Need major help choosing file server/NAS software

[junfan77]

Need major help choosing file server/NAS software

Long story short, I'm been reading here and trying hard to choose a server OS, but it's getting confusing.

My main pc is XP, and will probably be Win7 in the near future.
Server is non raid and wired via crossover cable to main PC, could technically connect it via wifi or wired to my router if need be.

Server needs to -
Stream SD & HD videos, mostly 720p, but occasionally 1080p
Easily and quickly transfer files back and forth to XP/Win7 PC (speed isn't a huge issue, and OSX compatibility would be nice also)
Backup folders from my main PC
I'd like the server to be headless and able to be put to sleep easily, and wake on lan would be nice.

Now this seems to be a deal breaker with the OS's i've been looking into, I would REALLY like to be able to choose what drive I put each file on, for instance, all HD movies on drive 1, all SD movies on drive 2, etc...

Freenas seems to be out since it's not NTFS, if something dies I want to be able to take the drive out and it's readable by windows via my usb dock, which is a reason I would like the drives to have specific files on them. WHS seems to be out since I can't control what files go to specific drives, though I might have to bend on this if someone can't suggest an alternative. Ubuntu is the same I'm assuming, not NTFS so the drives wouldn't be readable under windows?

Right now I'm just running xp on my server, which is fine for the short term but not ideal from a power consumption perspective, it's not headless, and RDC is showing it's limitations.

I basically looking for something where the hard drives are almost "hot swappable", something similar to how I have it set up now, where I'm running XP on as the "server OS" and just have it connected to my main PC as a workgroup, but I want the added features of server OS's.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[Nothinman]

Freenas seems to be out since it's not NTFS, if something dies I want to be able to take the drive out and it's readable by windows via my usb dock, which is a reason I would like the drives to have specific files on them. WHS seems to be out since I can't control what files go to specific drives, though I might have to bend on this if someone can't suggest an alternative. Ubuntu is the same I'm assuming, not NTFS so the drives wouldn't be readable under windows?

Technically you could use NTFS in Ubuntu with the NTFS-3g drivers, however, it would be much smarter to use a standard Linux filesystem like XFS or ext3/4. And IMO it would be a good to get yourself comfortable with Linux so that you can use a LiveCD to rescue data from other systems. Ironically, you've got a much better chance of Linux mounting a corrupt NTFS drive than Windows. And the tools available in Linux are much more capable.

I basically looking for something where the hard drives are almost "hot swappable", something similar to how I have it set up now, where I'm running XP on as the "server OS" and just have it connected to my main PC as a workgroup, but I want the added features of server OS's.

What features? You haven't listed anything that you want to do that XP can't right now.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: junfan77
Need major help choosing file server/NAS software

Long story short, I'm been reading here and trying hard to choose a server OS, but it's getting confusing.

My main pc is XP, and will probably be Win7 in the near future.
Server is non raid and wired via crossover cable to main PC, could technically connect it via wifi or wired to my router if need be.

Server needs to -
Stream SD & HD videos, mostly 720p, but occasionally 1080p
Easily and quickly transfer files back and forth to XP/Win7 PC (speed isn't a huge issue, and OSX compatibility would be nice also)
Backup folders from my main PC
I'd like the server to be headless and able to be put to sleep easily, and wake on lan would be nice.

Now this seems to be a deal breaker with the OS's i've been looking into, I would REALLY like to be able to choose what drive I put each file on, for instance, all HD movies on drive 1, all SD movies on drive 2, etc...

Freenas seems to be out since it's not NTFS, if something dies I want to be able to take the drive out and it's readable by windows via my usb dock, which is a reason I would like the drives to have specific files on them. WHS seems to be out since I can't control what files go to specific drives, though I might have to bend on this if someone can't suggest an alternative. Ubuntu is the same I'm assuming, not NTFS so the drives wouldn't be readable under windows?

Right now I'm just running xp on my server, which is fine for the short term but not ideal from a power consumption perspective, it's not headless, and RDC is showing it's limitations.

I basically looking for something where the hard drives are almost "hot swappable", something similar to how I have it set up now, where I'm running XP on as the "server OS" and just have it connected to my main PC as a workgroup, but I want the added features of server OS's.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Other than the main drive, you dont need to add every drive to the "storage pool" in WHS. You can add a second drive, and share folders from it across the network, hot swap it, etc. You wont be able to use the balancing and folder duplication if you dont add it to the pool.

I also dont like the way it spreads stuff around - I like to keep everything on the single main drive. I personally have an external drive attached to my WHS box and use a sync program to backup certain folders.

There's no better home server software than WHS - the backup has saved my ass numerous times.

 

[junfan77]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Technically you could use NTFS in Ubuntu with the NTFS-3g drivers, however, it would be much smarter to use a standard Linux filesystem like XFS or ext3/4. And IMO it would be a good to get yourself comfortable with Linux so that you can use a LiveCD to rescue data from other systems. Ironically, you've got a much better chance of Linux mounting a corrupt NTFS drive than Windows. And the tools available in Linux are much more capable.

Originally posted by: Junfan77
I basically looking for something where the hard drives are almost "hot swappable", something similar to how I have it set up now, where I'm running XP on as the "server OS" and just have it connected to my main PC as a workgroup, but I want the added features of server OS's.

What features? You haven't listed anything that you want to do that XP can't right now.

You're right about Linux, I have basic knowledge but i'm no expert, I was kind of misleading about my concerns, I'm more concerned that I can't hot swap it, rather than worried that the drive will die, if I had an ubuntu server for instance I wouldn't be able to take it out and have it recognized through windows, as far as I understand, but i'll look into the 3g drivers.

The problems I'm running into with XP as my "server" quite possibly have workarounds, for instance, to connect via RDC you have to put a password in, but when I turn the server on it prompts for the password, meaning I can't get into my server via my main pc until I log in from the server. I've also had similar issues with shutting it down, after I log out of RDC. I've read, but don't know for sure, that you can't have a headless system with XP, and i'd love to pull my videocard out and connect only via RDC since the videocard inside is a 8800GTS, hardly something I want running a server for lots of reasons.

Originally posted by: BD2003
Other than the main drive, you dont need to add every drive to the "storage pool" in WHS. You can add a second drive, and share folders from it across the network, hot swap it, etc. You wont be able to use the balancing and folder duplication if you dont add it to the pool.

I also dont like the way it spreads stuff around - I like to keep everything on the single main drive. I personally have an external drive attached to my WHS box and use a sync program to backup certain folders.

There's no better home server software than WHS - the backup has saved my ass numerous times.

I am very interested in WHS, I read something about the "storage pool" in another thread regarding WHS, two questions, when added a drive that won't be connected to the pool, does it need to be formatted? Also if I did it your way, if I take out the drives not in the storage pool will they be readable without any issues? Like adding or removing a drive from XP for instance.

*edit - and one last question, lets say installed WHS and I did connect all my hard drives to the storage pool, what happens if I hate it and decided to uninstall WHS, what happens then? I assume your data is scrambled all over the place? Are there any rules where WHS puts data?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: junfan77
*edit - and one last question, lets say installed WHS and I did connect all my hard drives to the storage pool, what happens if I hate it and decided to uninstall WHS, what happens then? I assume your data is scrambled all over the place? Are there any rules where WHS puts data?

All WHS disks are basic volumes, formatted NTFS. So they are completely readable in other computers. But no, you can't predict which disk will have which files if you are using more than one disk in the Storage Pool.

WHS arranges data file location "logically", but not "physically". The easiest way to ensure physical arrangement of files would be to move or copy them to other drives. If you don't have a lot of extra drives, then you could do it with maybe one extra drive. Move files off to that extra drive until there's enough free space to allow you to remove one of the WHS storage drives. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

The same idea would apply if you are using "redundant folders" in WHS. Disable redundancy and then tell WHS to start removing drives. Use those freed-up drives as "non-storage-pool" drives where you can move your files in the physical arrangment of your choice.

Yes, you can add any type of drive as a "non-storage-pool" drive. Just plug it in. But WHS won't manage the files at all and won't store data shares or backups on it. If that works for you, then it can be done. Mostly, the "non-storage-pool" drives are intended for use in backups.

If you want to test out WHS and think you might not be using it long-term, it'd be easiest to NOT transfer a ton of data to it. Set it up with a single hard drive. Or you can even install it into a virtual PC (using VMWare, Virtual PC, Virtual Server, etc.). You need a minimum 60 GB hard drive (or virtual hard drive).

 

[junfan77]

Just installed the WHS trial on virtual pc 2007, thanks for the excellent advice, I'll update after I mess around with it a little bit.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: junfan77
Now this seems to be a deal breaker with the OS's i've been looking into, I would REALLY like to be able to choose what drive I put each file on, for instance, all HD movies on drive 1, all SD movies on drive 2, etc...

Just out of curiosity, why is it that you want this? Everything else screams WHS obviously, but wanting specific files on specific drives is an odd request. What specific purpose does it serve you?

 

[Nothinman]

What specific purpose does it serve you?

It satisfies a compulsion for micromanagement?

 

[junfan77]

Micromanagement is part of it. I've been keeping my drives extremely neat for some time now. I bought a drive recently for my HD movie collection, I have nothing but HD movies on it, and know exactly how much space is left specifically on that drive for future movies which helps me prepare for when I need to buy another hard drive.

I like to keep very important stuff on one drive, documents and stuff for instance are separate from tv shows and movies, games, etc... If one drive dies in WHS, and I mean REALLY dies, hardware failure no possible way to retrieve the data (i've had a deskstar in the past), I would like to know exactly what I'm losing. Another scenario would be if perhaps there was a fire in the house, and I would definitely want to grab the hard drive with all the most important, irreplaceable data on it, and would probably leave the tv shows and movies drives behind. I know that you'll probably say that stuff should be backed up, which they are, backed up on dvd's and I've even been looking into some online storage options, but the convenience of me knowing exactly what is on each drive is important to me, I'm used to having control of what goes where, and I would lose that with WHS if I add the drives to the storage pool.

I've been messing around with WHS in the virtual PC and I will say it does seem to fit my needs.

 

[Athena]

Originally posted by: junfan77
If one drive dies in WHS, and I mean REALLY dies, hardware failure no possible way to retrieve the data (i've had a deskstar in the past), I would like to know exactly what I'm losing.

If you have multiple drives in your WHS and configure the shared folders to be duplicated, your data will be available if one drive fails.

 

[junfan77]

I've been messing around with it in the virtual PC quite a bit, and want to thank everyone for the great information and excellent advice, it's running in VPC 2007 without a hitch and it gives me a great idea of how it would work in a real setup. 120 Day trial from MS auto-updated to the newest power pack also.

It's definitely not perfect, but than again I think it's probably closer to perfection than I'll find anywhere else, unless I really invested some major time into setting up an ubuntu server or something like that. WHS just works out of the box, which I know on lifehacker it was voted very high on their highfive contest for that exact reason.

Another question though, on the failed drive question what does happen if a drive melts? Does WHS keep some sort of log of files lost? Assuming I didn't have them being duplicated, I most likely won't be backing up a lot of my media files but I would like to know what I lost regardless.

 

[alkalinetaupehat]

So I've built a fileserver with a 160GB RE2 boot drive and two 1TB Caviar Black's and am looking to use it for storage of music, documents, pictures, pretty much everything. The goal is to have the two Caviar Blacks mirror each other and backup to another 1TB drive in a removable enclosure on another computer and while I know WHS supports backup to a hard drive on another computer, I'm a bit murky on the whole storage pool thing, pun unintended.

Can I configure WHS to run what essentially would be a software RAID1?

Will WHS have a checksumming ability a la OpenSolaris and ZFS?

If no to Q2, I could use some help initializing the drives on an existing OS install as well as setup help for the fileserver.

 

[RebateMonger]

If you put WHS on that system, you can't tell where the music files will be stored. If you do a RAID mirror of only two of the drives, some of your data files will be on the system (boot) drive and won't be mirrored. You'd have to mirror ALL the drives in the WHS to ensure that all the data is being mirrored by a hardware-based RAID array.

RAID for data storage alone makes things more complicated without adding much to data security in WHS. For data storage, two approaches make the most sense:
1) Use folder redundancy to keep duplicates of important files
and/or
2) Keep backups of important files on a non-pooled storage device.

RAID of the WHS system drive may make sense if you want to keep the WHS server running if the system drive fails. But it's not hard to rebuild a WHS system if the system drive fails. It's pretty much automatic. It just takes a while.

WHS does a checkdsk of the disks several times a day to check for logical disk issues. It doesn't go to the extent that ZFS does. It that's a requirement, you'd be best to go with OpenSolaris and ZFS. But that'll likely take significantly more work than setting up a WHS server (an hour or two to run the automated installation).

I'm guessing your term "software RAID 1" really means "a low-end embedded RAID solution" (like on a motherboard or a low-end PCI RAID card). "Software RAID" usually refers to PURE software RAID, using non-RAID controllers and the OS itself controlling the RAID array. If you mean the latter, then, no, Windows won't allow pure Windows software RAID to run with WHS.

 

[alkalinetaupehat]

I was talking about pure software RAID controlled by the OS and had heard before that Windows OS do not work with software RAID at this time. During my research on WHS there was implied ambiguity on where it stored data, which is something that unsettles me.

The purpose of a RAID1 array for me was to ensure continued availability of the data should one of the storage drives fail. At this time my budget doesn't permit another HDD so I can protect against the downtime from a failure of the system drive, but it is up there on the to-do list as I go forward.

I'm going to go look for some help on setting up a ZFS mirror with the two 1TB and see what happens, but a thought that is on my mind is to put WHS on a 1TB drive and have the other two 1TB drives serve as backups in separate enclosures. The current RE.2 drive is 160GB and I may keep that as a cold spare with a WHS and Seven installtion or something. Ultimately I'm trying to work out how to maximize data security and availability and still not have to commit myself as a part-time admin while going to school full-time.

 

[ChaosDivine]

Considered switching to UltraVNC? Been using it on my fileserver/HTPC for years now without issues.