New Network Attached Storage suggestions

lifespan of the disks i dont consider a factor, although a agree with mostly what everyone has said since my last post. I do agree that unraid is good for power consumption and the ability to read from only one disk and spin down the rest, this is why i tried it out myself. But the limitations it brings and the use of reiserFS made me unhappy, speed again not that important but nice to be able to saturate my gigabit when i use it as storage for everything. As for solaris, solaris 10 has been free for long time and the next version of solaris (OpenSolaris) which is no longer open. I believe is a trial now and as far as i can see no more opensource updates for zfs.

And when i said linux md is better then zfs for repairing, yes zfs is better and safe to use but if something goes horribly wrong its far easier to recover data from linux md array imo.

Anyway i do certainly like the idea of spinning down disks that you do not use with unraid i just really wish there was a more open solution so you can setup a server properly using it. But with green drives, and i plan to build up to 2x6drive arrays and replace the smaller array with whatever is the best value at the time that way atleast limiting the amount of drives im using and i can spindown the unused array. Who knows maybe there will be a better solution in the future for doing everything i want with the one OS on the one machine

joel_ezekiel Wrote:lifespan of the disks i dont consider a factor, although a agree with mostly what everyone has said since my last post. I do agree that unraid is good for power consumption and the ability to read from only one disk and spin down the rest, this is why i tried it out myself. But the limitations it brings and the use of reiserFS made me unhappy, speed again not that important but nice to be able to saturate my gigabit when i use it as storage for everything. As for solaris, solaris 10 has been free for long time and the next version of solaris (OpenSolaris) which is no longer open. I believe is a trial now and as far as i can see no more opensource updates for zfs.

And when i said linux md is better then zfs for repairing, yes zfs is better and safe to use but if something goes horribly wrong its far easier to recover data from linux md array imo.

Anyway i do certainly like the idea of spinning down disks that you do not use with unraid i just really wish there was a more open solution so you can setup a server properly using it. But with green drives, and i plan to build up to 2x6drive arrays and replace the smaller array with whatever is the best value at the time that way atleast limiting the amount of drives im using and i can spindown the unused array. Who knows maybe there will be a better solution in the future for doing everything i want with the one OS on the one machine

In your situation (wanting one server to rule them all), I can agree that unRAID is definitely not the answer. I would argue that Ubuntu or RedHat would be a much better solution long-term, though. OpenSolaris' biggest fault is that Solaris was always an "against-the-grain" distribution. For a general purpose server, I tend to want something with nearly universal availability of packages. OpenSolaris easily falls into the "not quite open enough" category that unRAID occupies. While I am comfortable with a niche product being so tightly bound to one vendor, I would never consider a general purpose server with the same issue.

But it makes for an interesting discussion, nonetheless.

That's the thing that disappoints me with opensolaris. I believed it was better then Linux. The filesystem far superior atleast until we get btrfs and with most of the development done by sun with the backing of sun it had real potential. It was already possible to get mostly anything running on it without great difficulty. But thanks oracle for ruining that for us.

Without corporate backing any further solaris based distros will be just another distro like the other 500 Linux ones already there however have no developer support from other projects. :-(

Define "corporate backing". Nexenta is a real company. Illumos is going to pick up with OS left off. Oracle is still backing Solaris, they're cutting OpenSolaris.

ZFS is licensed under the CDDL. Oracle didn't say they would stop releasing Sun updates. They're changing the model in which they do it.

Instead of developers having access to the 'latest' code like they did, Oracle is going to wait until after the corresponding version of Solaris is released.

And who knows what will happen. Oracle is a major source of funds for brtfs... they now also own ZFS. They could somehow just merge the projects and release it as GPL.

And I've never had any problem getting packages for OS. It's not a standard desktop distro, so of course you can't get EVERYTHING under the sun, but I'm running SABnzbd on it

joel_ezekiel Wrote:Well I hope this helps people debating if they want to use unraid or not. Basicly yes it's acceptable if you want slow speed cheap nas. But no if you want well performing server that can do many things.

You make it sound like Unraid is not up to the task.

Unraid works PERFECTLY as a media server. Not once has its "slow speed" caused a playback stutter or a dropped connection. Heck, the Samba in the Unraid distro is so tweaked it BLOWS AWAY the default Samba in Ubuntu for performance.

The only reasons to not use Unraid are:

1. You want your server to do more than Unraid.

2. You want to simulate a business network environment in your home (I couldn't guess why, home business maybe?)


But please don't act like Unraid is unacceptable for a media server. In fact, its probably the only RAID out there DESIGNED for that task. The advantages it offers over Linux RAID or ZFS (such as spinning down disks, easy to grow arrays, the ability to mix and match drives) are basically the exact advantages that consumers like those on the forum could want....

poofyhairguy Wrote:. . .In fact, its probably the only RAID out there DESIGNED for that task.

Just a small flaw there. It isn't a RAID implementation. RAID means something very specific. If it were a RAID implementation, it would not be called unRAID (or they'd just be really dumb to call it that).

In the interest of being fair, unRAID would fail miserably at tasks for which RAID (with hardware controllers and a large memory cache) was particularly well equipped:

• Constant small file access
• High Simultaneous User Count (dozens to hundreds)
• Applications where number of writes approaches or exceeds number of reads (i.e., logging, online backup for large networks)
  

You just have to remember that these are vastly different use cases.

GJones Wrote:Keep the other computing tasks on a separate server unless it is very media-intensive. It will be less expensive and more stable that way in the long run.

I 100% agree with this. Sickbeard, Sabnzbd, and coachpotato are all works in progress and they need constant updating to keep up with the features until they hit some sort of stable level (the day when they are all one program).

If you just have one server, then you are constantly fiddling with it which leads to downtime. This is just three programs, you throw in a few more for the server (for me its also Air Video, MythTV, Orb) and suddenly you are faced with a situation where it requires almost constant fiddling to keep features from breaking because you have obsolete versions of the software.

So basically in that scenario you are constantly fiddling with your server that is supposed to be the stable backbone of your XBMC setup. No thank you, power and parts aren't that expensive, so personally let my servers only be servers.

For all the other stuff (Air Video, MythTV, Orb, Sickbeard, Sabnzbd, and coachpotato) I have turned my bedroom HTPC into a quad core monster that play XBMC while it does all these other tasks. You would be amazed how quiet you can get a quad core to be if you buy the right heat sink and silent 120mm fans. In this solution the box I am constantly fiddling with (and therefore breaking) is my least used HTPC, and since I would have a bedroom HTPC no matter what this doesn't add a box, it just reassigns the tasks...

GJones Wrote:Just a small flaw there. It isn't a RAID implementation. RAID means something very specific. If it were a RAID implementation, it would not be called unRAID (or they'd just be really dumb to call it that).

In the interest of being fair, unRAID would fail miserably at tasks for which RAID (with hardware controllers and a large memory cache) was particularly well equipped:

• Constant small file access
• High Simultaneous User Count (dozens to hundreds)
• Applications where number of writes approaches or exceeds number of reads (i.e., logging, online backup for large networks)
  

You just have to remember that these are vastly different use cases.

Agreed 100%. I consider Unraid to basically be RAID 4.5, which is why I called it that. It uses RAID 4's single parity disk, but the data is not stripped like RAID 4.

I agree to its limitations above, with the caveat that NONE of those things matter for a media server....

poofyhairguy Wrote:I agree to its limitations above, with the caveat that NONE of those things matter for a media server....

True. I just do not want someone less experienced with these issues to walk away thinking that it was a generalized solution to replace RAID.

GJones Wrote:True. I just do not want someone less experienced with these issues to walk away thinking that it was a generalized solution to replace RAID.

Good call.