Putting togather a new NAS, Ubuntu, Samba, ect

[Plugers]

ok, I've had my previous setup for almost 4.5 - 5 years now and works fine, but I want to upgrade.

Old setup:
Via C7 based mini-ITX board
640GB HD
512MB ram

Runs Samba, and SubSonic mostly on Ubuntu 8.04 server

New:
MSI H61M-P23
Intel G530
IBM BR10i (LSI 3082E-R)
SS100S2 16GB SSD boot drive
5 WD20EARS + 1 WD20EADS for storage

Planning on doing another headless Ubuntu server setup.

Now I haven't really messed with any of this in a while since my last server was rock solid and I only occasionally SSHed in for Upgrade/update commands.

Any tips or tricks, links for me to help make this go smoothly?

 

[fffblackmage]

Since you've done it before, I think you'll be ok.

Just curious, are you RAIDing the HDDs? And what case are you using?

Personally, my NAS/server runs FreeBSD 9.0 with a weird mix of 2x WD20EARS + WD20EARZ + 2x Hitachi 2TB HDDs in a 5-disk RAIDz. I'm still wondering how I might configure them in a RAID array when I buy some more HDDs.

 

[Plugers]

I would like some redundancy, but I only set up a RAID once a long time ago. It was with the old Deskstar drives. 2 45g in a RAID one when the 1Ghz CPUs first came out.

I'm using an old Antec case I had laying around with the 2 removable 3 drive cages and the SSD will just sit at the bottom for now. I have been looking at a 4u case that is set up for 8 3.5" drives which I will swap everything into once I'm up and running for a bit.

I found the sticky about SSDs in the top of this section, so I'll run those commands once 12.04 is set up. I'm just unfamiliar with the LSI card and what RAID, if any, I should run and that whole process in command line as I will have no desktop. I've been searching and reading a little, but if anyone had any good links it would be great.

This 4u case looks nice too. I need a shallow case as my 20u rack is wall mount and only 20"-21" deep.

 

[Soulkeeper]

You already own all that hardware ?

I hear people have issues with LSI cards
you must use a gui only interface(windows?) to configure them I believe (no personal experience).
Let us know how that works out

Areca gets better reviews from what i've seen.
Adaptec is coming out with a new 7 series line of raid controllers next month (not sure how much they'll cost).

Likely the best choice:
either raid5 or raid10 raid calculator
Also nothing wrong with software raid since you are using linux. It's fairly easy to setup and the cpu overhead is relatively not noticeable.
mdadm

 

[Plugers]

I do have all that hardware, I've gathered it all over the last year or two.

I have been looking at FreeNAS a little also and have heard ZFS might be a good way to go.

Looks like RAID5 is a good compromise of not losing much capacity with a little redundancy.

 

[Soulkeeper]

just as a note, I talked to someone the other day that setup a raid5 with green drives
he didn't align them right and ended up getting horrible benchmarks (ie: 8MB/s write 133MB/s read) last here
another link 2yrs old

personally i'd just stick to ext4 filesystems, it's tried and true.

 

[Plugers]

just as a note, I talked to someone the other day that setup a raid5 with green drives
he didn't align them right and ended up getting horrible benchmarks (ie: 8MB/s write 133MB/s read) last here
another link 2yrs old

personally i'd just stick to ext4 filesystems, it's tried and true.

That is one thing I wanted to look into, alignment of the green drives. Looks like I've found my answers to SSDs on Linux. Looks like it was addressed in FreeNas and newer BSD distros. I'll have to see if it is already accounted for in 12.04.

From what I've gathered, I what to flash my LSI card with the "IT" firmware and use software RAID.

 

[Soulkeeper]

your EADS drive should be 512/512
the EARS are 4K/512 tho

 

[fffblackmage]

I manually aligned my EARS/EARZ drives following this post (it's the 5th one down). That's the only tricky part. Setting up the RAIDz pool is pretty straightforward (used this handy guide).

Using CrystalDiskMark, I'm getting 57 MBps reads and 67 MBps writes. In practice, I'm typically getting much faster writes than reads.

My biggest problem is stuttering, though I can still stream videos ok. It's mostly annoying when I'm trying to browse the server. I'm wondering if it's because of the mixed HDDs I'm using - the EARS/EARZ being 4K and the Hitachi's 512. Or maybe I didn't align the drives right? Does the pool being 80% full have anything to do with it? I have really no clue.