Topic: Recommendations for Media Server / NAS

[OFOTD]

so any huge advantage to gigabite since the sb and wdtvl don't support it?

No advantage.  100MB is more pipe that you'd need for the biggest 1080 files or audio files.  The only time you'll see that difference are in large files transfers. 

[Gordon]

oops!  either you edited or I didn't keep reading

wouldn't I see dramatically faster transfers from pc to server?  both have gigabit lan.  when I was thinking about hard drive speed I wasn't realizing that the drive speed is MBps not mbps.  so it seems it would be way faster on the network to use gigabit. 


edit:  so looks like a gigabit switch is all I need.    found this info online

Just plug your router to the last port on the switch and you're good to go ... Don't plug any devices to the router, only the switch.

If you plug all clients into the gigabit switch, then all clients will communicate, and transmit data between each other at gigabit speeds.

This assumes you have gigabit NIC's in each client.

Of course when you go to access the internet, you will be reduced to the speed of your internet connection because it's slower. (as stated above, you're reduced to the slowest connection speed).

[spyder9]

I just bought and configured the QNAP TS-112.  Single bay is all I need.  Connect via eSata to my USB drive for 1 button backup.  USB drive then goes offsite.  Too easy. 

$179.00 at newegg.

http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=191

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

I just bought and configured the QNAP TS-112. 

Are you using the native UPNP server or did you install the twonkeymedia server (or is the native twonkey)?

[spyder9]

I just bought and configured the QNAP TS-112. 

Are you using the native UPNP server or did you install the twonkeymedia server (or is the native twonkey)?

Yes.  UPNP.  I'm a newbie for this stuff.  I'll eventually have it setup for wireless access around the house and web streaming from work.  Cat's ass!   

QNAP (ethernet) >  Lynksys wireless router (ethernet) > PC Win7 > J River Media Center 15 > HT Omega Claro > Benchmark DAC1 > KRK VXT4

Use WASAPI Event Style output on J River.  Win7 configured @ 24/192 output. 

Best sounding system I've ever had.  J. River makes it complete.  Big upgrade over Foobar2000.  FB2K sounds tinny compared to J. River.

[Gordon]

started building last night!  doa power supply     newegg is doing an advanced rma but still a pain in the ass!  I would have had it up and running today.  oh well I guess I'll do yard work instead. 

[rastasean]

freenas did pretty well in this list:
http://lifehacker.com/5162026/best-home-server-software

...extremely minimal distribution of FreeBSD. How minimal, you ask? You can run FreeNAS off a 32MB flash drive. Designed to be an absolutely skeletal operating system to maximize the resources devoted to storage FreeNAS is great for when you want a simple operating system that leaves every hard drive bay and disk platter wide open for file storage goodness.
FreeNAS's scant 96MB of RAM requirements.

Anyone use this as a server? I know rjp recommended/linked to it but not certain if he used it.

[rjp]

I tested FreeNAS out for a while, and, while it's great if you're using the box strictly for NAS purposes, I wanted something more general-purpose, even if that meant using a couple of drive slots for the OS instead of a USB stick. So, I installed OpenSolaris on the system. However, after Oracle took over Sun, they basically froze OpenSolaris in favor of the commercial Solaris product.

However, as Oracle was freezing OpenSolaris without telling anyone, some developers decided to continue work on the open code, and the Illumos and OpenIndiana projects have picked up the pieces. Upgrading from OpenSolaris to OI was seamless for me.

However, OpenSolaris and OI are extremely picky about hardware. Unless you're either a) running Sun hardware (or HP hardware known to be supported by Solaris), or b) willing to spend the time figuring out what motherboards/disk controllers/etc. work best, FreeBSD is more likely to support your hardware, if you want a ZFS-based file server.

Note also that even if you're a longtime Linux user, Solaris can be quite a culture shock. There's a lot to be said for a prepackaged appliance like FreeNAS.

My hardware setup:

• Asus M4A785-M motherboard
• AMD Athlon II X4 630 processor
• 4 GB unbuffered ECC RAM
• Intel SASUC8I eight-port PCIe X8 SAS/SATA controller
• SIIG 2-port PCIe X1 SATA controller
• lots of hard drives, and one SSD for cache

Between the six onboard SATA ports and the add-in cards, there are 16 SATA ports. All drives except the SSD are in Supermicro 5-slot hot-swap drive racks. The onboard ATI video isn't well-supported (you're limited to the VESA video driver), but since I use this as a server rather than a desktop, that's no big deal.

[rastasean]

I can always count on you for v e r y detailed reports on opensource information! Thanks so much, rjp.
From the little research I did do today, it sounded like the machine would be dedicated for freeNAS and I took it to mean that's why a lot of people used the CF cards to have freeNAS reside and not an entire hdd.
here's a comparison between 7 and 8: http://www.freenas.org/item/freenas-comparison-chart-2
The jump from 7 to 8 as far as requirements are unbelievable.

Thanks for the info on OI and Oracle. I do have a sun server sunfire x4100 with about 6 gigs of ram but the server is VERY noisy in addition to the other machines that are already on. I suppose installing OI may not be a bad idea, plus this x4100 has SAS drives.

The mobo you're using is the one my primary desktop has. I have had this mobo since February of last year and its been great. I like the fact that it has so many sata ports...only thee of mine are in use.
This machine you mentioned, is it also what asterisk runs on?

If I don't decide to go the freeNAS/OI way, do you have any other advice for a home NAS? On the link I sent, ubuntu server was the next highest and that's certainly a worthwhile possibility. Have you ever used the aforementioned Amahi?

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

I think I may have mentioned this previously but I'm still fiddling with it. Running my media server off of Server 2008 (overkill, but it was a free copy).

I just added this handy little program so I can stream all of my media to my PS3. Pretty easy to set up. Only issue I ran into was having to open up port 5001 to UDP and TCP traffic. Once I figured that out everything worked fine. Also took a minute to figure out that you have to play video files under "video" and audio files under "audio" on the PS3

http://www.ps3mediaserver.org/

Figured some of you might like it as well.

[rjp]

here's a comparison between 7 and 8: http://www.freenas.org/item/freenas-comparison-chart-2
The jump from 7 to 8 as far as requirements are unbelievable.

That's ZFS's fault. ZFS is very memory-hungry, especially so if you turn on deduplication.

Thanks for the info on OI and Oracle. I do have a sun server sunfire x4100 with about 6 gigs of ram but the server is VERY noisy in addition to the other machines that are already on. I suppose installing OI may not be a bad idea, plus this x4100 has SAS drives.

The mobo you're using is the one my primary desktop has. I have had this mobo since February of last year and its been great. I like the fact that it has so many sata ports...only thee of mine are in use.
This machine you mentioned, is it also what asterisk runs on?

Asterisk is running on an Intel Atom box with CentOS 5.

If I don't decide to go the freeNAS/OI way, do you have any other advice for a home NAS? On the link I sent, ubuntu server was the next highest and that's certainly a worthwhile possibility. Have you ever used the aforementioned Amahi?

I haven't tried Amahi. My OI server took the place of using my Ubuntu desktop in a server role.

[rastasean]

W-O-W, AMAZING.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGIwg6ye1gE&feature=related

I don't see why we tapers wouldn't want to implement this if you already have a raid system setup.

a linux alternative to zfs looks like btrfs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

Fedora 16 (late this year) will use it exclusively. http://digitizor.com/2011/06/09/fedora-16-btrfs/
butter fs may not be as extensive as zfs but it looks like these two file systems are breaking some ground.

[rjp]

Yeah, ZFS is pretty sweet... but always remember that any type of RAID is no substitute for backups. Also, it's certainly possible to screw up a ZFS setup (example: a storage pool split across multiple controllers in such a way that one controller failure toasts the whole pool). Another thing, ECC RAM is very important in the overall scheme of ensuring data integrity. If a RAM chip has a bit flip, corrupted data could be written to disk and checksummed - and then the corrupted data will be accurately re-read as corrupted data later.

One thing to note - fancy RAID controllers are counterproductive with ZFS, as it's a software RAID setup. Fortunately, the Intel SASUC8I (really a rebadged LSI controller) by default presents the drives as individual units.

I've never cared for hardware RAID in any case - even on Linux I've used the built in software RAID rather than hardware-based controllers. Hardware RAID has problems with vendor lock-in; if a controller fails, you have to replace it with (at least) the same manufacturer's controller, and likely the same model. Modern CPUs have no problems keeping up with the calculations needed for RAID - especially so when they're multi-core.

By the way, you can download Solaris 11 Express from Oracle for free - but the terms only specifically allow evaluation or development use. Oracle hasn't said (and probably won't say) anything about whether or not a home server qualifies as "evaluation" or not. On the other hand, it isn't time-limited and doesn't require activation. That being said, just to be safe, I'm sticking with OpenIndiana... but either system is even less noob-friendly than Linux.

[phanophish]

here's a comparison between 7 and 8: http://www.freenas.org/item/freenas-comparison-chart-2
The jump from 7 to 8 as far as requirements are unbelievable.

That's ZFS's fault. ZFS is very memory-hungry, especially so if you turn on deduplication.

So question regarding FreeNAS 8....

Looks like ZFS provides for the fault tolerance and recovery, and I see they specifically now support thin provisioning.  What is the process for growing volumes?  Do I simply add in additional disk and the system absorbs them in to the thinly provisioned storage pool?  Or do I have to go through some process of building/incorporating them in to the existing LUNs?

[rjp]

So question regarding FreeNAS 8....

Looks like ZFS provides for the fault tolerance and recovery, and I see they specifically now support thin provisioning.  What is the process for growing volumes?  Do I simply add in additional disk and the system absorbs them in to the thinly provisioned storage pool?  Or do I have to go through some process of building/incorporating them in to the existing LUNs?

Thin provisioning applies to zvols (chunks of disk space that would typically be exported via iSCSI, Fiber Channel, or FCoE). In ZFS, they are created and managed by the "zfs" command, not the "zpool" command, since they need to be created on existing storage pools.

To add space to a ZFS pool, you would install the additional drives, then add them to your pool. Since redundancy is very important, it's best to add redundant groups of drives to the pool.

I'm not sure how the FreeNAS web interface does it right now. Here's a Solaris command-line example; in this case, let's pretend we have an eight-port SAS HBA, and we're going to create a pool using two sets of mirrored drives. The HBA has already been automatically configured as controller #4 (c4) in the Solaris device addressing scheme.

Code: [Select]

zpool create mypool mirror c4t0d0 c4t1d0 mirror c4t2d0 c4t3d0

Let's say we're getting more than 2/3 full, and we want to add two more mirrored pairs:

Code: [Select]

zpool add mypool mirror c4t4d0 c4t5d0 mirror c4t6d0 c4t7d0

A different way to grow the pool, if we didn't want to use up drive slots: assuming we have the original two sets of mirrors:

BACK UP YOUR DATA FIRST

Code: [Select]

zpool set autoexpand=on mypool
zpool offline c4t0d0
(physically replace the c4t0d0 disk with a larger drive)
zpool replace -f c4t0d0
(wait for new disk to resilver)
zpool offline c4t1d0
(physically replace c4t1d0 disk with a larger drive)
zpool replace -f c4t1d0
(wait for new disk to resilver)
(optionally replace c4t2d0 and c4t3d0 in the same manner, one at a time)

As soon as the second disk in the mirror has finished resilvering, the pool will autoexpand with the additional space on the new drives.

Note that most SAS HBAs support hot swap out of the box. AHCI-compatible SATA ports can also do hot swap, but on a Solaris system, it's not enabled by default for some reason, and the line:

Code: [Select]

set sata:sata_auto_online=1

must be added to the /etc/system file (and then the system needs to be rebooted). Hot swap is wonderful for this sort of thing, as the system can keep going while you remove and replace drives.

Food for thought: If you have two hot swap drive cages, you want to arrange your mirrors so that each mirrored pair is split between the two cages. That way, if one cage goes out, the entire pool remains available via the other cage.

Always remember that RAID is not a substitute for backups.