Ongoing OS Choice? (1 Viewer)

[MrBobC]

Hello All,

I am currently engaged in my first foray into home networking. I have a case that will hold 23 HDDs, of which I already have 5 (6TB), 7 more will arrive tomorrow (10.5TB). This is of course my server, and I have used basically the same parts as the Milhouse Media Server but with a different case. My question to the community is what OS should I use? I tried using WHS but found I cannot get fault tolerance on it as all it has is "Folder Duplication" which is not what I want, I believe I want RAID 5 which is not possible with WHS as it only has a "Drive Pool." Should I use Windows Server 2003, 2008, Ubuntu, Linux, or perhaps something else? My system drive is an extra 300GB HDD I have laying around and the other 22 will be at least 1.5TB for a total storage capacity of at least 33TB. I plan on using this server to host my Blu-Ray ISOs, DVD ISOs, Music, Emulation, and I will probably want to add TV watching/recording capabilities at some point, so please keep that in mind. I have two clients thus far, my main PC in the den and my HTPC in the bedroom which has MediaPortal 1.0 with the My Emulators, My TV-Series, and MyFilms plugins on them. The PC in the den will only access the music files, whilst the HTPC will access basically all the files. Please advise.

Thank You,
Bob

 

[rekenaar]

Wow, 12 HDD's and place for 11 more...impressive! Sorry I do not really have constructive advice.

Wait...what about z/OS

 

[funkstar]

Is this just a storage server or will it be running the TVServer part of MediaPortal as well? As that will limit your choices if it is.

If it's just a storage server I'd be tempted to ditch the 300GB boot drive and use something like FreeNAS off a compact flash card or similar. With that number of drives I'd want to use proper hardware RAID cards, Areca cards are supposed to be fantastic, but pretty expensive. At least you will get good support though, so if a card dies they will you get the array working in a replacement card, something that budget vendors won't be so good at (I'm not saying it would happen, just that you get what you pay for as far as support is concerned).

If it is going to be running the TVServer, then officially you are limited to XP or Vista. There are threads on here about getting TVServer installed on Windows Server 2003 and 2008, but they are not supported by the developers at all.


I currently have 2x 5 drive NAS boxes and a HTPC with 4 tuners that I would like to combine. This will need to wait until I find a new, larger appartment. But when it does happen I'll probably go for some version of Windows Server that others have successfully managed to get the TVServer running on. I have a few other tasks I'd like to give it as well, so the pain in getting it all set up should be worth it.

 

[etheesdad]

OMFG

(thats all I have to contiubute. I just wanted to say that)

 

[MrBobC]

I am thinking I will eventually want to run the TVServer. I currently have Server2003 installed with Software RAID5 on the HDDs, but I notice they spend a great deal of time "resynching," but, after all, it is 7.5TB (really 5.44 with another 1.36 of parity). The first time I set it up it took a little over 24 hours to resynch. Unfortunately I made the comp bluescreen though and since that restart it has been resynching for 2 days now. I am using the SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X card because it has 8 SATA ports for only $100. I have seen some of the Areca ones, but they are $450 for an 8-port. I was planning on using 4 5-disk RAID5 arrays, the boot drive, a TV drive, and a music/emulation/misc. drive. Everything but the boot drive is a Seagate 1.5TB drive, and all the firmwares on them are okay according to Seagate, so I'm not concerned about that. Currently I have one array up which is resynching, the TV drive, the misc. drive, and all five of the drives for the next array, with two more drives slated to arrive Tuesday, which will give me 14 1.5TB drives and a boot drive. I will check out TVServer more and see if it will do what I might want it to.

Specs:

Lian-Li PC-A77-B Case
4 Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-bay SATA Enclosures
14 1.5TB HDDs
1 300GB Boot Drive
Windows Server 2003
Opteron 1352
4 GB Kingston DDR2 PC6400
Corsair CMPSU-520HX 520W Power Supply
ASUS M2N-LR AM2 nVidia nforce Professional 3600 ATX Server Motherboard
2 SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133Mhz Sata Controller Card

 

[drealit]

Hmmm tasty plans...

Currently I have a 2 Server setup-

Primary Storage Server:
UnRaid Pro Operating System Fantastic for media servers! Very low maintenance, doesn't cost a lot, highly functional and a great support community.
6x1TB Drives - 5 Usable one for Parity/Redundancy
1x160GB IDE Hard drive used as a cache drive... data gets moved here before automatically being moved over by UnRaid in the middle of the night to the protected array. This leads to faster writes to the server and doesn't waste a SATA connector.
2x2GB Crucial 6400 DDR2 Memory Great ram... UnRaid doesn't fully take advantage of it... but hell it's so cheap!
Abit AB9 Pro Motherboard UnRaid does not utilize true Hardware/Software RAID for it's functionality so no need for expensive RAID cards etc.... this motherboard is perfect for the OS since it has 9 native SATA ports on it with a PCI-Ex16 slot for an 8xSATA card, 2 PCIex1 slots for 2xSATA cards, and some PCI slots which I don't use
Intel Celeron 440 Single Core Processor Don't need anything more for a media server like this
Corsair 550VX Powersupply Very efficient more than enough power for a lot of drives
Coolermaster Centurion 5 Enclosure Room for 15 drives up front once you drop in 3x 3x5.25 into 5x3.5 bay convertors... and you can probably weasle more inside the case... not as spiffy as your enclosure but is a great budget case for a home brewed budget server.
4GB USB Drive This is where the heart of UnRaid is... it runs right off the USB stick

If one drive fails I'm fully backed up (via the dedicated Parity disk which is equal to your largest drive or IS your largest drive), if 2 drives fail at the same time there's potential for me to lose data on both disks... but the chances of this are slim. If the motherboard dies I'm fine, if the CPU dies I'm fine, if the memory dies I'm fine, if the SATA cards die I'm fine, and if the PSU dies (provided it doesn't nuke everything else with it) I'm fine. This software is very secure for media storage purposes but ideally you'd want a 2ndary backup server... which you should always have in a remote location anyway. I've been using this server for almost a year now and it works wonderfully. Stores all my movies, music, tv shows... steams them all perfectly fine even 1080p encoded mkv's.

My secondary server is where all the nonstorage related activities happen - SQL hosting, Torrenting, Encoding, TV Server responsibilities sooner or later? etc. etc. and this truly was a budget computer for me... completed for under $140 (that's everything including the processor haha) excluding the harddrives which I had laying around:

Secondary Server:
Windows Server 2008 32bit although I might switch to the 64bit edition since my encoding would benefit from it.
Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 Motherboard Extremely efficient and a very low power consumption... plenty of features for this type of build
AMD Phenom 9600 Quad Core CPU Encodes as well as my E8400 and stays at reasonable temperatures with the heatsink/fan I have on it (Zerotherm ZFS10?)
4GB Crucial 6400 DDR2 Memory Same stuff from before... cheap as dirt and very stable
2x320GB Seagate 7200.10 hard drives in RAID 1 for the OS and all my configurations etc.
1x500GB Western Digital Harddrive used for Storage and primary torrent location before I move the downloads over to the media server and also where my encodings go before I move them over.
Antec NSK4400B Enclosure looks good, not too big, has room inside with decent airflow
Antec Earthwatts 380W Powersupply more than enough for this build and is highly efficient

My endgame plan is to upgrade both servers to "Server" grade parts but I built both of these on a very low budget... had just finished school and was still suffering from loans etc. haha. Migrating from my current UnRaid build to a new hardware setup will be extremely easy provided I pay attention to which drives are in what location etc. The other server will be a little more work to migrate to different hardware but it will get done in due time.

For Media Storage responsibilities and media streaming I highly recommend an UnRaid setup. It's very easy to setup and doesn't depend at all on big expensive hardware to run. It is very easy to setup... and I truly had my first test build up and going within 10 minutes of installing the hardware into a temporary box. It really is that easy to do. The only draw backs to UnRaid is that you lose the speed of a true RAID setup... but for media storage I don't believe you really need that benefit. I write at around 30-40MB/s depending on what I'm doing/where I'm doing it from and I can read at up to 75MB/s.

I like having 2 separate servers since I find it easier to maintain and less to worry about. I don't touch the media server except to stream my media off it or put more media on it. I remote desktop into my other server and do whatever I need to do whether it be maintain my databases, torrent something, rip/encode a bluray or dvd... it's all very convenient and easy to use.

My home network is a CAT6 based Gigabit network to ensure no hiccups there.