Please critique my storage build

[paulney]

Hey guys, I am currently considering whether to buy a turn-key NAS box or a custom storage build, and after much consideration, I've decided that a personally built storage box would be the way to go for me.

Here's my background and my needs:

- I shoot quite a few photos
- I have a large archive of said photos (approaching 150 Gbs right now)

What I need:
- a storage box with redundancy (would hate to lose all of these because of an HD failure)
- decent read/write performance (most consumer-end HDD enclosures suck big time in this department)
- I also want to ssh into this box occasionally for various shell needs and to manage files (ftp just doesn't cut it some times)

I've been able to put together the following shopping cart on NewEgg:

- Case: COOLER MASTER Elite RC-332-KKN1-GP Black SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail (no PSU, because I already have one from the current linux server standing in the garage)
- HDD: SAMSUNG HD502HI 500GB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM X4
- RAM: CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop
- MB & CPU: ECS GeForce6100PM-M2(V3.0) AM3/AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

All of this comes down to $381.92 + Shipping + Tax

Way cheaper than a good hardware NAS even without the drives!
I'm planning to install Fedora 11 on it and do a software RAID 5 or 10. Yes, it's not as cool as hardware RAID, but a MB that could do it or a good dedicated RAID card cost a ton!

What do you think?
Thanks.

 

[taltamir]

my biggest regret on mine, is that i used raid6 instead of multiple raid1 arrays. With multiple raid1 arrays i could have fairly easily upgraded it peicemeal. add two drives, take out two drives, keep 4 of older drives... and having enough space to shuffle things around without buying a whole new set of drives...
the extra speed of raid 10 is not really needed and you lose out on flexibility in the long term.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: taltamir
my biggest regret on mine, is that i used raid6 instead of multiple raid1 arrays. With multiple raid1 arrays i could have fairly easily upgraded it peicemeal. add two drives, take out two drives, keep 4 of older drives... and having enough space to shuffle things around without buying a whole new set of drives...
the extra speed of raid 10 is not really needed and you lose out on flexibility in the long term.

I agree, and for the same reasons. It's much cheaper and easier to upgrade RAID 1 arrays piecemeal. No need to buy capacity you don't need right now when you can wait for a year and get bigger and cheaper disks when you need them.

And if the disk array isn't INSIDE the PC you are working on, then the speed benefits of RAID 10 are mostly lost across the network.

I haven't used RAID 5 for five years now. I've seen too much data lost on those arrays. If ongoing backups are being made, that's one thing. But too few people and companies do the backups they need.

For completeness, I'll repeat my suggestion from the original thread in General Hardware:
In this situation, I'd place a single 1 TB disk in your desktop PC and use that. Buy a second 1 TB or larger disk for keeping ongoing backups. For most users, redundant disks are over-rated and backups are under-rated.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
For most users, redundant disks are over-rated and backups are under-rated.

Amen!

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

I would consider using larger disks. I just saw some WD 1TB drives for like $69 each. That means you can buy one less drive. That means less heat, power etc...

I've had SW raid5 for the past few years with few issues. I lost a set once due to user error, but I had a good backup. Protection is king.

You might...maybe...consider something like freenas or openfiler for the os. They have quite a few nice features. Including easy RAID, and drive management. I don't use this, because I wanted more of an open server, but if I just wanted a plain NAS box, that's the way I'd go.

I'm not sure you need all that memory...but it's cheap right?

I think I have the same motherboard for my server and it works fine. I like the integrated Video.

One last thing. You might want to look into drive spindown. It's a HDPARM setting that you get out the box with linux. I'm going to start working on that in the next month. You just have to make sure you don't have any drive monitor tools touching your disks and spinning them back up.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: paulney
What do you think?

The MB has a 10/100 NIC. You could add a PCIe NIC, but might be better off starting with something else. More SATA ports wouldn't hurt either for the long run.

Also agree with starting with the biggest HD's which are economical. At this time, it's probably the 1.5 TB, and if not that, 1 TB. But this depends on your budget and actual data growth.

Alternatively, it might be wiser to limit the total size / data risk on the server, and add a single large external drive for a full backup.

 

[mtnd3vil]

HDDs:
I second the motion to use 2x 1TB drives to start with. 1.5TB is kind of sketchy because for most MFG's that means it's an old generation drive.
My HDD of choice is the Seagate 7200.12 but would suggest looking at the WD Black on account of better IOPS (Would be useful for photo storage)

Networking:
GBe is mandatory. 100Mbit will give you LESS performance than most pre-made solutions for cheap.
You can expect 9-10MB/s from a 100Mb link and 90-100MB/s from a 1Gbe link
I hope your switch is Gbe ...

Software:
I agree with cr0nj0b here too, you should definitely evaluate freenas. You can test it out as a virtual machine in virtualbox--that's what I did.

What are the IO specs/layout of your current workstation? Knowing that can help reveal exactly what you need out of the NAS.

 

[chrisf6969]

Originally posted by: mtnd3vil
HDDs:
I second the motion to use 2x 1TB drives to start with. 1.5TB is kind of sketchy because for most MFG's that means it's an old generation drive.
My HDD of choice is the Seagate 7200.12 but would suggest looking at the WD Black on account of better IOPS (Would be useful for photo storage)

Networking:
GBe is mandatory. 100Mbit will give you LESS performance than most pre-made solutions for cheap.
You can expect 9-10MB/s from a 100Mb link and 90-100MB/s from a 1Gbe link
I hope your switch is Gbe ...
Software:
I agree with cr0nj0b here too, you should definitely evaluate freenas. You can test it out as a virtual machine in virtualbox--that's what I did.

What are the IO specs/layout of your current workstation? Knowing that can help reveal exactly what you need out of the NAS.

Raid 10 is a waste since you're going to moving this stuff over your network on a 100Mbit link. You need Gb NIC's & Gb Switch/router and even then your network will be your bottleneck as with my GigaLAN I'm only getting around 45MB/s.

If you stick with 100Mbit NIC's & switch you might as well use a USB back up drive. That will give you about 30MB/s.

Or why not just add a 1Tb drive to your existing system and back up your 150Gb's of files to it ? So much faster having it in your system.

My current system is this:

1 x 80Gb SSD for OS/apps
2 x 640Gb Caviar Black for Data/docs/pics/music (planned on setting them up in Raid 1, but still haven't gotten around to doing considering I feel pretty safe with my current back up procedures)

1 x 74Gb Raptor in USB enclosure for back ups. All of my docs/pics still fit on it, and I can unplug it, and throw it in a fire proof safe.

 

[pjkenned]

Originally posted by: chrisf6969

Raid 10 is a waste since you're going to moving this stuff over your network on a 100Mbit link. You need Gb NIC's & Gb Switch/router and even then your network will be your bottleneck as with my GigaLAN I'm only getting around 45MB/s.

Jumbo frames supported by your switch/ NICs? If so are you using them?

 

[Ben90]

There is something wrong with your LAN if ur only getting 45MB/s

 

[mtnd3vil]

Random reads or writes to the caviar 640GB could easily only be 45MB/s
If that's what he's doing, then the LAN would no longer be the weakest link.

Even modern single disks don't dominate Gbe links. Caviar Blacks and 7200.12s will see low numbers for random read/write and especially small files.

 

[pjkenned]

Yea but most people aren't doing small file transfers with 8TB+ of storage online. Realistically, if you have that much storage on a home network, the vast majority of the space will be filled with files >1MB.

Even mp3 music files are big enough that spindle drives will generally do fine on them. I guess if you had a single 640GB drive 45MB/s may be a limitation, but if you are running Raid 6 on a decent controller... doing more than 45MB/s over GigE won't be an issue.