Server OS for NAS?
#61
You might want give snapraid and aufs a look...

http://blog.ktz.me/?p=470

My biggest complaint about unraid is it's chaotic development strategy.

Freenas is great but expansion is tricky due to ZFS and pools etc. Gets confusing quick for a newbie and before you know or you're locked in. Also, ideal hardware requirements are somewhat less flexible due to ECC memory.

Snapraid and aufs (or mhddfs) does everything you want when paired with any Linux distro. I use arch because I can get "those kinds of apps" from AUR very easily, the OS is almost irrelevant as snapraid is filesystem agnostic.
Asus P8H77-V LE, BIOS 0237 | Intel i5 3470 3.2ghz | 8GB RAM | TX750W Corsair PSU | 60GB OCZ SSD | 500GB data drive
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#62
(2014-08-10, 02:55)nickr Wrote: I never know why people who can type quite literately on a forum think that they can't type on a command line, particularly now that there are so many howto sites out there from which you can copy and paste.

Because typing a throwaway forum post is not in the same universe as trying to configure your media server? Because there are a lot of how-to sites with conflicting and/or outdated information? Because searching for a lot of those how-to sites leads to multiple results that a new user has little ability to rank in terms of quality of the information? Because searching for how-to sites often leads to incomplete instructions that presume a level of knowledge a new user might not have? Because searching for how-to sites often leads to results where experienced Linux users either implicitly or directly insult the intelligence of Windows users rather than simply providing help?

I've used Linux for a decade or so, and I think one of the biggest obstacles to more widespread adoption is the type of posts many people are making in this thread.
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#63
Interesting reading and thanks for all the input, some above my head though!

Having a bit of a nightmare trying to find a suitable application to run on my NAS....

Tried FreeNAS and setup was easy but it wouldn't recognize the partition on one of my drives (new 4TB WD Green). Googled and seemed like an error other have had as well but no resolution so gave up.
Tried Amahi, installation took forever but got there in the end only to be greeted with a command prompt when it booted up and no GUI. Spent hours again googling and inputting linux commands to install and get access to a GUI but to no avail.
Tried UnRaid (demo) yesterday, nice easy setup and interface and was able to put two of my drives in a array but doing this seemed to kill the partition info and had to recover it afterwards! Is there no easy to setup a partition with NTFS drives (no parity)?
Snapraid just looked too complex for me! Will look into Open Media Vault though.

Will get there in the end! Always thought I was pretty tech savvy but this exercise is showing me I am far from it!
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#64
Can't help with FreeNAS, I've never used it

From looking into Amahi myself it seemed like it was managed through a web interface, did you try accessing it from another computer?

UnRAID needs to start with empty disks

Snapraid is not complex at all, I just set it up on Ubuntu Server recently and it was a very simple setup, though it was all at the command line. I followed this guide:
http://zackreed.me/articles/72-snapraid-on-ubuntu-12-04
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#65
@mrstarface can you create a poll in this thread with the different alternatives you've been given for people to vote.
My XBMC/Kodi folder: addons, skins, addon/menu backgrounds & more
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#66
(2014-08-08, 02:15)two515ty Wrote: What are the dangers of a RAID reconstruction? I'm curious myself because I'm planning on migrating to a RAID-Z2 (RAID6) system in the future, but I've never really heard about RAID reconstruction being dangerous.

The issue is if you hit an uncorrectable error during rebuild you can lose some data or even all the data on the array. For instance if you are running RAID5 and a drive fails. You slap in a new drive to rebuild the array. If parity data that is required to rebuild that disk is bad then your going to lose data.

Good controllers will allow the process to continue and you will only lose whatever was corrupted. Some controllers will halt the entire rebuild and your data will be gone. This is where a backup comes in handy.

If you run RAID6 (like I do), this makes things more secure because there is duplicate parity data (always stored on different disks) so 2 drives would have to fail. To fail a rebuild 2 matching parity blocks would have to be corrupt.

The trick with RAID is maintenance. If you run a scheduled volume check on your array weekly (or higher frequency), as every manufacturer recommends, then you will detect issues and correct them, so when you actually get a failure your data is tip-top. Furthermore, if you monitor SMART data correctly you have a good chance of finding a drive before it fails.

I run daily SMART short tests, and a script emails the results to me. On particularly important arrays I run a full SMART assessment weekly in "off-peak" hours. So between the weekly volume checks and the weekly SMART assessments, that covers file system and hardware issues.

I have been running RAID in my house for over a decade (RAID0, RAID1, RAID5 & RAID6) and have only ever lost data on the RAID0 arrays, which didn't matter because that's why it was stored there to begin with.

The only downside to a really nice hardware RAID card is the price. Most good cards (that support 8+ drives) are easily over $1,000 US.
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#67
if it hasnt been mentioned have you looked at openmediavault its based on debian wheezy and is developed by one of the ex freenas developers
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