Completed My Mediaportal Server Setup (1 Viewer)

[ryan20021982]

Well I was using freenas for awhile but I ended up changing some thing around. The main server is not in raid anymore just normal drives. The backup I have the same way for now also, freenas was nice but I missed being able to use that pc to do other things also. So for now I am back to no raid at all but I actually like it this way, I just filled up all the drives and just add new movies to 1 drive just like I would if it was a raid.

About the drives I have 12 total 1.5tb seagates and havent had a problem with 1 of them yet, key word yet, but I know I will eventually. I like the drives myself but I agree there are alot of problems with the firmware.

I ordered a trayless hot swap bay to put in the main server and I am thinking about just have the backup drives just sit on the shelf after loaded with movies and if I need one then pop it in. Will see how this idea will work. I am always changing things, I'm like a little kid I just cant leave well enuf alone.

 

[moab]

How about upgrading your small OS drive for SSD?
I use a patriot 32GB for OS and apps.
Bullet proof and fast.

Here is my 2c on RAID.

I compared running the 500GB alone with 2x500GB RAID 0 using ICH on the mummy board.
The performance improvement was linear. i.e. 2 drives ran twice as fast as 1 drive etc.

Here are the stats for my system:
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/general-62/best-nas-solution-45568/

I have 1 x Seagate 1.5TB Drive and like it. It is quicker than my 3 x 500GB drives in RAID0.

Out of interest could you run Roadkils Disk Speed and post the results. I would be interested on the stats.

I have used a lot of RAID systems and here is my thinking.
Commercial RAID has more fault tolerance/features than consumer RAID. e.g. commercial RAID card stores a copy of the RAID configuration on the drives as well in the RAID controllers NVRAM which is powered by battery on the RAID card. If either RAID config gets corrupted then you can recover from the NVRAM or the Drive copy depending which one went bad.
RAID5 is commonly used in servers for economy and redundancy. RAID 10 (aka RAID 0 + 1) is optimal for performance and redundancy but is expensive requiring 1 redundant drive for each good one (minimum of 4 drives).
With your 12 drives you might want to consider RAID 10 with a commercial grade RAID card.
The issue with OS RAID is that your CPU bears 100% of the processing for the RAID. This CPU load increases with the number of disks. Using a RAID card offloads the processing burden from the CPU and gives you much better error recovery and fault tolerance.
Personally I use ICH RAID 0 because it is bargain basement. I have not had any problems with it.

 

[Shurik]

The main server is not in raid anymore just normal drives. The backup I have the same way for now also,

So I guess you don't care about losing 1.5TB of data? I wouldn't want that, that's why I just bit the bullet and bought $350 RAID card to have RAID5 support. It's be much cheaper to buy it than have a totally separate backup server with bunch of drives.

And I know that I will never have a regular JBOD or RAID0 - not worth it.

Just my 2c

P.S. Oh, wait, your opening line in the first post was about you worrying to loose your gigantic collection of movies and TV shows. So why not go with RAID5?

 

[drealit]

I have thought many times about doing raid 5 for a good backup but I just dont trust raid for backup purposes. This way there is a complete backup of the movies in a separate pc so there is a pretty low chance of not having a copy of the media if something happens.

He addressed that also in his first post. He is definitely right though in that RAID really isn't a true backup solution. In reality you'd want a local server and also something that is remotely backing that up...

I personally use UnRaid as my server solution. It doesn't have 1 single point of failure (where data loss will occur) which I like most about it, not to mention there's a huge range of hardware you can use for it - and not reliant on same hard drives either. Multiple simultaneous drive failures are required for there to be data loss basically (motherboard, cpu, ram, usb, psu, sata card... any or all of those could die and your data would still be ok... unless the psu takes everything with it hahha). It's very affordable also. Eventually I plan on having a second offsite server that I can remotely shutdown/turn on for syncing purposes.

What I would like to know is where that rack mount system came from? Was that a DIY cabinet or did you buy it prebuilt and from where? If it's DIY I'd really like to see some plans for it since I will want to do something similar sooner or later.

 

[whaase]

Don't take this the wrong way, but why would you want to bother if offsite backup for your media? Backup yes, but If your house burned to the ground, would you even be thinking about your movies/music? lol I know I wouldn't.

 

[ryan20021982]

P.S. Oh, wait, your opening line in the first post was about you worrying to loose your gigantic collection of movies and TV shows. So why not go with RAID5?

Totally seperate drives is alot more stable than a raid configuration. I have seen raid5 go down and unrecoverable, just look around at avsforum.com you'll see it happens.

What I would like to know is where that rack mount system came from? Was that a DIY cabinet or did you buy it prebuilt and from where? If it's DIY I'd really like to see some plans for it since I will want to do something similar sooner or later.

I dont have any plans but yes it is a DIY cabinet, I ordered the prethreaded rails from ebay and just measured the server with rails on it to see how big to make the cabinet and attached the rails to it, pretty simple really, Just a box with the rails attached.

Don't take this the wrong way, but why would you want to bother if offsite backup for your media? Backup yes, but If your house burned to the ground, would you even be thinking about your movies/music? lol I know I wouldn't.

I never said the backups were offsite

 

[drealit]

Don't take this the wrong way, but why would you want to bother if offsite backup for your media? Backup yes, but If your house burned to the ground, would you even be thinking about your movies/music? lol I know I wouldn't.

I don't know about you, but I have a bazillion hours and vast amounts of electricity poured into my media (each bluray I rip and encode requires 20+ hours of my time and electricity). To lose all of that because of something that could have easily been avoided, would be a considerable hit to myself. Not everyone is like me or yourself for that matter. But even then, I'd want an offsite backup solution for my photo, documents, and home videos. 1 single RAID configuration is not a solution for that at all.

 

[ryan20021982]

1 single RAID configuration is not a solution for that at all.

I totally agree, and plus for the cost of some of these good raid controllers I have buy duplicate drives for all the drives I use.

 

[Shurik]

Totally seperate drives is alot more stable than a raid configuration. I have seen raid5 go down and unrecoverable, just look around at avsforum.com you'll see it happens.

Hrmm.. That's weird... So you're saying that chance of RAID5 failing is higher than a single drive? The purpose of RAIDs (1, 5, 6, etc) are to be more stable and less failure prone than single drives. If one of your drives fails - you lost 1.5TB of data. In my case I just need to replace one drive and auto-rebuild will restore the data. I do not have 30-40 drives in my array so chances of two drives going down are almost a non issue (whoever says that chances of drives failing is higher doesn't know what he's talking about). Once I go beyond 8 drives I will go to RAID6 and that is way better.

Your argument is very weak at best. And I don't understand why you're scared of RAIDs.

 

[drealit]

^^^
You're forgetting he has a 1:1 backup going on with a second server, that's pretty damn safe. If he only had a single server and was composed of just a bunch of drives with no redundancy I'd agree with you... but he doesn't as was described in the OP.