All, I quite fancy building a linux NAS box to replace my QNAP TS-409Pro NAS. I'd like to be able to use it for transcoding of video also as well as doing downloads. I'm just not sure of the best hardware for it all. I would like it to be:- low power powerful enough to transcode video linux friendly able to support online RAID capacity expansion and RAID level migration able to take up to 8 sata HDDs fast network transfers able to enter sleep modes and support WOL I'll likely be loosely following the linux server guide on Bit once I buy everything... TIA for any advice.
If you're going to use it as a transcoder you'd do best to get some kind of itx or matx board with hardware mpeg support, and for your RAID requirements, you're probably going to be best looking at a plugin PCI-E or PCI RAID controller, especially if you want to support 8 drives.
Sounds good. WRT hardware mpeg support, could I use a low-end nvidia card and cuda to help with this? Is that linux friendly? Would that be a power-efficient solution? Any suggestions on raid controller cards with hardware offload of parity that's linux friendly? TIA
WRT hardware mpeg yes I was thinking nvidia/cuda (eg ION and Atom most likely given the low power draw) or an Epia ITX board with hardware mpeg, which is also ridiculously low power draw and has hardware mpeg in the igp/northbridge. I'm out of touch with current EPIA models, but I had a CL previously, and its a very high quality solution. I can't really comment on RAID, however I'd say that most Adaptec cards supporting RAID5 will have hardware offload; not checked for a while but when I last looked their cheapest SATA RAIDs are 0/1/0+1 only and are part software, whereas anything with a fuller featureset had a more powerful processor/cache and would support RAID5. As for your OS, if you haven't given a thought yet, there's a couple out there, some of which do iSCSI so you can map a storage path directly to your workstations if desired. FreeNAS and OpenFiler seem to be the most popular ones. I've heard of people using OpenNAS but when I googled that there didn't seem to be an open download link for it.
An Ion isnt good enough to transcode video, plus you're limited by applications unless you want to pay a lot for something overcomplicated. I've looked into it recently. Nothing is yet available, open source, that lets you have the finesse of a CPU unfortunately, unless you want a simple one click answer for absolutely everything, which is rarely the case. Hardware MPEG2/4 decoding is available on any modern IGP these days. MPEG4 AVCHD requires specifics like UVD or PureVideo.
I was just thinking about something. In top gear recently, they tested small cars and Clarkson had a Skoda Roomster with a piddly little diesel engine. When they did the fuel consumption tests, the Roomster was the worst cos he had to wring its neck just to get it going. So although it could have been fuel-efficient, it wasn't since it had to work so hard all the time. Would I see something similar with an atom processor? The processor in my Qnap NAS is undeniably frugal on the 'leccy but it struggles to extract anything I download. So much so that if I have a queue of stuff downloading, 50% of the items on the list may be downloaded but only 10% are extracted. With the CPU working flat out to handle downloads as well as extractions, is it really efficient or would I be better with a 3.0ltr turbodiesel faster processor that can do it all quickly and then throttle down after to save power? And is it easy to tell linux to throttle down CPUs in this way?
Yeah, but doesn't the OS have to initiate the lower power states or does the CPU do it automatically now?
I think all that intel and amd stuff is supported in 2.6 Linux kernel. Not so sure with BSD, but its usually very close with support between the two.
I know Ubuntu throttles CPUs back automagically, something like that is surely at the kernel level right?
After a bit of a break I'm back to looking into this. I'm planning to get my friends and family to pitch in to buy all the bits for my upcoming birthday and xmas pressies, kinda like a wedding list. So I need to spec up this machine soon. I had an idea for power-saving. I intend to have a large RAID array hanging off a dedicated RAID controller but I'd like to power the drives down when they're not being used. That's usually a feature of any decent RAID controller. However, I quite like the idea of having the two PSUs for the system since I intend it to do more than file serving. I'd like something like a Pico PSU powering the mainboard and a small SSD and then a bigger PSU powering the HDDS. How easy would it be to have the bigger PSU turn off and on with the HDDs as needed? Would it even be worth bothering with this or should I just get a very efficient PSU to power everything? Which HDDs are the best for massive file storage these days? I know the Spinpoints are bad-ass for speed but what's their power-usage like? Lastly, CPU. I'm thinking dual-core Atom would be good but probably not very cheap or powerful. Do the standard C2Ds clock down substantially to save power when needed? I like the look of the new C2Q laptop CPUs, particularly their ability to stay within a 45w TDP and OC a single core to almost 3GHz as needed. I'm guessing they would be silly expensive though, and getting a standard ITX mobo to support it may be a challenge? Anyway, any suggestions on hardware will be greatfully recieved until I can get a decent internet connection to search for suitable parts myself. TIA.
