My new media server PC

[Nec_V20]

Here's the deal, I have my CoolerMaster HAF X casing full to the brim with drives (I've reached a 0.02 PB limit) so I took a look around at NAS solutions and my thoughts can be encapsulated in three letters - WTF?

 

For a good NAS you are looking at paying $750 for a four SATA disk solution with a pissy little Intel Atom processor. To my mind this is just taking the mickey.

 

So I decided to go with build my own.

 

I wanted something where I could put in a shed-load of drives and have it run quietly.

 

So here we go and you can slag off my choice of hardware - however remember it was not necessarily what I wanted that dictated what I bought but rather what was offered that was good enough for a price I wanted to pay.

 

Also you have to remember that I live in the UK where one has to pay somewhat more than folks in the US, so don't go telling me you could have gotten it cheaper over the pond. I have converted the prices I paid in UK pounds to US dollars and all prices include delivery.

 

Let's start off with the casing. I went for the CoolerMaster HAF XM. It has room for twelve - count them TWELVE - drives. I have the HAF X but if the HAF XM had existed back in the day then I would have bought that. I got the case for $134

 

For the innards of the machine I cast about to see what I could get that was reasonable and could be used as a working PC if I ever needed to repair my main box.

 

I ended up going for a bundle deal that was offered consisting of:

 

ASUS F2A55-M LK Motherboard - the motherboard has six SATA II ports

AMD A8 5600K Processor (my first ever AMD processor)

8GB Corsair XMS memory.

 

I got this lot for $213

 

The processor came with a stock CPU cooler but I saw an offer for the Corsair H60 that I couldn't refuse so I bought that. Price $86. I also bought two Noctua NF-P14 FLX Vortex Control 120/140mm fans (the round fans are 140 mm but the mountings are 120 mm) for $45

 

For the PSU I was torn, however considering the amount of drives I will be putting in the machine and that I will probably upgrade the system at some point I went for a modular Corsair TX750. Price $131

 

For the boot drive I was lucky enough to find a Corsair Neutron 120 for $110.

 

I also bought an addon card which has two sata III ports and two eSATA III ports for $34.

 

I also bought a "dashboard" which has two USB 3 ports, a regulator for fans, multi card reader and I can hook up a SATA drive to it externally and fits into one of the three 5.25 drive bays. Price for that was $31

 

So compared to the price of buying an empty NAS that has a piddly little Atom processor, which I cannot use for anything else, and can only hold four SATA drives for at least $750 I got the whole lot above for $784.

 

Since the NAS comes without a drive I should take the $110 for the SSD off the price so for a straight comparison I paid $674. And believe me, with the Noctua fans the thing will be nigh on silent. Oh yes and as opposed to the NAS solution I can use 4 TB Harddrives whereas the NAS was confined to 2 TB drives - an even more expensive one (over $1,000) was only rated for 3 TB drives.

 

On the other hand I just bought a new wooden keyboard from Datamancer for over $500.

 

With that, let the slagging begin :D:

[Technobeard]

1. What OS?

2. What are the HDD sizes?

3. Will any drives be in RAID?

4. What will the NAS be used for?

 

As for a "piddly little Atom processor", I have an Intel Atom D525 Dualcore 1.8 GHz in my NAS (~5 TB usable in RAID 6) used for backups / media distribution and more, and it's frankly overpowered for what it does.

[Nec_V20]

I have a spare legit copy of Win7 Ultimate.

 

I will be migrating the Harddrives I have in my present system to the media server as and when I buy new 4GB drives

 

I do not use RAID and ESPECIALLY I am not stupid enough to implement RAID0. RAID0 has no advantages - it is a lot slower on writes - and if one of the drives fail you lose the frigging lot (OK Active@ Partition Recovery can get it back - maybe). RAID1 is even worse, because that would only come into play if there were a catastrophic failure of one of the disks in the mirror. If however the system became unstable because of, let's say a virus, then that virus would have been replicated to the mirror.

 

Also and this is especially relevant. In a RAID configuration the drives which are slaved will always be active. In my case the drives which have not been accessed will go to sleep which saves a HELL of a lot of wear and tear on my hard drives.

 

I might do RAID 5 on my new rig although my capacity would then only be n-1 (n=number of disks in my rig) if I get enough homogeneous drives together.

 

My NAS will be used for storage, plain and simple. I do a lot of media related things and I would like redundancy that I can no longer achieve with any backup solution. Some stuff will only be saved once but stuff I really don't want to lose would be saved twice.

 

You cannot however use your NAS as a replacement for your main computer and also "RAID6" is just RAID5 with a band-aid. It is a waste of space unless one really needs belt and suspenders for RAID5 and adds an overhead of n-2 where "n" is the number of hard drives.

 

So for your "RAID6" configuration you need to have a minimum of four drives and if those drives were all 4 TB (16 TB total) then you would have a maximum usable storage of 8 TB. That seems like a lot of wasted space waiting on a disaster to happen.

 

In your case with 5TB usable on RAID6 (I only have 0.02 PB usable storage) this means that your total storage capacity has to be 10 TB which you have castrated to 5. Please tell me the advantage your system has over RAID5 except that you anticipate the failure of more than one but not greater than two failures of your hard drives at any one point of time compared to the data storage loss?

 

Also I can bet your RAID6 Atom powered rig cannot handle 4 TB drives.

 

In addition if your main computer gets hosed you cannot use your NAS solution as a replacement computer until you get the replacement bits to bring your main system back.

 

Aside from which, what did you pay for your bare-bones NAS (without drives) and how many drives can you put into it as a maximum? You neglected to mention that little factoid.

 

You also failed to mention if the RAID6 was software or hardware implemented in your rig. Maybe not so much a deal in recovery after a disaster but CERTAINLY a big deal with regard to write speeds in the RAID6 (and to a lesser degree in the read speeds).

 

BTW my low cost option vis-à-vis your Dual-Core 1.8 GHz Atom has a Quad-Core running at 3.6 GHz.

 

Your point being?

[Technobeard]

TL;DR - My NAS meets my needs, but if I was to do it all over again I'd probably look at building a HTPC / media box with a different RAID setup (maybe RAID 5 for some, no RAID for others). Maybe FreeNAS based, maybe something else. Lots of precompiled packages are available for my NAS (which has its upsides and downsides).

 

My NAS is a big toy :)

 

----------

 

I asked about the OS because I was interested which route you were going, e.g. Client OS (W7), Server OS (Windows Server 2012), or something else, e.g. FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org).

 

 

You cannot however use your NAS as a replacement for your main computer and also "RAID6" is just RAID5 with a band-aid. It is a waste of space unless one really needs belt and suspenders for RAID5 and adds an overhead of n-2 where "n" is the number of hard drives.

 

So for your "RAID6" configuration you need to have a minimum of four drives and if those drives were all 4 TB (12 TB total) then you would have a maximum usable storage of 8 TB. That seems like a lot of wasted space waiting on a disaster to happen.

Correct, it's 5 x 2TB drives with ~5 TB usable after RAID 6 eating up space and formatting. My usage scenario from when I first purchased two years ago versus now has changed a bit (and my backup schema has changed somewhat), so if I had to do it over I'd probably go RAID 5.

 

 

Please tell me the advantage your system has over RAID5 except that you anticipate the failure of more than one but not greater than two failures of your hard drives at any one point of time compared to the data storage loss?

That's pretty much it - paranoia :) IIRC the HDD vendor I went with for it was one I hadn't used before (but one of the few at that time certified to be compatible - a lot of 2 TB drives had issues with NAS's back then), so I chose caution over space, which again, this was more of a backup unit when I first used it.

 

 

Also I can bet your RAID6 Atom powered rig cannot handle 4 TB drives.

Correct, my model only accepts 3 TB drives now, but the next year's model accepts 4 TB just fine (Intel Atom D2700 Dualcore 2.13GHz and also accepts DDR3 whereas mine is a DDR2 model).

 

 

In addition if your main computer gets hosed you cannot use your NAS solution as a replacement computer until you get the replacement bits to bring your main system back.

Correct, but that's where my usage scenario differs from yours it sounds like. I have more than one computer so using it as a backup PC was not one of my concerns when purchasing my NAS. To each his own :)

 

 

Aside from which, what did you pay for your bare-bones NAS (without drives) and how many drives can you put into it as a maximum?

Can't recall the original cost, but certainly the base cost (sans storage) was more than a home built media server PC. Spacewise, the base NAS can take 5x3TB with another 10x3TB added on in modular units, but it would be more cost effective to just purchase a 2nd NAS or build a HTPC / media server rig.

 

 

You also failed to mention if the RAID6 was software or hardware implemented in your rig. Maybe not so much a deal in recovery after a disaster but CERTAINLY a big deal with regard to write speeds in the RAID6 (and to a lesser degree in the read speeds).

 

BTW my low cost option vis-à-vis your Dual-Core 1.8 GHz Atom has a Quad-Core running at 3.6 GHz.

Software RAID. Meets my needs, doesn't peg the processor, and I can stream multiple 1080p videos over WiFi, ethernet, and over power (looooong story) with zero issues.

[Nec_V20]

I'm sorry. I took your post as a flame to a newbie and you answered my private messages with personal conviction.

 

That was my bad with regard to my reflexive and denigrating reply to your post.

 

I said in private and would like to say in public - let's start again, as individual seekers and not antagonistical Samurai's.

[Nec_V20]

With regard to where I am going that is pretty simple. I remote into my Win7 machine over my network whenever I make a request and it wakes up to answer me and then goes back to sleep again after a bit.

[Technobeard]

No worries, gotta start out with basic questions here as we get all levels, from new users to server admins, etc. I should have clarified a bit that I didn't take the Atom poke to be a dig.

 

I can't wait for someone to take the 900D and turn it into a personal server. Should be interesting :)

[Nec_V20]

No worries, gotta start out with basic questions here as we get all levels, from new users to server admins, etc. I should have clarified a bit that I didn't take the Atom poke to be a dig.

 

I can't wait for someone to take the 900D and turn it into a personal server. Should be interesting :)

 

I didn't even think of that aspect and it being applicable to me. Briefly here are a couple of the things I have done:

 

Sys/NetAdmin for Mercedes Benz in Germany

 

Senior German Engineer for EMEA Enterprise Disaster Recovery Tech-Support at Veritas.

 

I've been a computer techie for 30 years now. I fell in love with them when I was studying Psychology at Bonn University in Germany and after my degree (which involved informatics as my minor) I never looked back.

 

It was during my time at University that I was diagnosed with Asperger's (a form of autism) and so I probably would not have been all that much use in the psychological field, but I hit it off with computers really well. :D:

 

I was comparing the Atom in the NAS for $750 to what I could build myself for a lot less and in that sense I was being disparaging. Personally I have a Netbook with an Atom and it does the job that I need done. There is an even weaker processor in the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) which I have and it fills a niche for me very well.

 

The only thing I have never been tempted by is a Smartphone - and don't even get me started on Apple and the fact that, leaving The Woz aside, they have invented a grand total of zilch. Although they are very good at pretending they did.

 

But no, it was never a direction I thought you could be coming from i.e. that you could consider me to be a (L)user or as Microsoft call them "al lusers" or as we used to call them in tech-support "Computer User, Non-Technical" (there's an acronym in there somewhere) :p:

 

I was thinking to myself, "Here we go, not even here for a day yet and already a flame".

 

With regard to the 900D I could not find it available in the UK but I have to say that for me the best utility/price is represented by the CoolerMaster HAF XM. The 900D goes in a direction that is not of interest to me presently. It is a gorgeous case, I will give you that.

 

However the case does not satisfy a need I have at present, whereas the one I chose does. If you were to say to me "How does one not love the 900D?" I would agree with you and if someone were to give it to me I would probably migrate my system from the case I have because I do consider it to be better however it is not almost three times the price better.

 

Don't get me wrong, I just spent over $500 on a keyboard from Datamancer so it is not primarily the price which motivates me.

 

With regard to the media server I wanted to see if I could come in under the price of the Atom powered four SATA NAS solution and what I could get for the price. If I wanted it purely as a media server I would probably have gone for Linux instead of Windows.

 

Speaking of which if Microsoft keeps on going with the lunacy of Win8 then Windows 7 will be the last Microsoft OS I will ever use.

 

As a desktop OS the two things I have against it can be summed up in the words, "Screen Plaque" and "Gorilla Arms".

 

What possessed them to market a touch-screen OS for a desktop I will never fathom. Let's face it, ten minutes of working at a desktop touch screen will annoy you with regard to the finger smudges; and waving my hands in front of a 27 inch screen as if I were Dumbledore locked in mortal combat with Voldemort is just not my idea of a good time.

 

I also find the Metro GUI to be incredibly ugly. Personally I think this OS deserves to be relegated to the garbage can of history along with Windows ME and Vista.