New Network Attached Storage suggestions

readynas 3200 (or 4200)

12 disk bays, dual redundancy, redundant power/nic's

http://www.readynas.com/?cat=73

thats what I would buy if I had a big budget

joel_ezekiel Wrote:unraid im sure would do the job, but it lacks performance and the parity drive is only 1 disk so im asuming if that disk dies you would have some problems with the rest of the array? I haven't looked into it properly i might do that now actually.

If a parity drive fails you'll have to replace it and rebuild the array. No data is lost. If you lose 2 drives then the data on both of those drives is lost. With Raid 5 2 bad drives means you restore everything from backup as all the data on the array is gone.

For most media users raid5 is not a good solution. It uses a lot of power (drives spin all the time), expandability usually isn't near as flexible as the parity drive systems, and its reliability isn't what is needed.

TeknoJnky Wrote:readynas 3200 (or 4200)

12 disk bays, dual redundancy, redundant power/nic's

http://www.readynas.com/?cat=73

thats what I would buy if I had a big budget

ReadyNAS is a good solution. It too uses a parity type system so drives can be spun down when not in use and you can expand it (within the confines of the chassis). It is also more expensive than most of the DIY systems as well as the Lime-Technology unRaid box.

Oh, and Adaptive Load Balancing doesn't work on the ReadyNAS line (though it's unlikely any media users would use that feature).

Ok, you've got me interested, because power usage is a concern for me. 3 WD green drives isnt a big deal but i used to run 8 1TB drives and im sure eventually i'll have that many 2TB drives as well.

From what i was reading there is no striping, data can be accessed on each single drive if the whole raid is scrapped. The few concern i have is that the parity disk has heavy usage but if its a write once and read many times this shouldn't be an issue. The performance, im assuming the performance should be that of reading directly from one drive? The last one is software, do i have to buy the unraid software to get full unrestricted usage of it? eg. there is a free version nexenta but its limited to 2TB.

I'm really keen on this though, as i lost my 8 drive array due to me not scrubbing before pulling a disk and there happened to be errors on one of the disks i didnt pull killing the whole zfs array. So while the new array isnt full i would like to find the right solution.

The unraid parity drive is used when data is written. When you read only the drive with the data you're reading is spun up.

IIRC, unRaid uses a ReiserFS. If you decide to break up the array these drives can be read by another system, as long as it can read that file system type. Windows doesn't do it natively, but I recall someone posting a link to a driver that would allow Windows to do so.

UnRaid is free for up to 3 drives. The Plus license is good for 6 drives, and the top end version is good for 20 drives. IIRC, it is ~$70 for the Plus and ~$120 for the Pro.

Since it runs on almost any hardware it is easy to try out. Probably the biggest hurdle is making sure you have a USB drive that is bootable and that the MB allows boot from the USB drive.

I get 20MB/sec+ write speeds. Read is faster but I really haven't bothered to test it as it is plenty fast to feed a BR rip.

TugboatBill Wrote:ReadyNAS is a good solution. It too uses a parity type system

this is not completely accurate.

the original sparc based x-raid is like this, but the current generation x86 based x-raid2 uses mdadm based arrays. 3200/4200 use dual redundancy (essentially raid 6) by default and come with enterprise disks.

Quote:so drives can be spun down when not in use and you can expand it (within the confines of the chassis). It is also more expensive than most of the DIY systems as well as the Lime-Technology unRaid box.

I know the nvx/ultra/pro systems have spindown, I am not sure if the 3200/4200 do as they are designed for 24/7 operation in datacenters etc.

Quote:Oh, and Adaptive Load Balancing doesn't work on the ReadyNAS line (though it's unlikely any media users would use that feature).

I've never tested ALB, but LACP works fine on my readynas.

If you have issues with ALB, then the best thing to do is open an online support ticket and post in the readynas forums.

TugboatBill Wrote:Since it runs on almost any hardware it is easy to try out. Probably the biggest hurdle is making sure you have a USB drive that is bootable and that the MB allows boot from the USB drive.

I get 20MB/sec+ write speeds. Read is faster but I really haven't bothered to test it as it is plenty fast to feed a BR rip.

Well, i have centos running off a flash stick right now. Im hoping i can run unraid under vmware so i can through in a bunch of virtual disks to test it on.

Also 20mb/sec write speeds is rather slow, but what is the limiting factor here? I'm used to getting full saturation of my gigabit network (up to 90mb/sec tranfers) when i used to use my raid for everything. It was actually quicker for me to access the raid over gigabit then it was for the 250 and 500gb drives i was using in my desktop sytems. However since i lost the raid ive decided to go down the dedicated NAS just for sharing media files so speed isnt as much of an issue and im using old hardware. But using all PCI cards and a p4 im still getting 40mb/sec write speeds to the array at the moment.

I've also been looking into flexraid, I have a games box which i keep clean and dont install junk onto and then i have a second pc using synergy to share the kb/mouse which i do all my downloading, encoding, ripping, day to day work and chatting on. If i can use that pc for the raid this would cut down the need for another pc thats on 24/7 and give me fast access to the raid. But trusting my data with something like flexraid seems... scary? Has anyone had any experience with this?

joel_ezekiel Wrote:Also 20mb/sec write speeds is rather slow, but what is the limiting factor here?

The slower write speeds and the cost are the two downsides to Unraid. But the write speed problem can be fixed by dedicating a cache drive.

The cost problem is fixed when you see how awesome Unraid works....

TeknoJnky Wrote:I've never tested ALB, but LACP works fine on my readynas.

If you have issues with ALB, then the best thing to do is open an online support ticket and post in the readynas forums.

Already been done. Alas Netgear support for the ReadNAS is a bit slow. The ALB bug is a nasty one. PM me if you want details (or take a look at the ALB bug? thread in the readynas general forum).

I'm a big fan of hardware RAID vs software based solutions like unRAID, but Lime technologies has a pretty cool product.

I personally run a linux box (Fedora) in a Norco 4220 case with a pair of 3ware 9550X 12-port SATA cards. I picked up the cards and working pulls off of ebay for a very reasonable price. I currently have 2 arrays - a 12 drive array built with WD Green 1Tb drives and an 8 drive array built with WD Green 1.5Tb drives. I run XFS as the native filesystem because it supports large volumes, volume expansion (I didn't start with both arrays fully populated), and the initialization time for the FS is nearly instanteous compared to ext2/3 FS. The motherboard I chose has 2 64bit PCI-X slots for the RAID cards, as well as a dedicated 64-bit channel for an onboard dual gigE ethernet controller which I have bonded to my switch for full 2x throughput.

I don't have hard benchmark numbers, but I can transfer a BD rip from my main workstation to the storage array and simultaneously play full BD rips from both of my XBMC pc's without a hiccup.