are external ( say in basement) then what is their home? Is it a Windows based OS?

It depends on your intended use.  You might do external drives directly attached to your HTPC.  If that takes up too much space or is too noisy, you could use a NAS box of some sort.  I don't have direct experience with FreeNAS or any of the other DIY solutions.  Though I hear some of them are good.

My main idea in all of this is to keep it simple at every step.

And how do I manage a current location library of 12 disks? Do you suggest some sort of pooling software?

That's a lot of disks!  If it were me, I would be looking to move the collection to the smallest number of disks possible with (at least) two considerations:

1.  Keeping 10 - 20% free on all drives.
2.  Anticipating growth.  If I expect to grow my collection, I'd try to buy drives large enough to account for that growth.  If possible.

The good news is that MC can handle a collection that's spread out among many disks pretty easily.  It just becomes a bit of a hassle to try to figure out which disk(s) have free space on them.  I would probably approach this problem by filling each disk to it's intended capacity (usable space -10%).  That way any additions go to the last disk which still has space left on it.

Pooling software is something I'm familiar with, but I'm not sure what the reliability of various systems is.  So, as a "keep it simple" measure, I would avoid them until doing enough research to be really sure about what happens when there are drive failures.  Also research how often these systems cause loss of all data in the pool.  I wouldn't do it at all until I was really sure.

And would this be left on 24/7?

This is a hard one.  The spin up and spin down of disks is bad for them.  Disks that run all the time generally last longer.  But that's ONLY if they are adequately cooled.  For many years consumer drives ran "too hot", mainly in external enclosures.  So manufacturers started adding spin down to the external boxes to keep the drives off when they weren't being used.  This seems to mostly have worked pretty well.  My personal experience with external drives has been pretty good over the past 5 years.  I've lost one of 5 drives in that time.  The oldest drive is now at least 8 years old.

So it's a crap shoot.  The old advice is: "all computers and drives last longer when left on 24/7".  But drives are a high heat device, so it makes that advice harder to follow unless the drives are in enterprise class enclosures with great cooling.

I personally think you could go either way with externals, since they will probably be doing "auto power" internally and shut the drives down when not in use for a while.

Again, if I were you, my first thoughts would be towards minimizing my number of physical drives and, at the same time, getting a backup strategy going ASAP.  12 drives have a pretty high probability of one of them failing.

Good luck!

Brian.

[mwillems]

Also, by keeping separate drives I am already running out of drive letters in Windows. Is there a solution to this?

Drive pooling software is a solution; FreeNAS or UNRAID can handle that if you want something turnkey; if you're installing an OS yourself there are half a dozen different drive pooling solutions depending on the OS.  I use lvm for pooling (because it's only two large disks), and have all my media shared under one windows drive letter.

As Brian noted, drive pooling can be more fragile than having everything on separate disks, but it's more convenient.  If you have good backups and a small number of disks in the pool, it's not as big of an issue.

This is a hard one.  The spin up and spin down of disks is bad for them.  Disks that run all the time generally last longer.  But that's ONLY if they are adequately cooled.  For many years consumer drives ran "too hot", mainly in external enclosures.  So manufacturers started adding spin down to the external boxes to keep the drives off when they weren't being used. 
[...]
So it's a crap shoot.  The old advice is: "all computers and drives last longer when left on 24/7".  But drives are a high heat device, so it makes that advice harder to follow unless the drives are in enterprise class enclosures with great cooling.

I personally think you could go either way with externals, since they will probably be doing "auto power" internally and shut the drives down when not in use for a while.

Just to add on to what Brian's saying here: you will maximize the lifetime of the drives if they don't spin down (unless you often don't use them for several days at a time).  The wear and tear of starting and stopping frequently is often more significant than the wear and tear of continuing to spin. 

Heat can be an issue, especially with external drives, but: if you follow Brian's and my advice and reduce the number of disks to a much smaller number, heat won't be an issue anymore.  A conventional home PC case easily has enough cooling to keep 5 3.5" disks in the sweet spot for temperature. How do I know?  Because it's trivial to monitor the temperature of disks, and all of my computers and my NAS are set to track the data.  I also have the NAS setup to E-mail me if the temps ever get over a certain critical threshold.  At various times since I setup my NAS (almost two years ago), I've had four or five drives in it, and my temperatures have always been fine.  In fact, now that I'm down to two drives, the drives were actually staying too cool in the winter (google's data shows drive failure increasing below 25C), so I've had to adjust the airflow in the case.

Which is a long way around to:  you should monitor your drive temperatures once you set this up, at least long enough to satisfy yourself that your proposed cooling solution and location are adequate.  Reducing the number of disks will help.  If you're trying to pack 12 disks in, you need to consider both enhancing your cooling solution and how to deal with the vibration which can be quite significant with that many drives and can cause data corruption and drive failure (some drives are designed to better deal with vibration from large NAS units, but you'll pay a premium for them).

[Z0001]

You may want to look at unraid. It is a pretty simple nas solution that takes relatively little setup to get a nas working that be managed and expanded easily.

From a brief read of the unraid site it looks interesting. One question: do I have to start with new HDDs, format them and then copy over my data, or can I add my HDDs with their data straight into unraid?

[mattkhan]

From a brief read of the unraid site it looks interesting. One question: do I have to start with new HDDs, format them and then copy over my data, or can I add my HDDs with their data straight into unraid?

you can't just load your existing HDDs, drives have to be formatted with a specific signature on load. There are various threads on their forum discussing strategies for loading data into an unraid box, best approach does depend on what you're starting with. It does make it a good opportunity to consolidate a few drives though, for example you could buy 2 big HDDs and set one as parity and one as a 1st data drive then start loading up your smaller disks onto that larger drive. Once you have 1 existing disk free then you can load into the array in parallel to the ongoing data load from your other drives.

[Z0001]

I guess the remaining question is what is the real benefit of unraid if  backup is needed anyway? Why not just backup from HDDs on the LAN? Question is then what is an affordable way to get the data on the LAN? Enclosure, NAS adapter, mobo/OS or hardware solution?

[mattkhan]

I guess the remaining question is what is the real benefit of unraid if  backup is needed anyway? Why not just backup from HDDs on the LAN? Question is then what is an affordable way to get the data on the LAN? Enclosure, NAS adapter, mobo/OS or hardware solution?

unraid is a turnkey NAS that can use commodity hardware and has a JBOD like approach to the disks you use (and where the underlying disk is readable outside of the array). It's a pretty convenient feature set for a home NAS IMV.

[bhampster]

My own solution so far is this -

I just use actual NAS units and NAS drives. I have 4 Lenovo IX-300D units and I got them cheap from various sources including Ebay. (On average each of these cost about $120 so it's a lot cheaper than DIY.) I stuffed all 4 with 4x4TB NAS drives and I run Raid 5. (Each of the NAS units run Raid 5 ... it's not like the entire pool shares one parity drive... just to clarify)

I keep them running all the time but let them spin down when in-active ... I sometimes go days without accessing any of them ... If I watch it's often one movie per day so in that case only 1 of the 4 units spins up.

Once (so far) a HD failed... I swapped it with a replacement and after the Raid re-built all was like new.

I still have the (mostly Blu Ray) discs as backup.

Just stating my solution... it's a lot like what Kaliedesope vaults use... it works for me ... but I do sometimes wonder if there is a better way.

=Brian