Help with filesever please. (1 Viewer)

[erichzann]

I am in the process of getting some plugs put in the loft as I use powerline adapters round the house. The benefit of putting everything in the loft is obviously the noise is no longer a concern. Also, the aerial is in the loft so that will work fine.

If you are concerned about dust etc you can always go for a rack mount setup. There are some really cheap and good rack mount cases on amazon etc and eBay has some amazing deals on 2nd hand rack mount cabinets.

That's definitely my next move with one 4 unit or so rack mount PC for the TV Server and anther for the Backup.

 

[4Fred]

Currently my two year old is fixated on the "on" switch on the front of my current box..

Now I understand alot better why you dont want it next to the TV

The HP Microserver that @erichzann links to in post #2 is a good one, have another look at it.

Inside the server it will never get below freezing, I cannot under any conditions imagine that if the server is running even if the disks are spinned down. Heat is a much much bigger problem.

If you want to build your own system get a box that can fit as many disks as you need, and if you dont need a cd/dvd you can utilize that space for an extra disk. When building your own system you can be creative where you put the power button and if you attach the button to the mainboard or not at all to make it childsafe.

When it comes to backup you could backup the OS to a laptop or something and for important data I backup to a friends computer and he backups to mine using CrashPlan. I do not backup movies/series, but I do backup photos and documents and things. Crashplan is free and you can buy storage at crashplan and that will cost you.

Best of luck dude!

 

[erichzann]

Yes, and the 4 bays do not need to include the OS drive in the HP Micro Server. The OS can either be run off a usb (there is a usb port inside the case attached to the motherboard or plenty of external ones) or the top horizontal drive bay can also be used for the OS by running a sata cable to a free port on the motherboard. This is what I do.

With 4tb drives now available this would give you 16gb in this machine. There is also an external sata port and the other usb ports can be used to add external drives if required.

 

[jonm]

Ufortunately, I am not remotely familiar with Linux Beyond standard Ubuntu instal and the like. I really dont fancy having to mess around with command lines and all the ususal Linux command stuff that I know nothing about and risk making things worse for myself.

Understood. I knew nothing either when I started out though, depends if you like learning new stuff, I guess. Oh and it's free, Windows isn't

 

[kiwijunglist]

I use snapraid, but that is only because my fileserver and htpc are on the same computer.

If I was to build a standalone fileserver, I'd go with something like unRAID and I would build my own PC. I'd go with a case that can hold 8x HDDs, as 4x HDDs would require me to upgrade HDD size too frequently. My HTPC has space for 9x HDD.

The reason I mention unraid is
1. works with different sized drives
2. only one disk is spinning when accessing a single file (ie. no striping, parity only)
3. you don't need striping for a media NAS, parity is enough.
4. you can add additional HDDs to the array at any time. with striping you can't do this.

With regards to condensation

1. If your fileserver is 'always on' you probably wont get any condensation

2. If you fileserver sleeps when it's not in use you should get an Asrock B75 mobo. It's a really cheap board with 8x SATA and has a dehumidifier mode when in S3 sleep.

 

[Owlsroost]

+1 for the HP Microservers - we have two of them in the office, and they are quite impressive for the money - built like proper server hardware, with tool-less plug-in drive bays and hardware monitoring. You can fit extra cards in the PCIe slots, but space is tight so they have to be low-profile and short length, and you have to partly dismantle the server to fit them (so think about before you load it up with disks). We run Win 7 on ours - no need for a 'server' OS, it's a standard AMD chipset on the motherboard AFAIK.

 

[smarty12345]

Well. Lots of food for thought there. I do like the size of the HP. but I dislike propriatary parts like PSUs and mobos. I see it all too often in my job where I can't get parts for these sorts of things.. I googled the P/N for the PSU and its as much as the whole server again.
At the cost of it, For an extra £100 I could build a modern system I could replace parts on easy that would take up to 8 drives.

I kind of like that dehumidifier idea from Asrock. Its just a shame its an Intel board with limited sata 3.0 ports. I wonder if they do an AMD FM2 system with the full 8 ports as sata 6gb. I know Gigabyte have a board with 8 sata 6gb ports. But they don't have that dehumidifier trick.
I had hoped to sleep the fileserver when not being accessed. And hopefully use something like "wake on LAN" to get it going when a client tries to access it. Though if resuming from sleep adds a high overhead of thumb twiddling waiting for it to respond and get going that would bug me..

Decisions, decisions...

 

[porky996t]

Hi Smarty,

I was in a bit of a quandary when I decided to build a server. I eventually went for discrete components and a mini tower case with a mobo ( Asus M5A99X EVO Rev 2.0 AMD 990X AM3+ ) that had 8 x sata ports. I don't use raid - just have mirror backups of each drive, well within my limited tech' capability to deal with this. I have an AMD Phenom II x 6 Black Edition as it easily handles the video conversion which is useful for streaming to tablets / phones. I convert all movies & TV Series to .m4v format and this is quickly done with the AMD processor.

It really improved my MP experience too. I can access it using RDC whilst the GF doesn't get her viewing interrupted by my moving files around. My server spec is in my signature.

 

[erichzann]

I also run mirrored back-ups and if you give up on the hardware raid idea and either use software raid or no raid at all then you can always add pci cards to add 4 or so extra sata ports at a time.

Personally I choose not to go with raid due to concerns I have about rebuilding broken arrays and instead use mirroring with drive pooling. This approach also allows me to have my backup in a separate machine (the micro server) which reduces the number of ports needed in the one machine if the server and backup are combined.

Also, I want backup so that if someone deletes something by accident I can restore it. Raid can't help with this. Raid will only help with failing disks.[DOUBLEPOST=1368652797][/DOUBLEPOST]Here is another post where myself and @porky996t went into some more detail about our specific server setups:

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/cost-of-storage-and-the-like.118726/#post-990997

 

[kiwijunglist]

Snapraid and other snapshot raid systems can cover against accidental file deletion and there is no raid to rebuild if you move the hard drives around.

With regards to sata 6gbs you don't even need 1gbs for a media fileserver[DOUBLEPOST=1368653788][/DOUBLEPOST]You could put something like a Intel g620 or 2nd hand I3-2100 in it although I'm sure asrock makes an AMD board with the same features