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[Daydream]

I've run out of space. The horror. For the nth time. The nightmare. So I thought to build something else. Observe how the word server is carefully avoided. I guess the whole thing can become one at some point but I'm not aiming for it from the beginning.

Giving a nod to other great server builds (high 5 Ben! ) from which I've learned lots of stuff, this thing I'm trying to put together it's by far and wide not in the same category. Different needs, different solutions. Some of them way crazy and not what one would consider standard practice.

So here's what I got:

- Case: Norco 4220. $290, mwave.com, with coupons (always watch for coupons) + S&H. 20 bays, only 5 data connections (SAS), way less cables to manage.
- Drives: err, I lost track. 17-18 HDDs of various sizes and brands, from Maxtor 300GB to 2TB WD green. The thoughts here: everything has to get situated once and for all, if I see drives connected the crazy way (read a mess of small external enclosures) I'm gonna flip. That amounts to 17-18-20TB these days, something in that range. The smallest will be replaced later as I get my hands on more 2TB drives. All of these I already had, no money spent here. These will be the "array" drives although there will... and there won't be an array
- boot drive: Crucial CT64M225 2.5" 64GB SSD. This I also had, it's like $234 at Newegg. Note: the people over here don't praise enough SSD coupled with MC. I'll post a video sometimes soon, showcasing mad-fast scrolling and lossless 1080p video capturing.
- HBAs: 2x Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-Port SAS/SATA. $198.98, with coupons, superbiiz.com
- the rest of the build, CPU, motherboard, memory, PSU, video card - I'll use what I have. This thing will replace my desktop (gasp!). If you were doubting the previous hints, yes here is where it starts the real fun. So what will go in is a AMD Phenom X4 9950 BE, 8GB DDR2 RAM, ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe Mobo, 2 ATI video cards of whatever slimmer design I can find around the house, one 4xxx series, one 5xxx; nothing powerful, I don't really play games. I said slimmer 'cause the 2 video cards and the 2 HBA will have to fit together on the 4 PCI-E slots. PSU - COOLER MASTER Silent Pro 700W, if it can't deal with the spike at startup I'll get another.
- Optical drives: I'm undecided how many to hook up or if it works (never tried with this mobo). Main idea is that the drives will be external and attached to the computer desk in supremely convenient position(s). If I can hook more than one via an external esata hub, remains to be determined.
- 4 SFF 8087 SAS cables and 1 reverse breakout cable to connect the 5 SAS ports on the Norco, to the 4 ports on the HBAs and one to 4 SATA ports on the mobo.

Win7 Ultimate will be the umbrella over everything.

The... well, the array. Well the array will be built on the principle of "I wanna have my cake and eat it too". Meaning I wanna have my individual drives AND their combined size and contiguous space (but not their combined speed) at the same time. Something like smart JBOD. The drives will obviously be set up with mounting points. The "array" will be X:\ or something. A file will never be split between HDDs. If a file cannot be copied on any HDD because each one individually doesn't have enough free space, an "array full" message will be returned. If a hdd fails, just that HDD fails. You can reinitialize the array without it at any time. The RAID protection should I choose to add it (as much or as less as I want) will be a snapshot RAID.

This is FlexRAID and FlexRAID-View.

Risks? In theory huge. This technology has just been released like yesterday (well, some weeks ago). In practice - none (for me). Those drives will go in even if I have to deal with the mounting points alone. Also it's a lot of fun. I already pointed MC to scan my X drive (currently made up of drives connected in the most... abracadabra way). Everything went flawless.

Other thoughts. This is where is getting really crazy. I'm aiming to make this a living room device. No heart-attacks? Ok, moving on. If you look at the Norco it's not really bigger than a standard big tower desktop. The 80mm 4-fan bracket that cools the drives will be replaced with a custom one that holds 3 120mm fans. It's like $60 a custom bracket. For the fans I'm looking at Noctua NF-P12-1300 - $22.29 one. If you know something else, please suggest.
It's not gonna be completely quiet, but within my tolerance. And my movies are pretty loud .

I'm expecting to start working on it over the weekend.

[glynor]

I love my Noctua fans and heatsinks.

One question... Why not throw all of those drives in a Drobo, and have some good data redundancy?  You could get the Drobo Pro and install up to 8 drives in it.  As you get new ones, you can swap them out seamlessly.  Also, since the Drobo Pro can use iSCSI, you can keep the drobo and all of those drives in a closet or in another room, and just run Cat 5e over to the PC serving/using the drives.

Granted... There is a price for this, but if you are building a file server with that much storage, you will NEED some redundancy.

Product Web Site: http://www.drobo.com/products/drobopro/

Recent Review: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=792

[Daydream]

8 drives are not gonna cut it. I already have an external case that take 8 drives (Rosewill, and does raid-5) but even if I fill it with the biggest drives I have it's not enough. With the Norco this will get in time to 40TB (20 x 2TB). These are all movies. A snapshot RAID can be scheduled, once a day once every 3 days, whatever. I can set one parity, double, tripple, as much as I want (or have space for) till I mirror the content. If I lose something I lose only what I ripped between the last snapshot and current. While I'm certainly a movie buff I don't rip that much every single day.

And obviously I'm totally against the kind of money and limitations and constant pressure (what if more than X drives fail around the same time) a true RAID solution implies. To rebuild a RAID 5 or 6 arrays made of 2TB drives it's gonna take a small eternity. I do not run this like an enterprise where all these details fall into an acceptable pattern or maintenance and spending that can be dealt with in the background. If a drive fails for me the FlexRAID View is shut down, drive pulled, the View is started again, array is up again, minus that drive. 15 seconds. Then if I plug in a replacement drive I can use the snapshot RAID (which BTW can be stored an anything - a pool of old drives, blu-ray discs, flash drives, whatever) and star recovering missing data.

It is very different than the general perception of RAID. It is not an enterprise solution, it is not recommended for databases and critical transaction environments. But I believe (at my own risk) that is a solution that covers better the home requirements. And it's free, for unlimited no. of drives.

[gappie]

that flexraid stuff sound like a good solution. for me it would be. ill check into it for when im up to it. setup looks nice btw.

 
gab

[newsposter]

a) It is one thing to 'build' a raid set from some point-and-click cookbook instructions.

b) It's quite another to be able to successfully recover data from a broken raid set.

Unless you are prepared to invest the time to learn how to do b), it makes absolutely NO SENSE to invest the time to do a).

[fitbrit]

I'm running 16 drives, soon to be 20, flawlessly from unRAID. It's been about two years now. A few drives have failed, but I've never lost data due to unRAID's unique and flexible system. FlexRAID runs snapshot parity, which means a lot of disk wear and tear everytime you build parity to protect yourself. UnRAID builds parity on the fly; the downside is that you cannot easily run other software on that machine- it's just a dedicated storage server like a DROBO etc. FlexRAID Live may be the ideal solution, as it will be FlexRAID but with live parity building like unRAID. It's been mentioned for over a year now, but is still vaporware. I doubt I'll switch though as I'm just that happy with unRAID.

[Daydream]

UnRaid is not free, it has a hardware compatibility list and... what's the transfer speed out of that box? I may be biased but when I hear 20-25MB I kind of start walking in the opposite direction. There's no perfect solution .

[fitbrit]

The hardware compatibility list was relevant back in the day when not all mobos could boot off USB. It's not maintained currently because it's a non-issue. Some hardware, however, isn't compatible until the latest Linux kernels add support for them, such as different flavours of SATA cards etc., but much of that is about to change in the upcoming releases.
There is no issue with read speed. Indeed, in tests people have had four video streams concurrently - from a missing drive - i.e. UnRAID was calculating the data on the fly using parity. There is a write speed bottleneck in that parity needs to be written, so speeds of 30 MBps are common. However, even that is a non-issue with the cache drive; this drive is written to at full speed, and then it transfers the data t the protected array at a predetermined time, e.g. overnight.

As for not being free, you are totally correct. It's still a lot cheaper than prebuilt NAS devices, especially if you want to go to high drive numbers e.g. 16-20. Soon there will be 24 drive support too. It's not the perfect solution, but it really does work well and is incredibly simple to set up.