1 TB RAID 1+0 Windows File Server Easy

[jgold03]

I am thinking about building a 1 TB drive for movies/ISOs/etc. for my family network. It will be accessed a lot, with equal amounts of reads/writes. What are your guys thoughts about the following:

- RAID Card
- Hard Drives (SATA/PATA)
- Power Supply
- OS (options for both Windows and Linux)
- Software
- Other Issues

 

[DaveSimmons]

RAID 0 is silly for just a file server. What you want is RAID 5, so you only need 1 extra drive (plus a spare sitting in a box).

* A cheap SATA or IDE RAID-5 controller from someone like Promise
* If it supports >4 drives, 5x250, otherwise 4 x 300 or 400.

* An Antec SLK3700AMB case (add a low-speed 120x25 mm intake fan to the empty front fan mount) -- this has 5 grommeted HD slots with vertical space between each drive for excellent cooling and low noise.
* Maybe a better power supply than the included 350watt, though I used it for a year in my FLAC music server box (Tualatin 1.3 GHz, 512 MB, geforce2mx, 5 hard drives)

* A low end CPU (anything you can buy new is fast enough)

* Linux if you know it. I use Win2000 server, but that's because I also use my box for development and get it "free" with my MSDN subscription.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
RAID 0 is silly for just a file server. What you want is RAID 5, so you only need 1 extra drive (plus a spare sitting in a box).

Aye.

 

[Vegito]

My co-worker just build a 22 drive raid 0 box.. 22x250 - 5.5 TB, he paid around 4100
He had to use one of the cube cases with 22 bay.
I asked him what if 1 drive fails.. he's using it to told 3TB of ripped dvd movies which he already has on Disc

Ill get pics later on today..

The funny thing is he wouldn't used raid 5 to save himself the failure of 1 drive but he would go out and buy a tape drive that can backup 4-5 tbs at a time.. which seems to be pretty expensive

 

[dartworth]

Originally posted by: forcesho
My co-worker just build a 22 drive raid 0 box.. 22x250 - 5.5 TB, he paid around 4100
He had to use one of the cube cases with 22 bay.
I asked him what if 1 drive fails.. he's using it to told 3TB of ripped dvd movies which he already has on Disc

Ill get pics later on today..

The funny thing is he wouldn't used raid 5 to save himself the failure of 1 drive but he would go out and buy a tape drive that can backup 4-5 tbs at a time.. which seems to be pretty expensive

pics please...

sounds wicked

 

[KK]

I have a promise SX6000 card that is running 5 80GB drives currently. It has worked pretty good so far. I've had 2 times so far that I've lost a drive and was able to install a new drive and rebuild it. I'd like to swap out those 80GB drives with some 200+GB drives, but right now I don't want to spend that kind of money. As far as power goes, I just have a 300watt unit powering those 5 drives, plus another 80GB drive, a dvd burner, 4 case fans, P4 1.6A, I haven't run into a problem yet, knock on wood.

 

[MulLa]

Isn't the max LTO tape drive these days can hold 200/400G? You mean he's gone out and got an autoloader / type library for that??? :Q

 

[Vegito]

he wants to till i told him how much those things cost.. the cost of a dslt 320 tape is around 55.. and he nearly choked.. better at least do raid 5

 

[Adul]

go for a raid 5 array.

 

[Adul]

Originally posted by: Adul
go for a raid 5 array.

also when buying the HD look at the cost per mb. 200 GB drives have a very nice cost for each drive right now. 250GB drives are getting there.

 

[jgold03]

RAID 5 has slow writes though

Also, would you just use Windows File Sharing if you used Windows 2000 as your OS?

Any ideas on good RAID cards if you wanted to have 250 GB 8 drives (assuming 1+0)?

 

[DaveSimmons]

RAID 5 has slow writes though

Not compared to even gigabit ethernet speed. If the network were saturated with write requests (for example 25 users sending MPEG2 DVD rips at 8x speed) the server would still be receiving far less than 100 MB/sec.

How many users do you actually expect to be writing at once, and how much traffic will they generate (keeping in mind the limit on network bandwidth).

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: jgold03
RAID 5 has slow writes though

No slower than a RAID1+0; the data still has to be written to two disks in either setup. It's slower than a RAID0 for writes, but RAID5 does support striping and concurrent nonoverlapping writes, so it should be significantly faster than a RAID1.

Also, would you just use Windows File Sharing if you used Windows 2000 as your OS?

For network file accesses on a home network? Sure.

Any ideas on good RAID cards if you wanted to have 250 GB 8 drives (assuming 1+0)?

There are a few 8-port SATA RAID cards out there (and even 12- and 16-port models). They're mostly just bigger versions of the 4-port cards -- but they aren't cheap (starting at $200-300 for software RAID cards). I'm not sure if anyone currently makes 8-channel IDE RAID cards. Beyond that you're into SCSI territory, which gets even more expensive.

 

[jgold03]

No slower than a RAID1+0; the data still has to be written to two disks in either setup

Actually, because you can read/write to two disks in parallel, it IS faster.

What File Sharing Utility (other than Windows File Sharing) would you use if you had a lot more users?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: jgold03

No slower than a RAID1+0; the data still has to be written to two disks in either setup

Actually, because you can read/write to two disks in parallel, it IS faster.

You can do multiple writes in parallel on RAID5, as long as they don't share data or parity disks (and you can do multiple reads in parallel as long as they don't share data disks). With a 4-disk RAID5 it's impossible to get more than 2 writes in parallel (and often you will only be able to get one), but you could get 3 or 4 parallel writes with an 8-disk RAID5.

With a RAID1+0, what you normally have is a RAID1 of two RAID0 arrays. With four disks, at most you can get two writes in parallel (since each write has to be done to both sides of the RAID1), although unlike the RAID5, you *always* get two writes in parallel, no matter where on the disk the data lies. The difference in throughput is generally not going to be *that* great, and you get a lot less storage with the RAID1+0 (2/3 the space in a 4-disk setup, and just over half the space in an 8-disk array).

If you know your workload is going to be write-heavy, and you can tolerate the reduced amount of available space, a RAID1+0 *will* be faster, but probably not dramatically so. Another thing to consider is that RAID5 also introduces extra system overhead unless you have a controller with onboard cache memory and hardware XOR processing.

What File Sharing Utility (other than Windows File Sharing) would you use if you had a lot more users?

I'd consider going to Linux and running some sort of Samba implementation if you want to serve a lot of Windows hosts (more than 5-10), or using Windows Server. The basic filesharing built into WindowsXP/2K starts to bog down the CPU with a lot of parallel users, especially if they're doing a lot of nonlinear operations. But if you're just using it as storage, or for streaming media, basic Windows File Sharing could handle quite a few clients (20-30, maybe more on a multiprocessor?)