I'm so indecisive

[yh125d]

So my current storage solution (2TB external drive) is at max capacity and I need to expand soon (and on a budget lower than I planned on expanding with)


So, I'm thinking about buying an Acer Aspire Easy Store home server with WHS and 4x1TB drives in raid5 for 3tb (will later expand to 4x2tb for 6tb in a few months) and I have a couple questions

First of all blazing speed isn't that important so I'm not bothered by the software RAID in this solution

About WHS, I hear it's easy and self explanatory to get set up.

1) Will I be able to hook the headless server through the second of my two gigabit LAN ports on my UD3P and be able to access the server and internet simultaneously?

2) As I said, budget is low so I may need to mix and match some HD types to get the 4x1TB drives. As of now I have a free Samsung HD103UJ (1tb, 7200rpm). I have a WD caviar green (1tb 5400rpm) in my extra 1tb external enclosure I could cannibalize, and the included drive with the Acer is a WD green. I would also buy another one to make the 4. Will it cause any problems running 3 green 5400rpm drives and a sammy 7200? It will only be for a few months likely and I'm not concerned about the speed really

3) Like I said I'm not too concerned about the speed, but I would like to confirm that the speed would be enough to stream 1080p movies through gigabit?

4) Anyone know of a good deal? Newegg has em for $389, but I've seen several sales where other vendors package a second 1TB drive in for 2TB total included. Any of those going on now?

 

[ch33zw1z]

1) I don't see any reason why you can't. Just make sure the WHS cube and your Internet connection are different networks. IE: if LAN IP to the Internet is 192.168.1.x/255.255.255.0, then the LAN IP to the cube should not be on the 192.168.1.x network.

2)Software RAID really won't care, equal sizes is the most important.

3)A smooth running 1000Mb LAN will provide plenty of room for 1080p streaming

4)Sorry, I don't know.

 

[Old Hippie]

You can do RAID on that thing?

 

[yh125d]

Originally posted by: Old Hippie
You can do RAID on that thing?

I'm an idiot. You can't. I assumed since it has an ICH7R I could do raid 5. All I can do is WHS version of JBOD spanning or it's rendition of semi-raid 1



They are $340 on ncixus.com though, with 2gb ram and 1x1TB HD. I might do it still and just do the JBOD setup with the particularly hard to replace media backed up on my 2TB external (which I would like to eventually fill with 2tb drives if anyone knows if that might be possible)

 

[Old Hippie]

You're misunderstanding the WHS OS.

You'll be fine.

I'd just never heard of RAID on that thing.

 

[Old Hippie]

You can duplicate any folder/files on the internal storage pool and copy anything externally for a back-up.

 

[Emulex]

just do jbod. unless you use raid sata drives its not worth it.

whs has a raid-like duplication system that works best with consumer level high density drives.

 

[taltamir]

jbod? thats terrible, jbod means that if any drive fails you lose all the data. you are better off with independent disks.

 

[yh125d]

All the data... on that disk.

 

[betaflame]

unless the first one fails in which case you lose the filetable (yes I know NTFS has one on the end). And that's not always the case either, you should not do that.

 

[elconejito]

1) is tricky. I didn this for a while with dual ports on my Asus P5B. You can either
a) setup the WHS on a completely different IP. So your desktop is 192.168.1.X, and then setup your WHS as 192.168.2.X. Otherwise, windows is stoopid and will randomly look for the WHS in the 192.168.1.X range and not find it. I think I had to change the subnet also, and don't use a gateway.
b) do internet sharing (or maybe a bridge?). I forget exactly how this worked, but it was fairly simple. the WHS uses DHCP to get an IP address from the desktop, which just forwards the request to your router. I recall just right-clicking on one of the connections and choosing on of the options. If you need internet on the WHS, this is the route you have to take.

2) no idea

3) gigabit is plenty. 100mbit is iffy, just in case you are limited by that somewhere along the way (router/switch/hub for example).

4) no idea

Just note on WHS. From what I've heard (no first hand experience) while it doesn't use RAID, it does have some sort of redundancy that you can set up. I think it's called folder duplication or something like that. Yo can configure WHS to show individual drives or show up "like" a JBOD, but any folder that you mark for duplication (or whatever it's called), it will be stored on more than one disk. I don't know if it just mirrors that one folder across two drives, or if it further splits it up and puts different files/subfolders on as many disks as you have (in a RAID5 like fashion). But it does have some redundancy. And as mentioned, you can set it up to auto-backup to an external drive, and there is also plugins for online-backup like Jungledisk.

I think MS realized that if everybody put all their files in one place.... and then the drive crashed they'd be in for a world of negative publicity. So they took steps to prevent that.

 

[Yellowbeard]

FreeNAS might be a good option in this case.

 

[taltamir]

open solaris with ZFS is your best choice for the safety of your data, but if lazy, go with freenas.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Originally posted by: taltamir
open solaris with ZFS is your best choice for the safety of your data, but if lazy, go with freenas.

How user friendly is Open Solaris? I'm OS challenged to say the least. FreeNAS was simple enough for a chimp ( aka - chimple ) so I had a decent shot at it.