Ongoing The Milhouse Media Server (1 Viewer)

[Dubyahjay]

Milhouse.
Damn Sexay.
Nuff Said.

When are you putting mine together?

 

[clintebb]

nice project.. how hot does it all run? hows it go with 5 hard drives stacked that close? i figured if i was going to ask someone you would probably know.. what kind of temps are acceptable for hard drives to run at? mine run at 40-47 or so degrees, but i dont know how high they can go safely and without decreasing their life or reliability.

 

[milhouse]

Good question - I have not found any SMART monitoring software that will cover that many drives. And most don't find the ones on the PCI-X SATA cards. Since my mainboard-connected drives are also in those cages, they're probably a good enough approximation, and I recall them running in the low 40s. Each 5-in-3 has a fan, so they pull a lot of air over the drives.

 

[Karamu]

Hi,

Yes, this thing is a beast and all that, but I've just finished reading through the thread and don't understand why you're willing to use software RAID instead of hardware RAID. Hardware RAID is where RAID is implemented by the RAID controller, not Windows. It's faster, portable between operating systems, and more reliable than software RAID (especially Windows RAID). In hardware RAID, the operating system usually isn't even aware that the drive it picks up is a RAID array. Using RAID set up by the operating system on a hardware RAID controller isn't hardware RAID. It's software RAID. And, according to a review of that motherboard here, the motherboard RAID on your motherboard is FAKERAID (software RAID implemented the onboard drive controller). FAKERAID has NONE of the advantages of EITHER (h/w: speed, OS portability, reliability | s/w: PC portability, price), and ALL of the disadvantages of BOTH.

I'm not flaming you, it's just a concern I had, so sorry if I seemed a bit harsh in this post. =) It is truly a good machine, I just would have configured it differently.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way, with hardware RAID, you wouldn't have had that millions of drives problem you had earlier in the thread. Just wanted to point that out.

 

[Gixxer]

Hi,

Yes, this thing is a beast and all that, but I've just finished reading through the thread and don't understand why you're willing to use software RAID instead of hardware RAID. Hardware RAID is where RAID is implemented by the RAID controller, not Windows. It's faster, portable between operating systems, and more reliable than software RAID (especially Windows RAID). In hardware RAID, the operating system usually isn't even aware that the drive it picks up is a RAID array. Using RAID set up by the operating system on a hardware RAID controller isn't hardware RAID. It's software RAID. And, according to a review of that motherboard here, the motherboard RAID on your motherboard is FAKERAID (software RAID implemented the onboard drive controller). FAKERAID has NONE of the advantages of EITHER (h/w: speed, OS portability, reliability | s/w: PC portability, price), and ALL of the disadvantages of BOTH.

I'm not flaming you, it's just a concern I had, so sorry if I seemed a bit harsh in this post. =) It is truly a good machine, I just would have configured it differently.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way, with hardware RAID, you wouldn't have had that millions of drives problem you had earlier in the thread. Just wanted to point that out.

could you then recommend a raid card to do hardware raid with?

then what happens if the raid card dies?

 

[milhouse]

The rational for software is explained early in the thread. 1) I don't mind the performance hit for software RAID, because it's write once for a media server. 2) It's a hell of a lot cheaper - 2 PCI-X 12 port RAID cards? That's about $1500 right there. 3) Software is more portable. If my server blows up, I can physically attached the array to any Windows computer - I don't have to find a compatible RAID card. And I don't have to buy another RAID card if it breaks (see COST again). 4) I would absolutely prefer to use Linux software RAID over Windows - it's a lot more stable and flexible (like OCE), but I wanted to use it for my TV Server, so needed Windows, and I am much more comfortable with administering a Windows box. Not sure I could fix Linux if I had to... 5) This is, simply, not irreplaceable data. Painful to re-rip everything, but certainly possible. I only backup my personal video, not the DVD rips or TV recordings.

I do NOT use the RAID on the motherboard - I know it's fake RAID. It also puts in the same spot for portability. I don't use the motherboard RAID functionality - I just let WIndows see 15 individual drives, and set up the RAID in Windows.


I am curious what drive problems hardware RAID could have avoided? Near as I can tell, I've just had some disks go bad for unknown reasons. Replace, let the array rebuild, move on. Or do you mean moving the array from one machine to the other and having to rebuild when I first built this server?

I didn't take this as a flame - no problem challenging my decisions or clarify why I went a certain direction. It's been running over a year now, and quite stable other than a few drives that have gone bad. RAID 5 did what it's supposed to do. Really, my only complaint is that there's no good way to notify myself when a drive goes bad. I have to literally check disk manager on a regular basis and look to see if I am in failed redundancy mode.

 

[eetaylog]

Milhouse, when you were researching unRAID, FreeNAS and linux to handle your RAID arrays, did you find out whether MP TV server could be installed on them? id like to set my server (currently a 4 x 500Gb RAID array on XP Pro) up to handle tv for the MP clients in my house, but dont know whether it would be possible using a different OS?

cheers

 

[milhouse]

Nope, I didn't try anything but a Windows platform because I intended to use TV Server on it.

I did see your other threads, and I will make a couple of notes:
Someone in the forum did some work to get Windows running in VMWare (virtualized), and TV Server running on the virtualized O/S. Search the forums for "vmware" or "virtual", maybe.
There are people who hack XP to add RAID 5 functionality. (I think you said your 4x500 are raid 0 or 1.) It's copying a couple of files from Server 2k3, and a registry hack.

I agreed with the points you made in the other thread. If I am responsible to support it when something goes wrong, then I need an O/S I am comfortable with. As much as I'd like Linux software RAID, I'd be screwed when it broke. Same problem with virtualization.


I presume you saw the discussion earlier in this thread about on-line capacity expansion? That's the one thing you DON'T get with Windows software RAID.


I hope this helps-
Jason

 

[frenzy]

I have not found any SMART monitoring software that will cover that many drives.

In this survey (PDF Link) conducted by Google engineers it was found that SMART is useless in 56% of the cases and excessive cooling is actually more damaging than overheating, up to a certain level. Don't worry, your nice setup is safe as it is.

 

[Kian]

How to build one big enough to grow, when I've already got 8 storage drives?
After a fair amount of research, I settled on a Cooler Master Stacker STC-T01-UWK for the case. This monster has ELEVEN 5.25 bays down the front. If I remove the power/reset/ports in the top bay, I can stretch it to TWELVE.
Newegg.com - COOLER MASTER CM Stacker STC-T01-UWK Black/ Silver Aluminum / Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case - Computer Cases

To get the most hard drive space crammed into the 12 bays, I am using four 5-in-3 SATA backplanes. In the Stacker feedback on newegg, someelse had already done this, so I know they'll fit. This gives space for TWENTY hot swap drives in one case. Nice.
Newegg.com - SUPERMICRO CSE-M35T-1B Black 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure - Server Accessories

The hard part of planning for 20 hard drives is the controller. A hardware raid controller with this many ports costs a FORTUNE. And I wanted software raid, anyway. (If the RAID controller dies, I have to get another one exactly like the first. Too risky for me.) I found an 8-port SATA controller for PCI-X that should do the trick - and be faster than the cheap Rosewill 4-port PCI ones, too. So two of these cards:
Newegg.com - SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133MHz SATA Controller Card - Controllers / RAID Cards

PCI-X is a little hard to find. Let alone two ports. So I had to go to a server-class motherboard. 2 PCI-X slots, and 6 SATA ports. That gives me 22 ports for 20 drives.
Newegg.com - ASUS M2N-LR Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 ATX AMD Opteron 1000 series
Dual core ready Server Motherboard - Server Motherboards

This motherboard also drove my decision for an Opteron and ECC memory. 2.5 GHz dual core (that I will probably under-clock to save power) and 2GB of ECC memory.
Newegg.com - AMD Opteron 1216 Santa Ana 2.4GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2 103W Dual-Core Processor - Processors - Servers
Newegg.com - Kingston 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Server Memory Model KVR800D2E5K2/2G - Server Memory

I figure that as long as I am using a server-class setup, I'd go with RAID 1 (mirroring) for the system drives. So 2 160GB drives for that.
Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Blue WD1600AAJS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

And finally, two 500W power supplies. The case has room for two, and to be blunt, 2 smaller power supplies is a lot cheaper than one big one.
Newegg.com - COOLER MASTER eXtreme RP-500-PCAR 500W ATX12V V2.01 Power Supply - Power Supplies

first of all congrats for the successful setup.
i am also interested in a similar setup as my HDDs are about to reach their limits (5 1TB HDDs). currently i am thinking about exchanging 1-2 HDD with bigger HDDs, i.e. swapping a 1TB HDD with a 2TB HDD. this would be a dirty approach though.

so my quesiton would be:
is your media server also capable of acting like a normal HTPC? i.e. does it only serve as a storage solution for media so that other clients in the house can access the media for streaming? or can this setup also be used as a native HTPC running Mediaportal and watching movies? whist directly conected to the TV?

the reason y i am askin this is that i am using newsnet for my media and a regularly updated RSS feed tells my HTPC when to download certain files. after download the files are automatically unpacked and moved to their pre-specified folders. so my biggest concern would be whether your setup would also support such a process.

other questions:
- are there alternatives to supermicro 5-in-3? in germany, these are not available.
- are there alternatives to your ASUS mainboard? the one u are using is also not availabe in germany, any other brands or models you can suggest?
- would you sugges streaming mkv/hd material via WLAN? Which kind of connection would your suggest for streaming media?
- which hardware are the clients in your home using for streaming media from the media server?

lots of question and hope to find some answers

merry xmas,
k