Network Storage

[nutty]

ZFS is only on BSD, while I agree it has a great upside to Raid5/6, no native support in Linux turned me off

[ysu]

How can zfs help with reliability ?

altho I'd go for a raid0+1 rather than 5

[nutty]

Well there are plenty of reasons to go raid 5 over 0 or 1

0 means if you lose a single drive all your data is gone, while 1 is decent over 4 drives you only have 2 worth of data.. Raid 5 gives you the redundancy that if a single disk dies you dont lose your data, but also means you only lose a single drive in your raid array.

Software raid 5 isnt fantastic, build times are long and write transfers are "slow" (note, I get ~60mb/s with this setup) but read times are close to raid 0 and if you have a hardware failure you can pickup your raid and mount it in any pc.. even using a live cd

[ysu]

raid0+1 is sometimes referred to as raid10, I hope you got what I mean, now

[wabbit]

ZFS has different limitations on different NASes, I went there and shortly afterwards formatted again. As for RAID, nuttys right, RAID 5... With enough disks the slower write speed isn't an issue.

Says the guy with 6 disks :P

[ysu]

I wouldn't even bother with RAID5 look up ZFS much MUCH better than raid 5/6

Enough of the idle chat, I'd like to get to the bottom of this statement!

How is ZFS better than a (slightly) redundant storage - eg raid 5 ?
I don't think it can beat it in speed either, because of the hardware limitations - unless you were applying zfs to a SSD. But I'll happily stand corrected if I was wrong.

[Doso]

I wouldn't even bother with RAID5 look up ZFS much MUCH better than raid 5/6

Enough of the idle chat, I'd like to get to the bottom of this statement!

How is ZFS better than a (slightly) redundant storage - eg raid 5 ?
I don't think it can beat it in speed either, because of the hardware limitations - unless you were applying zfs to a SSD. But I'll happily stand corrected if I was wrong.

The biggest advantage of ZFS isn't speed (but this should not be a limiting factor in the home enviroment) it is data integrity

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showt ... hlight=zfs" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The big issue in my opinion with RAID 5/6/1+0 etc is the controller card, if it goes boom you have to have the same (or similar) controller card on hand to recover your data (in my opinion this is why I advise anyone thinking of running hardware raid of an intergrated motherboard raid card to at least buy an external raid controller)

[ysu]

If you run your raid on something like an ich8r, then you can easily run it on the ich10r as well (tested, altho it was a raid10 setup). So I think if you stick to one sort of chipset you'll be ok - but not sure about raid5 in this case.
Not sure if you can rebuild the array on an alien controller either (actually that's something I'd like to know myself, too!).

But if you run ZFS without raid (and/or stringent backups!) and you have a drive failure you're truly rooted - this is why I was thinking - while these concerns above are true - you're safer with a raid. But then again, I'd go for a raid10 in any case. Yes you get somewhat less space but the advantages are much greater, IMHO. I think raid 5 is overrated while raid 10 is a bit underrated, usually. I mean c'mon, what can be better than having a redundant stripe for safety (and speeds!)

[Doso]

If you run your raid on something like an ich8r, then you can easily run it on the ich10r as well (tested, altho it was a raid10 setup). So I think if you stick to one sort of chipset you'll be ok - but not sure about raid5 in this case.
Not sure if you can rebuild the array on an alien controller either (actually that's something I'd like to know myself, too!).

But if you run ZFS without raid (and/or stringent backups!) and you have a drive failure you're truly rooted - this is why I was thinking - while these concerns above are true - you're safer with a raid. But then again, I'd go for a raid10 in any case. Yes you get somewhat less space but the advantages are much greater, IMHO. I think raid 5 is overrated while raid 10 is a bit underrated, usually. I mean c'mon, what can be better than having a redundant stripe for safety (and speeds!)

ZFS is raid in software kind of, in ZFS you can have 1 drive fail and still maintain full data ingerity (ZFS-Z simlar to raid 5) or ZFS-Z2 (simlar to raid 6 need to have 3 drives fail to lose data) or even ZFS-Z3 (Need to have 4 drives fail before lossing data)

Unlike traditional file systems, which reside on single devices and thus require a volume manager to use more than one device, ZFS filesystems are built on top of virtual storage pools called zpools. A zpool is constructed of virtual devices (vdevs), which are themselves constructed of block devices: files, hard drive partitions, or entire drives, with the last being the recommended usage.[22] Block devices within a vdev may be configured in different ways, depending on needs and space available: non-redundantly (similar to RAID 0), as a mirror (RAID 1) of two or more devices, as a RAID-Z (similar to RAID-5) group of three or more devices, or as a RAID-Z2 (similar to RAID-6) group of four or more devices.[23] In July 2009, triple-parity RAID-Z3 was added to OpenSolaris.[24][25]

[ysu]

aha! that was the info I was missing!
Thanks, now it makes sense.

...and I've yet to click those bloody link, I suspect they'd have explained it but I was rather lazy

[norbs]

Nope, got mine locally in Brissy, contacted this dude and brought 3 (2 workmates got them)
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NEW-HP-Proli ... 33698731de" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Pulled the pin and bought one myself tonight. Should have it late next week.

Nutty, any reason you didnt go for FreeNAS?

[nutty]

I know it has the advantage of ZFS and it was tempting, but honestly I didnt want it to only be a NAS, I wanted it to be a proper server.

I have mine doing

UPnP Media player with ps3 media server
It handles all my downloads with Sick Beard/Couch Potato + Sabnzbd and Transmission
Ive got alarms setup to email me if the raid dies, a HDD fails ANY S.M.A.R.T test and give me a daily email with login attempts

Workmate got vmware running ontop of his, and he runs up 2 vm's and it seems to work fine!

Heaps of great info here, if your running with 5 hdd's your going to need to do that bios upgrade
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showt ... p?t=958208" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[norbs]

[nutty]

nice mate!
if your going down the nas server path, i forgot to mention you should make sure you had 2-4gb usb key to use as your OS HDD, then you keep all the HDD's for the raid, i got a 4gb one from officeworks for $9

[norbs]

Probably more like what you are doing with NAS as the main job, but also Torrents.

I have a couple of 8G USB keys here, so will use one of them.

Not sure if I am missing a cable or not, but I have nothing to hook an optical drive up with. So I am no sure how to get an OS onto it for now.

Will go down the Ubuntu ath I think, and follow your guide.

[nutty]

Yea, you need your own sata cable, doesnt come with one of the CDRom

Also, remember to unplug all your drives when you do the install, feel free to PM me if you have any questions

[norbs]

Found a way around the CDROM issue.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I think.


I am thinking Ubuntu 11.04. Any dramas there oh Nutty one?

[nutty]

Make sure its Ubuntu Server
I had problems building off a USB key, im guessing it was because it was usb key > usb key

Ive got a USB CDRom tho

[norbs]

I'm interested... Does it require much nous to use, because as you know I am computer moran.

Plus, emma-chisit?

Smiss, that Netgear Box is for sale. $125 mate with out any disks. If you're keen, I can get Onz to drop it off next Friday night on her way home from work.

[norbs]

Well, thanks to Mt Nut, my server is a go.

I have a few things to add or modify to the how to if thats ok Nutty. I will collate them tomorrow.

I took the 2TB Hitashi drive out of the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and whacked it into the HP. The speed difference astounded me.

Netgear NAS - 15-20MBs
HP Server - 100-120MBs

It copied a 300meg file so quick I didn't realise it had done it.

Still got a few things to do that are on the Nutty HowTo, but so far it is rocking my world. Now to fill it up with drives.

[nutty]

Good stuff Norbs! happy everything is working out fine for you.

and send me through the changes, as I said a few people have helped me put it together, so I would love to keep it updated

[dvestate]

How are you boys going with the HP MicroServers?

I've been thinking about something for storage at home that is small, reliable, quiet, etc. Would be good to reduce the footprint of my current Torrent/storage PC and actually have some sort of disk redundancy etc

[nutty]

Love it! Best investment ive made in years!

[wabbit]

Grrr, I'm NAS shopping at the moment. Because I really need to backup my current one (10TB). I can't think of another way to reliably backup my NAS other than with another one. I've done a fair few clean ups but the save made available never lasts long.

QNAP and Drobo are out, being stupidly priced. I'm happy to go Thecus again because the current one is rock solid in every way. Then I saw a 12 bay Synology, which is where I'm currently making sure "everything" is sweet.

Of course I'll have to wait until HDD prices come down, I guess it gives me more research time.

[ysu]

so in other words, once you tasted NAS there's no stopping, you'll need more