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The NEW Server 38TB
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BGSPCS




Joined: 23 Aug 2006
Posts: 115
Location: Pottstown, PA


PostLink    Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote


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Very cool Craig. I have a storage server built with a quad core Xeon, 12GB RAM, 12x 3TB Hard drives running in RAID 6 on an Acrea controller with 1GB cache, the OS on the system is Openfiler. Additionally I am running Plex as a virtual server on a different box, and Plex is connected via 4gbit Fibre channel to the storage server. The storage server does more than just movie storage, but file storage on the LAN as well.

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Brad S
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CIR Engineering




Joined: 25 Aug 2008
Posts: 4264
Location: Chicago USA & Berlin Germany


PostLink    Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow. Are all 12 drives part of the same array?

craigr

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BGSPCS




Joined: 23 Aug 2006
Posts: 115
Location: Pottstown, PA


PostLink    Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 5:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes indeed all 12 drives are in one array. The array is then divided up by the OS and assigned to systems and shares.
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Brad S
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Aussie_Al




Joined: 18 Feb 2009
Posts: 47


TV/Projector: NEC 9PG, XG1101, XG1350


PostLink    Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 7:26 pm    Post subject: Raid controller Reply with quote

BGSPCS wrote:
Very cool Craig. I have a storage server built with a quad core Xeon, 12GB RAM, 12x 3TB Hard drives running in RAID 6 on an Acrea controller with 1GB cache, the OS on the system is Openfiler. Additionally I am running Plex as a virtual server on a different box, and Plex is connected via 4gbit Fibre channel to the storage server. The storage server does more than just movie storage, but file storage on the LAN as well.


Brad, just curious of the Raid Controller you are using? Is it a 1882 series controller? If so, sounds very similar to the server I want to build, I'm after RAID 6 too...
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BGSPCS




Joined: 23 Aug 2006
Posts: 115
Location: Pottstown, PA


PostLink    Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 12:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The controller i am using is an ARC 1231ML with 12 SATA 3Gbps Ports ($175 from Ebay at the time). From a computer connected to the storage server with fibre channel i was able to get 400 some MBPS transfer speed. This particular card has Raid 6 acceleration on it.

****Added**** One really really cool feature this array controller has, is that it has an integrated network adapter and web interface for configuring the array and for diagnostics. I have it configured to send me a text message and email if there is a a disk failure or problem with the controller.


This is the hard disk i used http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149408
I ordered them in batches of 4. Out of the 12, 2 of them were defective. Before i put them in any production system i ran a test to Read, write, read verify the entire disk. It took close to 2 days for each disk to complete the test.

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Brad S
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CIR Engineering




Joined: 25 Aug 2008
Posts: 4264
Location: Chicago USA & Berlin Germany


PostLink    Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 4:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

BGSPCS wrote:
The controller i am using is an ARC 1231ML with 12 SATA 3Gbps Ports ($175 from Ebay at the time). From a computer connected to the storage server with fibre channel i was able to get 400 some MBPS transfer speed. This particular card has Raid 6 acceleration on it.

****Added**** One really really cool feature this array controller has, is that it has an integrated network adapter and web interface for configuring the array and for diagnostics. I have it configured to send me a text message and email if there is a a disk failure or problem with the controller.


This is the hard disk i used http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149408
I ordered them in batches of 4. Out of the 12, 2 of them were defective. Before i put them in any production system i ran a test to Read, write, read verify the entire disk. It took close to 2 days for each disk to complete the test.

Interesting and tempting card. There is a guy on eBay now who is selling a pile of the 16-port version (Areca ARC1280ML 16 Port) for $150 shipped in the USA. Only down side I see is SATA II instead of III, but that really only would matter with SSD drives as spinning platters don't even use the full SATA II transfer rates.

Kind of makes me wonder if I should sell my two M1015's for about $125 each and then just buy the 16-port Areca. I could downsize my motherboard as well then and probably save some electricity.

craigr

_________________
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Murideo Fresco SIX-G HDMI 2.x Multimedia Generator
Murideo Fresco SIX-A HDMI 2.x Analyzer
*NEW Light Illusion ColourSpace XPT Version β Color Calibration Software
Light Illusion LightSpace XPT Pro Version 10.x Color Calibration Software
*NEW OMARDRIS JVC Software Patch to use K10-A and Jeti with JVC OEM AutoCal Software!
Sencore CR7000 CRT Tube Analyzer / Rejuvenater
Authorized Dealer for Lumagen & just about everything worth buying Wink
www.CIR-Engineering.com - craigr@cir-engineering.com
Phone: 865-405-6892
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BGSPCS




Joined: 23 Aug 2006
Posts: 115
Location: Pottstown, PA


PostLink    Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 5:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's quite the nice card. I may get a second one in the future for additional disks. I don't see SATA III as being a viable option for any applications. There are many bottlenecks that could be had that would reduce transfer rate. Mechanical disks included, SSD may not even get up to that speed at the moment. To build 40TB of storage with SSD would cost a fortune(I wish I had a fortune to play with! Smile

If one had A server with SATA III hard disks(SSD) one would get fast transfer speed with the host, but if you have a 1gb network you would be limited to 120MBPs or so of transfer(unless you had 10gbe).


To keep power consumption down I have the controller card configured to spin down disks after 30 minutes. I also have the OS of the server running on a little IDE 8GB SSD module. The motherboard, memory and CPU's push a ton of heat and use lots of electric sadly. I had to build custom cooling and dividers to push more air across the motherboard. The MOBO was designed for a server with forced air across the board with noisy fans. It is also taller so I had to make modifications for locating the power supply.

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BGSPCS




Joined: 23 Aug 2006
Posts: 115
Location: Pottstown, PA


PostLink    Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 5:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

One important thing I must mention is it must be upgraded with the latest firmware to support disks larger than 2TB.
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Brad S
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gfortune




Joined: 30 Nov 2007
Posts: 17



PostLink    Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2014 2:37 pm    Post subject: Setup Reply with quote

I have a Dune prime 3.0 in a network setup to see my qnas. My blurays are on discs for the Dune to play.

I put all standard DVDs which include series on the qnap for mount iso playback. The QNAS has 5 bay's carrying 20 TB using 4 TB WD green drives. The QNAP has some issues as corrupted iso files with inability to hold a static IP address using linux. I know nothing about linux.

The Dune is having a power supply problem and hoping Craig will fix this unit.

The only question I need answered is how to turn off the start and restart these drives so they can last over 2 years under the QNAS linux? Also this was put in raid 5.

The first unit I carried had 1 TB WD black drives in a Norco rack mount up to 20 TB in raid 5. It lasted 5 years until the 1000 watts power supply gave out taking the board with it.

Gary
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spoot




Joined: 19 Nov 2014
Posts: 21



PostLink    Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2014 9:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Nice build, but I'm curious as to why you moved from ZFS to UnRaid? I'm running ZFS on a 30tb array which backs up to an 80tb array (stores all other network backups too) via ZFS snapshots nightly and I've been quite happy with it.
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CIR Engineering




Joined: 25 Aug 2008
Posts: 4264
Location: Chicago USA & Berlin Germany


PostLink    Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2014 6:07 pm    Post subject: Re: Setup Reply with quote

gfortune wrote:
I have a Dune prime 3.0 in a network setup to see my qnas. My blurays are on discs for the Dune to play.

I put all standard DVDs which include series on the qnap for mount iso playback. The QNAS has 5 bay's carrying 20 TB using 4 TB WD green drives. The QNAP has some issues as corrupted iso files with inability to hold a static IP address using linux. I know nothing about linux.

The Dune is having a power supply problem and hoping Craig will fix this unit.

The only question I need answered is how to turn off the start and restart these drives so they can last over 2 years under the QNAS linux? Also this was put in raid 5.

The first unit I carried had 1 TB WD black drives in a Norco rack mount up to 20 TB in raid 5. It lasted 5 years until the 1000 watts power supply gave out taking the board with it.

Gary

WDIDLE3.exe

craigr

_________________
*NEW JETI 1501-HiRes 2nm Spectroradiometer
JETI 1211 Spectroradiometer
Photo Research PR-650 Spectroradiometer
Klein K10-A Colorimeter
X-Rite i1Pro2 Spectroradiometer & Spyder Colorimeters *For JVC auto-calibration when Klein & Jeti are not applicable
Murideo Fresco SIX-G HDMI 2.x Multimedia Generator
Murideo Fresco SIX-A HDMI 2.x Analyzer
*NEW Light Illusion ColourSpace XPT Version β Color Calibration Software
Light Illusion LightSpace XPT Pro Version 10.x Color Calibration Software
*NEW OMARDRIS JVC Software Patch to use K10-A and Jeti with JVC OEM AutoCal Software!
Sencore CR7000 CRT Tube Analyzer / Rejuvenater
Authorized Dealer for Lumagen & just about everything worth buying Wink
www.CIR-Engineering.com - craigr@cir-engineering.com
Phone: 865-405-6892
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CIR Engineering




Joined: 25 Aug 2008
Posts: 4264
Location: Chicago USA & Berlin Germany


PostLink    Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2014 6:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

spoot wrote:
Nice build, but I'm curious as to why you moved from ZFS to UnRaid? I'm running ZFS on a 30tb array which backs up to an 80tb array (stores all other network backups too) via ZFS snapshots nightly and I've been quite happy with it.

I moved from ZFS for many reasons.

1) NAS4Free started having a strange problem with my DUNE's out of the blue. About 1 in 5 discs would start skipping during playback. It took me weeks to figure out that the problem was NAS4Free. So I switched OS's to FreeNAS and that did solve the problem.

2) ZFS cannot add drives to a ZPOOL after it is already built. So any future expansion requires that a new ZPOOL be built with it's own parity drive. I didn't like having to buy loads of drives at a time and having several pools all with their own parity drives. It's not cost effective to buy five or six of the largest drives on the market, it's cheaper to wait until the price comes down. I also didn't like the idea of having several pools with each it's own parity. To me that's just a waste of drive space and electricity and $$$. With UnRAID you can add one drive at a time any time without having to start over or delete any data.

3) ZFS is very fast because it stripes to all drives in a pool simultaneously. That is fine, but you don't need that level of performance to serve up media files. ZFS requires that all discs in a pool be spinning to access any data. UnRAID only needs to have one drive spinning to access the data of a movie. This uses less electricity, wears the hard drives less, and makes the hard drives less prone to all fail at the same time because every hard drive will have a different number of operating hours. To me that makes the data safer because if you lose more than the number of parity drives in a ZFS pool than you loose all your data.

4) UnRAID's parity system is better for a media server. You only need one parity drive for 23 data drives. This is much more efficient than multiple parity drives on multiple ZFS pools. I would rather have my hard drives storing usable data than parity information. Since the drives are not all wearing evenly, on UnRAID the chance of losing data is much less.

5) With UnRAID there is less chance of losing any or all of your data. This is because you can lose one of any of your drives and restore from parity. If you lose a second or third or fourth drive, you still don't lose all your data. You only lose the data on the drives that die because each drive has its own file system and is totally independent of the other drives.

6) UnRAID is super easy to setup and manage. FreeBSD sucks when it comes to making everything work correctly and / or how you want it to work.

There were many other reasons, but simply put UnRAID is far superior for media storage than FreeBSD. If you need super high performance than FreeBSD and ZFS is perfect, but for serving HD video you just don't need that much power and you don't need that much resources.

I really love the concept of ZFS, but for this application it's not quite the correct tool... kind of like using a socket wrench to pound in a nail. You can do it, but it's not really as good.

craigr

_________________
*NEW JETI 1501-HiRes 2nm Spectroradiometer
JETI 1211 Spectroradiometer
Photo Research PR-650 Spectroradiometer
Klein K10-A Colorimeter
X-Rite i1Pro2 Spectroradiometer & Spyder Colorimeters *For JVC auto-calibration when Klein & Jeti are not applicable
Murideo Fresco SIX-G HDMI 2.x Multimedia Generator
Murideo Fresco SIX-A HDMI 2.x Analyzer
*NEW Light Illusion ColourSpace XPT Version β Color Calibration Software
Light Illusion LightSpace XPT Pro Version 10.x Color Calibration Software
*NEW OMARDRIS JVC Software Patch to use K10-A and Jeti with JVC OEM AutoCal Software!
Sencore CR7000 CRT Tube Analyzer / Rejuvenater
Authorized Dealer for Lumagen & just about everything worth buying Wink
www.CIR-Engineering.com - craigr@cir-engineering.com
Phone: 865-405-6892
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spoot




Joined: 19 Nov 2014
Posts: 21



PostLink    Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2014 7:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for your detailed reasons!

1) Yah, NAS4Free, Freenas, etc all pissed me off long ago and I won't touch them anymore.

2) Agreed, however, you can replace the smaller drives with larger drives and have a larger pool when ZFS see's all drives are now bigger. But yeah, that's costly.

4) I thought you were nutz having one parity drive for 23 data drives till I read #5.

5) Huh, interesting. So, it's kinda it's own clustered file system like GlusterFS, but local.

6) Hehe, just using Debian with ZFS on linux code myself.

If I build another array I'll have to look closer to UnRAID perhaps. Can you put SSD's for caching purposes before/after hitting the spinning rust?
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CIR Engineering




Joined: 25 Aug 2008
Posts: 4264
Location: Chicago USA & Berlin Germany


PostLink    Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2014 10:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

spoot wrote:

2) Agreed, however, you can replace the smaller drives with larger drives and have a larger pool when ZFS see's all drives are now bigger. But yeah, that's costly.

Yup and also, what then do you do with the old drives that you replaced? I had a zpool with six 3TB drives (one parity). I didn't want to stop using the 15 TB's of space just to add new space, so the only solution would have been to build a whole new pool next to the existing zpool. And the new pool would have had to been worth it because once it's built, it can't be made larger. I was looking at buying five or six 4 TB drives for a new zpool and then having to do it all over and over again every time I need more capacity.

So I wound up buying five more 4 TB drives anyway. I used four for data and one for parity. However, once I copied the old data over to the UnRAID tower, I was then able to take the drives out of the FreeNAS box and just drop them into the UnRAID server and expand capacity still utilizing only one parity drive. And as a bonus, I got my 3 TB parity drive back for data storage out of the FreeNAS box Wink

spoot wrote:

4) I thought you were nutz having one parity drive for 23 data drives till I read #5.

It's one of the coolest things about UNRaid I think. And even if you do lose data, it's replaceable by ripping the original disc again.

spoot wrote:

5) Huh, interesting. So, it's kinda it's own clustered file system like GlusterFS, but local.

UnRAID allows you to create what are called "user shares." A "user share" is a collection of assigned discs that show up in a network browser as one disc. You can have the "user share" all, or any number of the data discs in the tower.

spoot wrote:

6) Hehe, just using Debian with ZFS on linux code myself.

If I build another array I'll have to look closer to UnRAID perhaps. Can you put SSD's for caching purposes before/after hitting the spinning rust?

Yes.

The newest version of UnRAID 6.x is beta, but I have been running it form months with few problems.

UnRAID 5 and 6 both allow for a cache drive and UNRaid 6 allows for cash drive pools. Cash drives and pools can both use SSD. Furthermore, file systems include XFS, BTRFS, and Reiser. With BTRFS you can actually do some of the same type of things as ZFS though I have not formatted any discs BTRFS yet. The thing I miss most about ZFS is scrub. BTRFS allows for this in a similar way to ZFS so I am looking forward to that once UnRAID 6 is working perfectly with BTRFS.

New features for version 6.x include:

64-bit architecture
Cache pool
Extensions
Simplified manageability
Improved application support
Virtualization
Docker containers
Virtual machines (Xen & KVM)
New file systems
XFS
BTRFS

I am very happy with UnRAID and think it was worth the price. It's really well supported on their forums too.

craigr

_________________
*NEW JETI 1501-HiRes 2nm Spectroradiometer
JETI 1211 Spectroradiometer
Photo Research PR-650 Spectroradiometer
Klein K10-A Colorimeter
X-Rite i1Pro2 Spectroradiometer & Spyder Colorimeters *For JVC auto-calibration when Klein & Jeti are not applicable
Murideo Fresco SIX-G HDMI 2.x Multimedia Generator
Murideo Fresco SIX-A HDMI 2.x Analyzer
*NEW Light Illusion ColourSpace XPT Version β Color Calibration Software
Light Illusion LightSpace XPT Pro Version 10.x Color Calibration Software
*NEW OMARDRIS JVC Software Patch to use K10-A and Jeti with JVC OEM AutoCal Software!
Sencore CR7000 CRT Tube Analyzer / Rejuvenater
Authorized Dealer for Lumagen & just about everything worth buying Wink
www.CIR-Engineering.com - craigr@cir-engineering.com
Phone: 865-405-6892
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Bucketfoot




Joined: 17 Mar 2006
Posts: 698
Location: Centennial, CO


PostLink    Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2014 10:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hmm, I may have to start researching build a server. I've currently got an HP EX480 running Windows Home Server (WHS), but I just got a new desktop that has Win 8.1 and it is not compatible with my version of WHS.
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