NAS questions ...n00bness inside!

[redd87]

n00b alert! (so you can't say you haven't been warned...again)

Hi, I have this devious plan of bashing my DVD collection into oblivion but ... I need to put the home movies, photos and all the other cr... incredibly useful stuff into another storage solution, the reason for this topic.

I am planning of making a software raid 6 box with Linux (I have some basic experience with it ... by looking at other people using it, but I'll get to that later). This is a future project that I am planning in about 2 months (when money will be available)

My requirements are: 6-8 2TB drives (for 8-10TB usable space)

I was thinking of going el-cheapo with:
Gigabyte GA-MA770-ES3 (56€)
Athlon x3 440 (70€)
1GB RAM (have it)
Tacens Radix IV 450W (33€)
A no-name case that can hold the drives (20€)
6x2TB Western Digital Green (6x110€)

I live in Spain, so if you link something it'll be for reference purpose only.

Questions:
1. I want some room to expand, the MB has 6 SATA ports, continuing the el-cheapo trend I was pondering if these add-in cards are reliable enough for my needs (and by that I mean they will work reasonably well @100MB/s per drive and if they crash won't bring my drives with them)

http://cgi.ebay.es/PCI-E-SATA-IDE-C...224?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c56f68000

2. Speed is not essential, but I want the rebuild time in case of a failure to be again, reasonable (10-12 hours would be nice, 6-7 even better for my peace of mind and a sound sleep at night)

3. Is the hardware I chose OK?

4. I want to skimp on the GPU and manage the box remotely (I will use one when I set it up, but don't want to have one installed)... I assume this is possible, but due to my incredibly vast experience and superior expertise I will put you to the test and ask if it is possible

5. Any other suggestions?

6. Am I a complete and utter idiot? ( I mean I know that I am, but not so sure about the completeness and utterness part)

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Rebuild times on 2TB SATA drives are not pretty.

You're going to have lots of people recommending ZFS to you here. The RAID threads are endless... RAID 6 seems overkill for a home setup.

Just get a mobo with onboard video.

If this is just a file server the majority of the hardware matters very little other than reliability. Just make sure the PSU can handle all the drives.

The drives are going to matter the most. I'll let others speak to the merits of the WD Green drives in RAID arrays. As I said, the threads are endless, so you can probably find all the answers you could ever want about home file servers if you scour the forum.

 

[redd87]

Thank you for the input.
I have been a little research and a lot of people are against RAID5 because of the unrecoverable byte error, that I understand ZFS mitigates to some extent, but this is a no-backup setup (except the family photo collection) so I want it to be fairly reliable, hence the RAID-6 (technically all the data I have now it will have backup in the form of around 300 DVDs which would be a pain in the royal behind to restore).

The CPU is there for the parity calculations during rebuilds, the AMD because it supports ECC memory (again, probably overkill).

Money is an issue, so I would like to avoid enterprise-grade HDD unless consumer ones are that unreliable ... I have searched a little and found that they fail ... a lot. The culprit may be the TLER being deactivated... sooo Seagate LP's then which, from my understanding can be forced to activate the ERC (Seagate's equivalent to WD's TLER) in Linux.

Still ZFS is apparently very good and in my brainstorming I thought a raidz2 is the best option, I have found FreeBSD and EON to be interesting.

Finally the MB will be the Gigabyte 870A-UD3 (91€) because of the 8 SATA ports and IGP... so no more add-in cards.

Rebuild times are supposed to be around 10h@60MB/s as there won't be a lot of data traffic so I assume the system won't be too busy rebuilding/healing itself.

Annoying me has more questions:

1. Which HDDs to choose for the setup? Seagate LPs? Power is not that big of an issue... I mean 30 extra watts will not matter that much. I chose them because they are cheaper.

2. Which OS? FreeBSD, EON ... I'm open to suggestions.

 

[boomhower]

If you want reliable, get WD RE4's. Your going to pay through the nose but your array won't be failing left and right. I love WD's GP drives but they don't work well in RAID arrays. I'm not expert, I gave up on RAID long ago and just went with WHS for my NAS needs. I'm sure others will be able to give you some cheaper RAID friendly drives.