I met a guy off these forums on the weekend who had a nice server build at home and I was thinking it was about time that I set mine up. I liked the look of this guys build guide here :http://www.havetheknowhow.com But think its a bit outdated? I suppose I have about 300 for the hardware. Actually that's not true, I could spend a range but want to know what more I could do. That's not including its drives. I want it to be able to backup and transcode 1080p at the same time and record even sky freesat feeds or dvb-t. I would like it to have 1 drive parity on up to 8 drives for storage I guess? So, what should I use? I don't mind going 2nd hand.
Well first questions: What amount of storage are you after? How will you backup your data? Do you care about hardware running costs?
Hi, thanks for the reply. I guess I am not sure on storage. Its more about future proofing. When i've exceeded my 6tb NAS I want something that will last me a long time. I.e. not just going for a 4 bay solution. So lets say initially 10TB then up to 20TB or even more in time depending on when 5TB drives become available and they come down in cost. I didnt yet think of backing up, I would just be happy with redundancy for now. If the fire came, i'd lunge for the server perhaps first. I do care about costs of running it and this far exceeds my desire to save money on the hardware but then in saying that - I do not want to buy bleeding edge low power. Ideally - something from a few years back would suit me just fine if it was capable of doing what I wanted. Iain
My home server is i5 750 @ stock P55 mobo 4gb Ram (going to up to 16gb when I can afford) 6TB drive pool I have a raid card and I am going to eventually put in an array, 4x3tb and another 4x3tb, which will be 2 9TB arrays. I have whs2011 on the box at the moment, really it just does file shares around the 5 or so pc/macs I have at home, central torrent downloading, and central storage for us all. I don't do any transcoding, as, everything is opened by a computer at the other end so it's not needed. I do have a double teamed NIC in the server. I occasionally run game servers on the box and mess about on IIS. the performance is really good, I only built this server 3 weeks ago, before this I was using a core2duo e5400 and 2gb of ram, which was not much cop and would struggle if all of us in the house were trying to do something - haven't had any problems at all with the new box, though, it could do with some more RAM.
Take a look at unRAID. The 64-bit version (currently in beta) allows for virtualisation with Xen, so you could run the transcoding/recording.
If you are talking about RAID5 then it isn't really suitable for large sets of drives now-a-days. Assuming you are talking 7x2TB drives + a parity then you have a really high chance of having a failure during the rebuild if a drive should ever fail. RAID6 is a little better but personally I run RAID10.
I like this thread. It was me that timmehtimmeh met on Saturday (and I can vouch for the fact that he is a top bloke), and the bits in Margon's server were mine If you want something that's usable to install tv recording/transcoding/media streaming, I'd probably go an i5 with plenty of RAM, a decent dual NIC and a RAID controller. Depending on what you want to use for the TV bits (I use dvblink, personally), this will likely dictate your choice of OS. For movies, I run mymovies, which runs on Windows, but there are various server versions of dvblink (including one which will run on your very NAS to record, but not transcode). Drop me a PM if you want some more info about what I am running
What about something as awesome as this: https://teksyndicate.com/videos/asrock-c2750d4i-intel-avoton-c2750-octa-core-itx-motherboard
Do you find TV recording to be that useful now that all the broadcast services come with streaming catchup services? If you take out that requirement then the software to run becomes a no-brainer of a linux distro of some sort which will run on any hardware. I'd probably go with an AMD cpu rather than Intel but purely for cost reasons particularly with a budget of £300. A decent RAID card that can support up to 8 drives will take up 1/3 to 1/2 of that easily. I can't say I've paid too much attention but I didn't think transcoding was particularly RAM heavy you should be able to get away with 4GB, probably even 2GB.
I shall do, Surprisingly I got a PM from Noob? who seems to have a bottomless bag of surplus-to-requirements hardware at his disposal. Which may have just tempted me to build it round all of what he wants to get rid of. It would therefore be a Fractal Array R2 with currently 5 3TB drives (2 of mine and 3 of his) with a G620 1155 processor in a tba mini itx board with some kind of pcix controller. So that would be the basis of it. I think I might have to pass on the TV card thingy in that case (unless a usb one exists?) - its just I do have 2 sky feeds to the study upstairs so might want to use them. I am kind of leaning to some kind of Raid 5 or 6 scenario for the 5-6 drives.
Read these before using RAID5 - it really shouldn't be used at all now. It gives you a big performance hit on writes and likely little to no protection. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162 http://storagemojo.com/2010/02/27/does-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/
When you have it up and running feel free to join our little thread http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=214651&page=13
oh thanks! I just cant warrant having a redundant drive for every drive I use. I already hate the idea of running a load of disks like this. Is there no magical safe redundancy that I can use that say lets me get full use of at least 4 of my 6 drives? I really don't want to just get storage use out of 3 of them.
Yes that's RAID6 or double parity. This is even slower than RAID5 as now rather than 2 writes per "write" you have to do 3. This probably isn't too big a problem for media serving but it really kills database operations.
Is that how the SHR works that my little syno box uses then? I got a bit confused as it seems that is what it said it was doing across the disks you put in. As far as I was aware it was 1 drive redundancy for the hybrid raid thing. I get that once every 2^14 reads I get a URE. I do find it strange that if a single drive fails in Raid 5, that URE stops the entire rebuild - I thought it would just say - I am sorry but I cannot rebuild that single sector on the drives impacting the rebuild of just say 1 file or many. So is it ok to use Raid 6? in this scenario with these drives might you think? and if so, if one had 5 drives to begin with, could a 6th be added in due course or even a 7th or 8th if you had the space? I.e. can it build it as it expands?
SHR has a 2 disk mode in newer NAS that is basically RAID6. SHR appears to use conventional RAID with a twist in that it allows differing capacities of drive without wasting storage. I've not looked into this but I'm guessing it does this by partitioning the drives in chunks the size of the smallest drive and then creating a RAID array over these partitions. This is something you can happily do with any linux box but the cleverness is all in making the user interface simple and automating the process for you. TLDR; yes so long as you have two redundant disks synology or any other manufacturers raid levels protect against this problem and do the same thing
I think it's great, because recorded centrally it is available all over the place in HD (proper HD with decent audio), and I don't have to worry about things expiring from iPlayer and that sort of thing. I've also found some of the download-based catchup services to be truly dog slow, despite my decent connection. Also, I am a habitual tinkerer, and I like it. It's also all controllable from one remote, which is good for the GAF (girlfriend acceptance factor). TBS do decent USB tuners anyway - PCI-E is not a desperate requirement. Something like this, perhaps? I have mATX so I have PCI-E, but I wouldn't be averse to USB tuners - the TBS kit is very good, too.
