[akelley]

Why speculate? Try out the WHS Vail Beta and do a side by side comparison.
http://connect.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver

Any old hardware you have lying around should be able to run it. My old 1GHz Athlon rig served up files just fine. Couldn't transcode on the fly, but with low power consumption I could run it 24/7 without racking up a huge electric bill.

NS

Good point! Wasn't looking to speculate per se, but understand other people's experiences between the two, but you're right, I should find out for myself.

[fshagan]

Question: How much impact does the CPU have on raw throughput of either a NAS or a WHS box? When I originally started thinking about going WHS I looked at some of the Atom based boxes for the lower cost and lower power requirements. I started to think that the lower CPU power would limit my ability to add additional functionality in the future or the performance would be really slow.

By "raw throughput" do you mean streaming media to your XBMC install? The CPU shouldn't have much to do with that at all, there are several people using single core Atom 230 boards in home built servers.

But where you do see an impact is on transcoding speed, ripping, downloading bit torrent, running other applications, multitasking, etc. So you have to think about what you intend the machine to do.

Mine is low power, serving media, backing up computers and acting as a print server. That's its function, so the low power profile is perfect for me.

[akelley]

By "raw throughput" do you mean streaming media to your XBMC install? The CPU shouldn't have much to do with that at all, there are several people using single core Atom 230 boards in home built servers.

But where you do see an impact is on transcoding speed, ripping, downloading bit torrent, running other applications, multitasking, etc. So you have to think about what you intend the machine to do.

Mine is low power, serving media, backing up computers and acting as a print server. That's its function, so the low power profile is perfect for me.

That's what I figured, and you spelled it out nicely. And at the end of the day that's all I want - a media repository for my XBMC clients (and perhaps other client platforms in the future).

So that said, do you think my ReadyNas NV+ with ~15MB/sec is performing normal for what it is? I see others posting performance around twice that using WHS, so I guess my question is will going WHS easily solve this, or do I just need to get the ReadyNas configured correctly?

[Geeba]

Why speculate? Try out the WHS Vail Beta and do a side by side comparison.
http://connect.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver

Any old hardware you have lying around should be able to run it. My old 1GHz Athlon rig served up files just fine. Couldn't transcode on the fly, but with low power consumption I could run it 24/7 without racking up a huge electric bill.

NS

Maybe not Vail - pretty sure it has a higher hardware requirement than the current WHS - dual core 64bit CPU's and 1Gb+ from memory - but yep current WHS runs on anything... my first WHS was an old PIII saved from the skip!

[Dalej]

Maybe this will help someone else.
(and I have no dog in this hunt, just relatively happy with it for once..)

I have two of the 8 bay Sans Digital eSATA units: http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid/tr8mb.html

I had been running (and still have one running) OpenFiler on some old cases with older desktop boards for NAS. One unit had 10 500GB SATA II drives and the other has 8 500 GB SATA II drives.

The 10 drive setup was in an Antec case - the drives ran so hot and I had some drive failures. I got an off brand case from Fry's that offered somewhat better airflow and I have the 8 drive array running it in still. This thing has dual 6" or 8" fans on the side of the case sucking air over the drives. I keep a small fan pointed at the front where the "intake" for the drives when it's powered up and I still occasionally see a couple of the drives hit 104F some days.

Even with bonded pairs of NICs in the OpenFiler box I couldn't get more than 16 - 20 MB/s large file transfers out of it.

Because of the heat issue, I wound up getting the SANS Digital enclosures.
The first one I attached to my desktop and run it with the included dual port eSATA card (which of you read reviews, you'll see most people report very poor performance). That unit has 8 500GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATAII disks.

I bought a second one and filled it with 8 1.5TB 5900 RPM Seagate drives, it's attached to a cheap shuttle box I bought for like $95.

I have Ubuntu on both the desktop (cheap MSI board) and the shuttle - plain desktop install of 9.10, using software RAID5 on both and XFS on the shuttle and EXT4 on the desktop. I can consistently get 30 - 40 MB/s when copying DVD sized ISO images between the two boxes and I traverse two dumb GB switches and use a single onboard NIC on both boxes.

Maybe because I had Samba configured on the OpenFiler in addition to NFS caused the performance difference, I don't know. The CPU on the OpenFiler box is a little slower than the shuttle, the memory is the same. I really expected the OpenFiler to perform better than just generic desktop, but the difference may be the HBAs in use.

I'll eventually try Openfiler on the shuttle with both towers hanging off a 4 port eSATA card.

[billco]

Part of the reason Openfiler performs so poorly with software raid is it doesn't even try to tweak your drives. With a hardware raid controller, Openfiler is great. I run several large OF boxes at work, fast and stable.

Another hurdle is its use of LVM. LVM is a disk abstraction layer, which allows for some neat tricks but also adds overhead as every single disk access has to go through extra layers of processing before hitting the physical disk.

What I ended up doing is installing a regular Linux, creating normal partitions without LVM, and building the RAID-5 directly on top of them. Then I got to work trying various tweaks and benchmarks until I was satisfied with the performance. Here's the script I ended up with... hope it works for you. The most important things are the blockdev lines, and the NOOP scheduler. Blockdev sets the read-ahead, which helps on sequential reads like streaming a movie. NOOP affects how disk accesses are queued and prioritized, so you get better multi-stream performance.

#!/bin/bash
MD="md0"
####
CHUNK=$(echo `cat /sys/block/$MD/md/chunk_size` '/1024' |bc)
DISKS=$(ls -d /sys/block/$MD/md/dev-*|sed -e 's/^.*\/dev-\(...\).*/\1/'|sort|uniq)

echo "8192" > /sys/block/$MD/md/stripe_cache_size

blockdev --setra 16384 /dev/$MD

for i in $DISKS
do
hdparm -a 0 /dev/$i 2>&1 >/dev/null
blockdev --setra 4096 /dev/$i
echo "noop" > /sys/block/$i/queue/scheduler
echo "128" > /sys/block/$i/queue/nr_requests
echo "$CHUNK*4" > /sys/block/$i/queue/max_sectors_kb

done

This script is for an 8 disk RAID-5 array of 2tb WD "Green" disks. With this setup I can max out a gigabit (~110mb/sec), on an older Athlon X2 1.8 ghz, with plenty of CPU to spare.

[fshagan]

That's what I figured, and you spelled it out nicely. And at the end of the day that's all I want - a media repository for my XBMC clients (and perhaps other client platforms in the future).

So that said, do you think my ReadyNas NV+ with ~15MB/sec is performing normal for what it is? I see others posting performance around twice that using WHS, so I guess my question is will going WHS easily solve this, or do I just need to get the ReadyNas configured correctly?

Usually, performance problems from any kind of server are really network issues. There are plenty of people streaming from various NAS units or WHS that have great performance, but forums are also full of posts from people having problems as well. If it is a network problem, getting a WHS won't solve it (well, it might if its a configuration issue, as a lot of people find WHS very easy to configure). There's a thread with different I/O results for ReadyNas at http://bit.ly/cjlaVJ ... you might see if your throughput matches the posts there.

[Dalej]

Part of the reason Openfiler performs so poorly with software raid is it doesn't even try to tweak your drives. With a hardware raid controller, Openfiler is great. I run several large OF boxes at work, fast and stable.

Another hurdle is its use of LVM. LVM is a disk abstraction layer, which allows for some neat tricks but also adds overhead as every single disk access has to go through extra layers of processing before hitting the physical disk.

What I ended up doing is installing a regular Linux, creating normal partitions without LVM, and building the RAID-5 directly on top of them. Then I got to work trying various tweaks and benchmarks until I was satisfied with the performance. Here's the script I ended up with... hope it works for you. The most important things are the blockdev lines, and the NOOP scheduler. Blockdev sets the read-ahead, which helps on sequential reads like streaming a movie. NOOP affects how disk accesses are queued and prioritized, so you get better multi-stream performance.



This script is for an 8 disk RAID-5 array of 2tb WD "Green" disks. With this setup I can max out a gigabit (~110mb/sec), on an older Athlon X2 1.8 ghz, with plenty of CPU to spare.

I really doubt my performance issues had anything to do with Openfiler itself - on the 10 disk array the issue was heat - hot running Seagate drives didn't help, and stuffing 11 drives into that case was a little much.

On the 8 drive system where I'm seeing poor(er) throughput I'm using a fakeraid controller with Linux drivers - an 8 port rocketraid (forget the model off hand) controller.
It hasn't lost any data (yet- knock on wood) and seems stable just a bit slow.
So don't misread my post about openfiler - the issues I had were of my own creation, that's for sure!

I like the SANS Digital boxes because of the airflow - they keep the drives nice and cool even if I spend several hours doing a constant stream of data on or off as fast as the connected PC can read or write it.

I would be interested in reading up on tweaks that could/should be done for performance on an install of something like Ubuntu server LTS to optimize for performance for NFS and mybe even Samba usage. If anyone has a link?

[voip-ninja]

A bit late to the party but thought I ought to chime in. I've run a huge variety of NAS type devices over the past 5-6 years including running a dedicated Linux server with hardware RAID-5, running the Netgear ReadyNAS boxes, running a vanilla Windows box as a file server, etc.

I switched to WHS a couple of years ago and haven't looked back. As others have mentioned, once you set it up you can more or less forget it. Setting it up takes a whopping 30 minutes.

I have the HP EX495 and use it to serve all of my files as well as do Time Machine backups for my Macs. I have connected an external ESATA backplane so now I have up to 9 drives that can be configured with up to 18GB of storage.

I get typical transfer speeds of 35-50MB/s over my gigabit wired LAN. Streaming works wonderfully with one exception. If I duplicate the folder that holds my extremely large Mac Time Machine backup files (250GB each) then every time the MS drive extender service runs it will cause streaming to slow down if the movie file is on the same drive as the TM backup.

I simply turned off folder duplication for Time Machine folder and everything is running great again.

I would heartily recommend this as a solution, it works very very well and as a bonus you have a full blown OS on the box that can run other services. I run the YAMJ jokebox front end and scripting for my movie collection, run DC++, run IP security camera recording software, etc. You could do some, but not all of this with Linux but why bother when WHS does it very well with not much effort.

[achong4]

run the YAMJ jokebox front end and scripting for my movie collection, run DC++, run IP security camera recording software, etc.

#voip-ninja Just out of curiosity, which IP security camera recording software are you using? I have the EX495 as well and am looking to set it up as a recorder for my cameras. Apologies, I don't want to hijack this thread, but couldn't find a way to PM you