Best NAS solution? (3 Viewers)

[Moonracer]

I took a look at unRaid last night and it does look impressive. What I like about it is that with a tower, I can have plenty of room to grow simply by adding more disks.

The only other unanswered question for me is this: I have heard horror stories of users trying to rebuild their RAID-5 arrays and losing data! I would prefer a simple RAID-1 or RAID-10 but I'm not sure RAID-10 is possible with unRaid and I'm afraid that RAID-1 will not offer the performance to play my Blu-ray material (I had this problem with my simple WD Mirror Ed. drive using dual 1TB drives ((RAID-1 was too slow!! while RAID-0 was fine but no redundancy!!)))

Thanks again everyone for you input. I do like the towers they offer at unRaid as well. Nice setup!

Cheers,
mr

 

[moab]

I have a budget solution.

I bought a used PC HP m7674n for $200. The mummy board has Intel RAID and 6 SATA ports.
I have it loaded. I upgrade the graphics card, NIC, and added video capture cards.

1 x 32GB SSD for OS and Apps. Silent and very reliable.
3 x 0.5 TB drives in RAID 0 for high performance data (ISO images, TV recordings).
1 x 1.5 TB drive for backup of RAID data and backup of OS. RAID 0 is for pure performance with no redundancy.
1 x DVD drive (pending update to Blu Ray).

This PC is and all-in-one:
MP TV server
NAS
Living Room Client for big screen.

I have a few MP client PCs.

 

[meq123]

OK, so to throw my 2 cents into this ring...

A couple of years ago, I tried the Linksys combined NAS/router (WRTSL54GS) using both native and 3rd party firmware, and was heartily underwhelmed by its performance, flexibility and reliability (it was always hanging and needing to be restarted).

I then tried 'repurposing' an old PC (w/750MHz AMD CPU, and 100/1000Mb LAN card) and Ubuntu server edition. There was a bit of a learning curve, admittedly (I'm not an Linux guy), but the result was streets ahead of the Linksys in performance AND flexibility, allowing me to create all sorts of different shares (network folders) with different access permissions - some even nested. To give you and idea of performance, an average copy of a 4GB zip file ran at ~68 Mbits/sec (across my GigE LAN). This system has been running non-stop for at least 2 years without having to touch it once (no reboots etc).

Recently (last week actually), using the trickle-down-hardware style of upgrading, I updated this server to a Core2 CPU/Motherboard (1.8GHz) with 1GB RAM and a (new) 750GB SATA HD (WD "Green") and a cheap "80Plus" OCZ PSU (500W) running the latest Ubuntu version (9.04). Performance nearly doubled to ~113 Mbits/sec for the same 4GB file (I had both of these boxes running at the same time so could compare as sequential time trials). Oh and as far as power consumption, measured with a KillAWatt P3, the server idles at just under 40W and goes up to about 46W when a file xfer is taking place. (The old-hardware server ran at about 90/100 Watts idle/xfer.) These systems are headless so there's not monitor/keyboard to power or worry about - all control access is via PuTTY from my desktop.

As a speed comparison, a local copy of that same 4GB file on my desktop PC ran at ~296 Mbits/sec across different disks, or at ~159 Mbits/sec across different folders on the same disk.

In conclusion... NAS boxes are much simpler to get going, and may save a little power (though not that much I think), but you will almost certainly pay for it in performance unless you get a higher-end NAS, in which case you'll pay in $cost!

 

[moab]

Attached are the disk speeds for my rig.
C: SSD Patriot 32 GB
R: Raid 0 3 x 500GB WD HDD.
E: HDD 1 x 1.5TB Seagate
Curiously 3 500GB drives in RAID 0 is about as fast as my new 1.5TB Seagate drive.
The SSD is fastest as you would expect.

So if you going to do RAID get a bunch of the big 1.5TB seagates.

Oh and I ran the test on the drives as-is. I wanted a real world test, without de-frags and default settings.

 

[Guzzi]

I took a look at unRaid last night and it does look impressive. What I like about it is that with a tower, I can have plenty of room to grow simply by adding more disks.

The only other unanswered question for me is this: I have heard horror stories of users trying to rebuild their RAID-5 arrays and losing data! I would prefer a simple RAID-1 or RAID-10 but I'm not sure RAID-10 is possible with unRaid and I'm afraid that RAID-1 will not offer the performance to play my Blu-ray material (I had this problem with my simple WD Mirror Ed. drive using dual 1TB drives ((RAID-1 was too slow!! while RAID-0 was fine but no redundancy!!)))

Thanks again everyone for you input. I do like the towers they offer at unRaid as well. Nice setup!

Cheers,
mr

there is a free 3-disk version available - just give it a try if it works for your requirements. UnRaid is more "RAID-4 - Like" - calculating parity over a bunch of singledisks. The big advantage is, that even if your Raid fails, you still can access all drives as single drives, that are not broken.
Read-Performance in Unraid is like "Singlediskperformance" - I was able to stream Blueray from it, but didn't try multiple clients. Writeperformance is poor, because it has no distributed parity.

 

[NLS]

I am a long time user of unRAID, wouldn't buy it today.

Don't get me wrong. Works fine with their own boxes, works ok with your own hardware (as long as you are in the drivers implemented), but there are other things that make me run away.

Check alternatives.

 

[Guzzi]

I am a long time user of unRAID, wouldn't buy it today.

Check alternatives.

What alternatives? There's not many on the market compared to it - and flexraid will still need quite some time until it's reached the same level with flexview and flexraid Live ...
What other solutions do you know that support:
- jbod drives (making disk use dynamic and flexible)
- parity protection of your (jbod) data
- consolidated view to your (jbodded) data including the management for realtime writes
- powermanagement for all drives, requiring only the used drives to spin up
- S3 support (requiring proper hw in general and proper reinitialization of the filesystem drivers)

Would be very interested...

 

[NLS]

Well the developer just negates most of the positives of unRAID.
unRAID is a great idea, but Tom just stayed there for too long.
I also hate that he is ignoring his own community.
He is supposedly working on the next big release. Hope it's a strike, for his own good.
I am certainly keeping my license, certainly not denying that this thing does what it does quite ok (but that and only that) but CURRENTLY things are so negative in my mind about Limetech, that I am willing to torture myself into shifting all my data one-by-one back to NTFS.

FlexRAID (along with a JBOD solution like WHS or his almost ready FlexRAID-View) is much more active currently.
It's becoming better every day and it's good enough if you ask me.

I am going for a FlexRAID + WHS mix, which give a WEALTH of functionality I could only see from afar and this only by begging Linux wizards to hack the closed system of unRAID. No more. I am planning for a system worthy of staying online 24/7 NOT just for file servicing.
It does the five points you mention and a few tenths more, with the detail (yes detail) that the current version is limited to snapshot RAID4.
With 99% of my data being static (as most data on home NAS systems everywhere...), this is good enough for me with a scheduled resync of parity every night (plus a manual sync every time I add large amounts of data).

I can point you to my blog, but it's in Greek... maybe you can get a rough idea of what I am saying using one of the cr*py online translators:

NLS's Pit

...check the two last articles.
(if I see enough interest I might translate them myself)

 

[Guzzi]

well, I was observing unraid and flexraid since a longer time already - I think the concept of flexraid is great and more flexibel - but: That what you're complaining about is also a strength: If the system is simple and you do NOT use it for other things, this helps for a good uninterrupted operation. I had raids on multipurposemachines for several years - and I had lot's of rebuilds because of the machine was crashing or needed reboots for whatever. Also, for me personally, flexraid live is an important and necessary part for easy operation - i want to put the storage in a corner and "forget about it".
So I will couriously observe the progress - currently flexraids moves ahead with big steps while unraid seems to be frozen ...

 

[NLS]

Agreed.

Note that nobody forces you to actually make your storage "multipurpose". It's just that with flexRAID you actually can.
You could just as easily install flexRAID on a linux machine (as it is compatible with linux too), make a tight schedule (sync -if there is anything to sync- every two hours or something) and forget about it.

I surely can see scenarios where flexRAID-Live fits better though (btw, thankfully the author will not stick with that irrelevant name)... in fact if it actually is over ZFS, I will be seriously tempted (and Limeware -as Tom wants us to refer to him- will have a whole new load of things to worry about). Although since I love multipurpose (as this would be more Politically Correct and Energy Friendly - remember it's for home not for my company's server room), WHS extra functionality (and I am not talking about WHS core functionality as much as talking about that it is actually Windows and I can run Windows things that want to run all the time)... is also tempting. We'll see. (ZFS for Windows someone please?)

CURRENTLY unRAID is more mature if you ask me. FlexRAID opens much more possibilities though. When I invest in hardware, I invest so that it can last for years (I cannot afford the 6 month rotation others can afford). Proof? My storage server is a mix of SATA and IDE, on a P4 motherboard (an REALLY good and expensive at its time Asus nevertheless). If you check my blog you'll see that I use unRAID for years already. The unRAID I remember back then is EXACTLY the same unRAID I use now. Other can think of this as a good thing, others as a bad thing. You choose. If I build the system again today, what would I choose. Wouldn't pay for unRAID to be honest. Today.