Media Storage pc for xbmc.
#1
Hey guys, can anyone tell me if these bits are compatible ?

Its use will be as a home server, with 6 3tb green drives that i already own full of media. There is no Raid required. I am using the SSD for quick booting.

Coolermaster Silencio 550 with GX 550W PSU £100.24

Liteon Ihas124 24x Dvd±rw (dual ±r)/ram Sata Drive £13.94

Corsair 4GB DDR3 1333MHz Memory Module CL9(9-9-9-24) 1.5V £23.00

Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 760G Socket AM3+ VGA DVI HDMI 7.1 Channel Audio mATX Motherboard £39.63

AMD Sempron 145 2.8GHz 45W Socket AM3 Retail Boxed Processor £25.79

OCZ 120GB Vertex Plus SSD - 2.5" SATA-II - Read 250MB/s Write 160MB/s £65.00

Total cost is £267 , which seems pretty good to me.
Any advice is appreciated.
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#2
You say no raid is required but i have to ask the question why? A 3TB disk can hold a lot of content that could be rendered useless in the blink of an eye, i dont want to sound paranoid but disks do fail, even SSDs have a limited amount of writes they can perform, if your in the planning stages yet, why not look at using un-raid? I've been using it for ~3 years and it is awesome. Flexible, simple, reliable, and runs on must hardware. You dont have to have matching HD specs, and can grow your array as your requirements grow.

Just my $.02 but look at using unraid. http://www.lime-technology.com
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#3
I would also look to have some sort of parity protection, like Unraid, Flexraid of even Snapraid do. With both Flexraid and Snapraid, you can start with drives which already have data, so you would simply need to add a parity HDD.

About the HW you chose, I would go with intel, an Asrock B75 Pro-3M has 8 Sata ports, and paired with a Celeron (the G465 single core 45W or G5x0 dual core 64W) would be a nice system. I don't have any numbers here, but I would guess that a Celeron G465 is speedier than the Sempron 145 and even more energy efficient, and should be about as cheap.

The mobo you chose only has 6 Sata ports, which is a problem, since you listed 7 HDDs (6 3TB + the SSD). So you either have to change the mobo or add a special card.

The case looks nice, but you will practically fill it with the HDDs you have, and then you will have to add a 4 in 3 or 5 in 3 drive cage.. may be you could look for one that holds 10 3,5" HDDs? You don't say what power supply youl will use, but make sure it has a single rail 12V.

You can have a look at my server here, it may help: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=159260
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#4
(2013-03-25, 04:24)cobolstinks Wrote: You say no raid is required but i have to ask the question why? A 3TB disk can hold a lot of content that could be rendered useless in the blink of an eye, i dont want to sound paranoid but disks do fail, even SSDs have a limited amount of writes they can perform, if your in the planning stages yet, why not look at using un-raid? I've been using it for ~3 years and it is awesome. Flexible, simple, reliable, and runs on must hardware. You dont have to have matching HD specs, and can grow your array as your requirements grow.

Just my $.02 but look at using unraid. http://www.lime-technology.com


+1
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#5
(2013-03-25, 04:24)cobolstinks Wrote: You say no raid is required but i have to ask the question why? A 3TB disk can hold a lot of content that could be rendered useless in the blink of an eye, i dont want to sound paranoid but disks do fail, even SSDs have a limited amount of writes they can perform, if your in the planning stages yet, why not look at using un-raid? I've been using it for ~3 years and it is awesome. Flexible, simple, reliable, and runs on must hardware. You dont have to have matching HD specs, and can grow your array as your requirements grow.

Just my $.02 but look at using unraid. http://www.lime-technology.com

http://serverfault.com/questions/2888/wh...t-a-backup
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#6
(2013-03-25, 17:54)derechteversus Wrote: http://serverfault.com/questions/2888/wh...t-a-backup

We already now that, and nobody is talking about backup... but having a minimal protection against a Hard drive failure is always good and even recommended.
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#7
All my data is backed up elsewhere in other locations, so i have no need for any form of raid.

Will take on the suggestions re mother board, and case and have another think,,, i will be back

Cheers
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#8
Not to hijack, but while we're on the subject... Do you guys consider RAID5 adequate for a media library? I have four 3TB drives myself and would hate to lose half the space for true redundancy.
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#9
It depends on how much media you have, intend to have and what kind of budget / space requirements you have.

I am paranoid I have everything backed up in triplicate! But, so much of my media doesn't change it's easy to burn a bunch of photos, music and docs to some BDs and take them off site. I seem to have plenty of old drives lying around I can throw some stuff on those too.

But, I don't have a lot of movies -- just a few hundred -- so I don't need much space for everything even 3 copies (internal mirror + external backup)

Now I am looking into cloud backup... even with that I'd still have local backup for replacing crashed drives easily. The cloud stuff would be for something truly catastrophic like a fire.

So ... my real plan?

FlexRAID (parity + pooling) + local backup + cloud backup (but movies)
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Media Storage pc for xbmc.0