Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best Kit For a Home Media Server?
First time accepted submitter parkejr writes "I started off building a media library a few years ago with an old PC running Ubuntu. Folders for photos, ogg vorbis music from my CD collection, and x264 encoded mkv movies. I have a high spec machine for encoding, but over the years I've moved the server to a bigger case, with 8 TB of disk capacity, and reverted back to Debian, but still running with the same AMD Sempron processor and 2GB RAM. It's working well, it's also the family mail server, and the kids are starting to use it for network storage, and it runs both link and twonkyserver, but my disks are almost full, and there are no more internal slots. The obvious option to me is to add in a couple of SATA PCI cards, to give me 4 more drives, and buy an externally powered enclosure, but that doesn't feel very elegant. I'm a bit of an amateur, so I'd like some advice. Should I start looking at a rack system? Something that can accommodate, say, 10 3.5" drives (I'm thinking long term, and some redundancy)? Also, what about location — I could run some cat6 to the garage and move it out of the house, in case noise is an issue. Finally, what about file format, file system, and OS/software? I'm currently running with ext3 and Debian Squeeze. Happy with my audio encoding choice, but not sure about x264 and mkv. I'd also consider different media server software, too. Any comments appreciated."
Why would you change away from x264 and mkv. They are the industry standards. Not just in computers, but every way in the distribution chain. Going about it for some FOSS reason is just stupid because they're only for your own use, not for distribution. You would be either spending double the space or get half the quality by going with something other than H.264, and on top of that you introduce yourself additional problems because they are not what everyone uses.
Just kidding.
With drive capacities soaring, I wonder if you'll really need 10 drives.
You might want to try something like a fractal design array. It's a small htpc case for a microatx board. It has mounts for six 3.5" drives, and these days a microatx board will have everything you need, including integrated video for all your playback needs.
start playing linux mdadm and run raid 5 array with 1 or 2 spare drives. I built my first 1TB system about 9 years ago with 14 120G drives. ran without major failure for 6 years. Play with the array (remove drives, add new drives, etc) BEFORE you have a drive failure so you understand how to repair the failure. Let me say again, learn BEFORE you have failure. Otherwise, you'll freak out at losing all your data because you screwed something up during repair.
Larger disks. 4 TB should be available very soon (maybe now?).
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/108665-hitachi-ships-worlds-first-4tb-hard-drive-sticks-it-to-thor
I use mythtv. It does pretty much everything. I love it.
10 disks in a raid 0 type setup is a big risk. Also lot's of pci cards eat up PCI bus io and maybe even the same io used for the network also your board like only has 100M e-net. Now if your system has a pci-e slot then a 10 port non raid card + software raid may work and is cheap then a raid card. But you may also want to get a newer MB + cpu most new amd and intel boards max out at 8 sata ports. 8 ports may work out ok or you can get a new board with a dual core cpu + a raid or non raid card also a new MB will get you GIG-E + pci-e IO.
Rack doesn't make any sense for home environments. It's best used in data-center environments because it saves space and is highly standardized, meaning it also has fast and easy ways to connect input devices and everything else in a environment that hosts thousands of servers. The guy isn't going to be hosting so many servers, so rack doesn't really help with anything. It just costs more and will actually restrict you with size limitations and customization. On top of that you need to get something to mount it to. With a standard box you can just put it anywhere.
For a slightly more sane solution than rackmounting at home, consider the HP microserver.
Very low power (12W CPU), small, quiet, cheap, server grade, no Windows tax, holds four pluggable 3.5" drives plus optical (which some people swap for a 5th HDD for RAID5.)
http://blog.thestateofme.com/2011/05/14/review-hp-microserver/
http://www.silentpcreview.com/HP_Proliant_MicroServer
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-4237916-4237918-4237917-4248009.html
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=905262
If 8TB is full, you need to stop the obsessive collection of warez/pr0n/torrentz you are never likely to watch again.
I'm sorry, did you read the summary? Do you honestly think a Mac mini is a step up from that or solves the problems presented?
Another option with FreeBSD is ZFS, which is pretty sexy.
I would think about putting the box in the garage. Yes it seems like a great location, it's out of the way and such. However it might not be the cleanest place in the house. I for one know my garage to be one of the dirtiest places. In the winter the car drags in massive amounts of sand from the the winter roads, and leaves in the spring. Spiders and other insects, not to mention baby snakes and rodents, also make their way in from time to time and would just live a nice warm dark place inside the case to live...in city area's it could also attract roaches in from outside. (Despite sonic repellents and traps they still get in). Combined all that with being near moisture (wet car or rainy days). I don't see the case lasting long there. It would need to be cleaned out fairly often to keep fans and heat sinks from gunking up. Of course I understand some people's garages are nice and clean, and not subject to some of these things, but just saying I know for me it would not work out well.
He wants a media server not a HTPC.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
I'd say it would be better for him to get a separate system for the kids. Some time they are going to want to move away from home and move to college/into their own flat.
At that point, they are going to have to buy their own data storage then and transfer everything across.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The submitter has very specific tastes and would rather keep conversion to a minimum because of the overhead and liabilities involved.
You see, the submitter is storing guro, bestiality, snuff, squirt/scat, and crush videos; all featuring underage animals, so the overhead must be kept to a minimum. He must make do with wired networking only, adding parts to his existing configuration as needed so his horrific pornography may be available to him immediately, whenever he wants to jack off.
I've seen his workstation. He lays a towel over his cheap office chair so he can plant his bare ass on it in comfort. He once remarked that he likes to keep his pants around his ankles so he can pull them up in a hurry when his wife or kids knock on the usually-locked door. The interior of all windows in that room are coated with aluminum foil. On the floor next to his chair lies a long athletic sock crusted stiff by what appears to be dry super glue. A marijuana pipe sits on his desk, next to the razor scratches, with loose nuggets and ampule shells of crystal meth and amyl nitrate respectively. He also keeps a noose handy so his free hand can choke his neck while his other hand chokes his chicken.
Yep, hard drives.
A mac mini is a perfectly valid (if expensive) media solution. I personally use 2 synology NASs feeding a Mac Mini which is a dedicated iTunes server feeding 4 apple TVs (When I win the lotto I might try out a promise pegasus but until then the synology NASs are growing the library nicely). It's a bit of a pain to remux mkvs to mp4s but it works and it's a really nice solution once you've gone through the headaches of setting it up (yes better than a boxee box -- tried it, now gathering dust, better than every DLNA solution I've tried). The Apple TVs are just really, really nice media end-points and iTunes is a perfectly good management system.
But yea iCloud has no place in any video solution (your purchased shows can be streamed -- movies can not, and this solution will introduce you to your ISP's bandwidth caps very quickly).
Ballpark figures, this isn't exact, redo it with your preferred constants, I'm just trying to explain my reasoning against huge enclosures with > 10 drives,
Standard drive idle usage (W) ~ 10W [1]
Low-power (green) drive idle usage (W) ~ 5W [1]
Cost of power ~0.20 $/KWH
Cost of an older drive per year = $17
Cost of a green drive per year = $8.50
Replacing 6x500GB older drives with one 3TB green power savings = $95/yr
So think about that for a sec. At $150[2] for a 3TB drive, you cover the price in power savings in 18 months. That's assuming that there is zero fixed-cost per drive. At the point where you are talking about adding SATA controllers or fancy multi-bay enclosures or, worse, external enclosures with their own PSUs (and fans!), the turnaround-point for older drives is far sooner.
I'm a hobbyist, I understand that it's really cool to make do with older hardware and feel like you aren't letting anything to go waste but sometimes using old hardware instead of buying new is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Spending money on increasing how many hard drives you can accommodate instead of just buying newer high-capacity lower-wattage drives is absolutely batty; especially when you get into the price for anything remotely good in the RAID dept.
My advice, move everything to the largest capacity drives that are reasonably priced (after the flood damage is sorted). Replace the drives when you can do between 4:1 and 6:1 replacement -- should be every 3-4 years. Live happily, quietly and simpler. Save money on power transparently.
[1] http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Western-Digital-2TB-Caviar-Green-Power-Hard-Drive/
[2] I bought some Hitachi 3TBs before the Thailand floods at $130 on Newegg. Of course you would be silly as heck to buy hard drives now for your hobby storage project before they at least fall back to pre-flood level.
[3] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182221
[4] Older drives need not go to waste, they can become offline storage with a simple USB dock[3] -- make a backup, throw it in an anti-static bag, leave it at your relative's house when you visit!
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg
now just to fit the data on one set is like 3 HDD's and then raid 5 or 6 starts to look like a good idea.
If he just wants to go cheap and its gonna be stuck in some garage anyway i'd say white trash it like we did at my last shop. Me and the boss took a couple of the biggest cheapo ATX cases we could get our hands on, took out the motherboard mount and cut the frame on one, and finally a couple of small weld stuck them together. We ended up with something like 16 SCSI drives in that sucker for a total of 2Tb when most folks were still getting 80Gb drives. with those babies loaded with every single driver for just about every piece of hardware up to that point it was quick work to reload a PC.
:As for the board I'd go with something like a cheap AMD board with a nice cheap Phenom low power quad. you can get a Phenom I quad for $55 at Starmicro and add a couple of Gb of DDR 2 for maybe $25, board for around $40 and finally a decent HSF for around $15.
So when you figure in the cases which with no PSU can be had for less than $20 a piece from many places like Geeks you are looking at a final total of around $185 for a quad with 2Gb of RAM with an add on card for adding more SATA slots. Sure it won't be the prettiest thing around but if its just gonna be serving files from a corner somewhere who cares? I'd add a little more and get a full size board with lots of SATA slots and 3 PCI slots for adding more SATA cards and you'd have a thing you could load to the brim and with the low power Phenom quad you'll have plenty of power for controlling the whole deal and maybe even it doing some of the transcoding work via scripts at night when its not serving files.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
useing software raid is ok most boards have about 6 ports so if you want like 10 then maybe a x4 or better pci-e card may be needed.
Or, get an actual server board (this is gonna be a server, right?), like this one. That's six SATA ports and 8 SAS ports. If you flash the SAS ROM to the "no-RAID" version, the controller is recognized natively by Linux. In addition, you get lots of PCIe connectivity, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, and IPMI (allowing remote power cycle).
Then, find a full-tower case with lots of 5-1/4" drive bays, and add hot swap bays. There are smaller versions, as well...just budget what you need for drives.
I use the motherboard I referenced along with an add-on 8-port SATA card (anything supported by Linux would be fine) and two of the drive bays for ten 2TB drives in RAID-10. I boot Fedora off a pair of SSDs in RAID-1 and also have four 2-1/2" 750GB drives in RAID-10. The 10TB array serves iSCSI over 10Gbit Ethernet to ESX systems that hold all my VMs, with the 1.5TB array as local and NFS storage. There's still PCIe slots available if you need more controller cards.
With this setup, the VMs are how everything is accessed, so you can pick whatever OS you want to face client machines.
Once your data grows past a certain level redundancy becomes a must. For about 3 years I have been running an unRAID server & I don't know how I survived before it. It allowed me to start with 3 drives (approx 250MB each) to my current configuration of 14 hard drives (mostly 1TB but also a couple smaller drives and three 2TB drives). After you have the system setup you don't need a monitor. I have it in my basement which helps with noise issues that result from having 12 drives spinning 24/7. Because this is a SOFTWARE-based raid-like system I can mix/match different types of drives to get the most storage for the money. I HAVE had a drive fail and the rebuild was easy. Another plus is the data is NOT stripped so if the motherboard ever fails the data can still be accessed (any computer that can access data on a "reiserfs" (I think) filesystem). One recommendation... Wire for Gigabit Ethernet! Once you start transferring HD Video (terabyte-size files) you'll find it helpful. Another recommendation... Find a smaller (100GB-200GB) drive to use as a "cache drive." This will speed up the transfers to your unRaid box :)
Good luck!
PS1: http://lime-technology.com/
PS2: I have been running version 5.0-beta14 without any issues
I wrote about the latest storage server I built back in 2008, and a lot of my thoughts at the time are written up in http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/ultimatestorage2008/
However, to answer a few of your questions...
External disc enclosures? Avoid them like the plague. My initial experience with the 5 bay eSATA enclosures was pretty good -- sometimes it wouldn't pick up the external drives, but usually I could get it to find them after some tweaking, rebooting, etc... I ended up getting 3 of them, the AMS DS-2350S, which at the time were well reviewed, etc... I have since pulled all 3 of them out of active use and have them just sitting around. I don't know exactly the mode of the failures, but eventually after replacing some with others, I finally put them in internal SATA enclosures, which have been very reliable (I used these Supermicro CSE-M35T-1.
Also note that eSATA connectors don't really hold on that well. If anything, they're not as robust as internal SATA connectors, despite being outside the case where they can get banged around.
If I were to do it over again, I'd probably stick with the case I started with, with 5 internal 3.5" bays, and 3 front 5.25" bays, and put the Supermicro in there. I'd also probably go with fewer big drives rather than more smaller drives like I did previously (even though at the time the drives were free, I had them from another project).
As far as running it in the garage, don't even think it, unless your garage is not where you store your cars. I have some computers that I've run in the garage for the last 9 months, and they are filthy, I've had a lot of fan failures, lots of dust, insects, and random other crap. I put mine in our furnace room, which has enough extra space.
As far as using a server case? Hard to see the payback there unless you have a cabinet. Most server cases are HUGE, heavy, and expensive. A 3U case with 12 drive bays likely costs $500, plus you usually have to deal with special form-factor power supplies, expect to spend another $200 on one of those. I wouldn't do it, and I have a 3U 12-bay Chenbro case just sitting at my office that I could re-purpose.
As far as the file-system, I selected ZFS (via zfs-fuse under Linux) and I've been VERY happy with it. The primary benefit is that it checksums *ALL* data and can recover from some types of corruption or at least alert about corruption if it can't correct it. So, if you are storing photos or home videos that you may not be accessing very often, that's good peace of mind to have, I know in 10 years I won't go to look at some photographs I've taken and find they were silently corrupted. Of course, you could get similar benefits by saving off a database of file checksums and checking and alerting if they are bad. Really the only downside of ZFS that I've seen is that if you need to do a RAID rebuild it is a seek-heavy task rather than just streaming. I have a 8x2TB drive array that I'm currently rebuilding (drive failure, at work), and it's 33% done after 31 hours. A normal RAID-5 array would have rebuilt that in what, 10? The system is idle except for the rebuild.
If you care about the data going into it, make sure you checksum and verify the files regularly.
The 8 port PCI SATA card I got is fantastic, it's a Supermicro with the Marvel chipset and is very well supported (even supported by Nexenta).
Finally, all this data is encrypted, so if someone were to burgle us I only have to worry about them getting the hardware, I don't have to worry about them now having scanned bills and other documents and other personal and private data, etc... This is why I'm running ZFS in Linux, it gave me encryption plus ZFS (not available otherwise in 2008), as well as being an OS I'm very familiar with.
As far as OS, I am personally running CentOS on my system because that means I can install and set it up and then forget about it for quite a few years, except for regularly running "yum update". Debian should be fine, but you will get/have to track upstream changes more frequently.
Just because you don't understand the request doesn't mean it's gobbledegooke, it means your knowledge is limited.
Personally, I don't trust any auto-encoding solutions as they easily go haywire. I'd suggest doing that all by hand.
Ext3 is fine, & a rack mount is a necessity. If you want smooth operation of the system, at least 2 network cards are a must (I run 3, 2 bonded for media/SMB, 1 for management & VPN). I'd suggest having a decent 16 port switch in the house & running the 2 (or more) cables to the box.
For DLNA I just run miniDLNA & for torrents I've just set up uTorrent with a web interface. There's very little my desktop actually does.
Agreed. In addition, rack is generally designed with the premise that space is at a premium and that it's well worth cramming as much as possible into the smallest space possible and then compensating for the poor natural airflow with high speed fans everywhere. That's fine if space is that big a premium, but ion a home environment, it's rarely THAT tight. A big roomy tower will run quieter, have less problem with failing fans, and probably will run a bit cooler. It'll also be less of a pain to work on.
Ummmm, why two nic? The HDD and it's bus are the bottleneck - I cannot max out a gig-E nic now on my server but can play 1080P via x.264 with surround sound DTS encoded on a 100meg connection. No stuttering, no issues, no muss no fuss. It's wired for gig-E but sadly this nic refuses to synch at it.
I WOULD run some sort of redundant storage. However I wouldn't go traditional RAID. Striping data across disks along with parity makes for lots of speed, also means the disks never shut down. No thanks! I happen to use unRAID from Lime Technology. Parity isn't striped, it's held on a single disk. Each disk uses a standard format - ResierFS (ick). But's journaled and standard enough that recovery is easier. On top of that I can pull a disk and get data from it on another machine - one disk removed I still see all my data. Last but not least - if I lose multiple disks at once I only lose the data on THOSE disks and not the entire thing. Losing one disk I lose nothing. In 6+ years or so I've never lost more than one disk. Since parity isn't striped and neither is data one of my servers has ALL drives spun down and quiet, the other has just 2. Between them I have a bit over 22TB worth of disk BTW and not all are 2TB disks but as I fill smaller ones I swap in 2TB disks, the system migrates the data fine. Other programs can be run on this system, it's Linux based, but it's trickier than a full OS install - which has been done by some too.
Honestly to me it sounds like his current setup is working save for disk space. Why not just upgrade to 2TB disks? Surely he has more than 4 ports? If add-on cards are needed they are plentiful. I would also suggest using 4n1 cages for easy swapping. A low speed CPU is fine, underclock it maybe too - HDD bus is the bottleneck!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I bought a QNAP NAS. It runs Linux, has media server stuff pre-installed and runs Linux. You can even install extra software if you like or just trow out all the software and install a "real OS" (Their words) like Debian.
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=134 shows a list. Connecting my Linux machines goes over NFS. If I had a MAC, I could use AFP and for Windows there is Samba.
The standard possibilities are almost endless and as you can install extra software, they really are limited to your imagination and knowledge.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
btrfs has been very stable for me since 3.1 - with RAID10 at least. Sometimes it feels a little slower than ext4 but overall it works well (4x 3TB in RAID10, 3.1TB in use, 1.3M files right now.)
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Knowing a thing or to about genetics not much short of string theory makes Dna look simple
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Not the submitter but.... i do lots of this :)
Atom machines running Ubuntu and XBMC are my front-ends, I use MCE remotes and HDMI for sound and video. 1080P with an ION chipset accelerated using VDPAU is wonderful. Sound can be a hassle to get working with Alsa but it can be done. If this sounds too expensive or complex or whatever - look at the WDLive that was just revamped. $99, supports local storage, wireless, and network shares. XBMC is way nicer though! ;-)
Backend I mentioned this above - unRAID with many SATA disks, works well and sips power when the drives sleep.
Ripping... Slysoft AnyDVD-HD for decryption of BD (yes Win7). I use eac3to to pull the audio and video from the disks. I use x264 to encode and I wrap it all in MKV containers. When there are forced subs I use BDsup2Sub to get them compatible for MKV. As a front-end for the ripping and encoding I use meGUI. It has a GUI for eac3to and can encode the video and even audio if you want. I have some tutorials on various sites for how I do that, feel free to ask questions though. you will want a fast CPU or lots of time - a movie takes me 2-3 hours to encode. 4cores with hyperthreading running 4+ghz gets me 18FPS or so . You can go faster with lower quality or even use the GPU with some packages but they will not have the same options in my experience. Note that there are some gotcha's. Figuring out which track is the proper video track is a treat and audio can be a hassle too. THD I sample down to AC3 :-( DTS I can handle and so can ALSA. Forget menus, and if you want the director's cut plus others FFMPEG doesn't support MKV's ability to store just the extra scenes and chapter skip - hard to explain but it's how BD stores multiple versions. A raw rip of a BD can be nearly 40gigs or more (forget storage size but SOME will use it). Kung-Fu Panda2 for instance - 17Gig for the raw movie. Animated so it squishes nice - 5gig no sound. AC3 audio so compressed already and it's 450megs for the audio, I leave it alone. I have other movies at 34gigs that shrink to 11 with 800meg soundtracks so you get the idea. A DTS track will be say 1.2Gig, I don't compress these.
For regular DVD I again use Slysoft's product and DVDShrink. I store to ISO format and I do not re-encode. DVD are tiny compared to BD!
Hope that helps some :-)
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
He wants a media server not a HTPC.
then pretty much any old PC with a bunch of 3.5" drives would work.
I googled "build a media server" and found several guides. Here's one for $300 with six 3.5" bays and here's a 4U rackmount server case with twenty 3.5" drive bays for roughly $1,000
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
a) i am running out of hd space
b) i feel (=movies dont play without interrupting) that the processor is a little slow
c) i am bored over the christmas holidays
d) i am worried the thing explodes or falls apart
if only a): attach a NAS and make an archiving system
if a) and b) or d): there are enough shopping guides for off-the shelf pc's out there. You priority should be energy consumption, reliablility and space for more hds. Condiser external sata boxes
c) play around with something differnt.
If you're putting a system into a dirty environment such as a basement then either buy or build an environmental enclosure to put the server in. It's basically a sealed box with large filters for cleaning the airflow through the hardware inside it. Enclosure fans are optional, an overtemp alarm/shutdown system isn't. Replace the filters every six months or so and it should be good.
Power costs. Having a bunch of always on machines starts to add up. That, plus the progress of technology (by the time the kids move away we might be on to using SSDs for everything) means that it's usually better to try and aggregate costs. Plus it can be an interesting hobby!
For the FS format, definitively go for ext4. It shall save you a huge amount of time when fsck, it's easier to undelete from. For a media server usage you don't even need to understand the old delayed sync controversy, it's not relevant. For films, you're certainly right with Matroska. For the rest I wont comment (I use x264 myself).
unraid sounds just like what I was *designing* for myself (doh!).
the idea of lots of disks always spinning is just moronic for home-users! we are NOT a data center! the game is different, here; and it has taken the industry a while to learn this.
I had a gazillion disks spinning in big-time home raid. for years. blech! lots of noise, heat, failure modes and like you said, you lose too much, you lose it all! the idea of being able to take a single spinner out, mount it on a 'dumb' system and read it, that's super powerful! don't discount that, folks! its worth its weight in gold.
my approach is to just be an idiot human (I do that part well) and save lots of copies of the files to lots of places. I do that anyway. then run a database job that will traverse your filesystem, get every file's size, date, md5 hash and any other tag info you want to peek inside, for. and run a smart differ on it. keep 'n' copies; report partial copies; trim the ones that are beyond what you need (if you want 3 copies, kill any 4,5,etc version you see). use ANY format you want for the disks, ntfs, ext3, jfs, whatever. each disk has a disk-id ('blkid' on linux shows this easily) and so each file has a disk-id to show where its located.
the final part of this is to keep all disks spun down and have the database know which disk the file is on (the one you want to watch/play) and have it do power-mgmt (as I call it) and spin the drive UP. either have it auto-spin down or spin down via mgmt when your 'session' is over.
spinning the disks is easy if they are all external esata/usb/fw. even simple x10 powerline relays can do this (my first proto will use this style of distrib tech). for internal drives, you power their molex's on/off via relays, via software control.
noise is stupid! power/heat wastage is stupid! raid is stupid for most of us. lets get beyond the gazillion spinners and be smarter about our large disk collections.
(oblig: I'm using arduinos and linux as the controller on all this)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I have to respectfully disagree here. Racking and stacking my gear made all the sense in the world to me. I have the following (from bottom to top) all in the same approx 22"x30" footprint:
- 2 UPS: 1200W & 1500W freestanding (if one ever dies I might consider replacing with rackmount version depending on costs)
- Epson (blech!) All-In-One printer sitting on rack-mounted shelf
- FreeBSD (not FreeNAS!) NAS server built into 4U Norco RPC4224 24-bay hot swappable chassis. Holds virtually all my spinning disks (only exception being a Windows data disk I use in a gaming desktop). Spare hot-swap trays are only 5 bucks each which makes for easy backup. (Perfect? No. Cheaper than a big ass tape drive and media? Depends. Better than nothing? Infinitely!)
- Dedicated Mythtv backend in 3U iStar chassis (SSD boot, all other storage on NAS)
- 2U VM server
- Keyboard tray
- Monitor on shelf (mythtv motherboard not currently iKVM capable)
- Trendnet 16port VLAN switch
- Shelf for DSL modem and wireless AP
Having everything stacked vertically has saved me a ton of floor space. Could I have collapsed everything into fewer boxes? Sure. But that's not something I cared to do. I like my boxes having their specific functions. Could I have used conventional shelving/storage units (such as bread racks) instead. Yep. But they wouldn't give me the same space efficiency as a 19" rack (might have saved a few bucks though)
Regarding FreeNAS: I have no particular beef with FreeNAS. It's quite good if it does exactly what you want it to do. If it doesn't (for example: if it doesn't mount partitions where you want them to be, or you need some packages not included with it), it's a never ending struggle. Guess it's the age old trade-off of ease of use versus flexibility.
PCI SATA cards are a really, REALLY bad idea if you have any care about IO performance, and especially if those drives are part of a RAID. Use PCIe SATA cards.
iTunes for Windows? Because iTunes for Mac is quite a bit different. i.e. it works much better. The Windows port is a bit of a hack in my opinion and doesn't work very well.
because it saves space
highly standardized
The guy isn't going to be hosting so many servers
Those are the guys three problems.
1) I have the entire "under the basement stairs" space plus two partial wiring closets in my house. Other than hoarding for the sake of hoarding, I can not fill them up. Do not spend money and severely constrain yourself to save space, that you do not need to save.
2) Do not highly standardize. My best purchases have been weird special one off this weekend only deals. Surplus sales, etc. In a corporate environment you Really need to standardize on one specific model of rack hardware to keep the spares situation manageable. This is meaningless at home. Do not turn down the opportunity of cheap GHz and cheap TB because you only collect dell 1U rackmounts or whatever.
3) You're cooling limited at the high end of rackmounts anyway, so who cares if you "could" get a rack sized NAS because it requires licenses and higher voltage three phase power anyway. I could wire multiple 15 amp ckts into my wiring closet, but the space heater effect would cause a fire. Thermal is your primary limit at home, usually. Also you get much more interesting experience with triple redundant physical servers, and better overall system reliability, than with one box three times the size. I have a small compute cluster hosting many LXC images, and by playing games with NFS etc I can back up each container to all three machines and furthermore can redeploy any container to any box based on load. You do need to standardized on all i386 or all amd64 to pull this off with LXC. In summary, get multiple small boxes, not one large box.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Curious, just how do you use NAS to feed an iTunes library? I haven't figured out how to elegantly and reliably do this. I've considered using an AFP share and a symbolic link from the local drive to point to the AFP share, but that doesn't seem totally reliable across reboots. I've also considered setting up an iSCSI initiator on the Mini and then mount iSCSI volumes from a NAS server but that also doesn't seem terribly reliable. This has to be reliable enough that when I'm traveling my wife has no problem getting to videos for the 3 year old :-). Please share your setup. Thanks!
Yes... "the age of Facebook".
Every one I know that still had a Yahoo mail account got their accounts hacked and then used as a carrier for virus infested spam.
Yes. "the era of Facebook".
Perhaps I don't want Facebook screwing it up.
People put a lot of faith in "the cloud" but the fact is that it really is not really warranted. Big prominent services get hacked. They sell your information. They do stupid annoying things. Then there's the problem that the network itself still sucks. We simply don't have the infastructure yet to "live in the cloud". It's just a marketing pipe dream that clueless idiots are prone to buy into because they like bragging about how ignorant of tech they are.
So. Something you (can) actually control yourself can have considerable advantages.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Both QNAP and Synology make good NAS units with multimedia capabilities. That said, if you need transcoding for video, don't count on either one having the horsepower to transcode video. They have enough power to saturate GigE for simple file sharing, but you'll need another device with more power to transcode video: (ie: convert a 720p mkv to an iPad friendly format) Out of the box, they're stripped down Linux boxes with Busybox based userland tools. But they have good community based support for extensions from Optware - you can add gcc compilers, perl, ruby and all kinds of goodies to hack your NAS into whatever frankenstein setup you like. The best part ... they're low power consumption.
This is a boring sig
the idea of lots of disks always spinning is just moronic for home-users! we are NOT a data center!
I agree, and I used to have my media server under XP and the disks would sleep unless accessed. But for the last few years I'm Linux all the way (work/home/laptop/media server). And no matter what I try, the disks won't ever spin down. If I send a low-level SLEEP command with smartctl, it spins down and then right back up within 10 seconds. I've researched this problem without solution. Maybe someone here is brighter than me.
Non-Linux Penguins ?