New Home Server Mind Melt

Matt2000

An Unfortunate Discovery
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So I'm currently in the position where my data is vulnerable to failures. The OS SSD from my main PC is backed up along with my user profile and my separate disk for photos, but nothing else is backed up and at best the backups are only duplicate. My current home server is a Win7 box running an old AMD dual core with a single 2TB disk. Nothing on the server is backed up, it used to be a pair of 1TB disks in RAID 1 but I ran out of space and had to swap them out. As you can see, this is a tad risky.

I was hoping that the server I had brought home from the clearout at work would be the base unit for my new server, but after it decided to smoke me out on Saturday I don't trust it any more and will be getting rid. It ran an old Xeon with limited memory.

Storage

Storage is fixed already, I'll be buying a trio of WD Red 3TB drives and running them in RAID 5, giving me protection against one failure and 6TB of usable space. The disks currently total ?285, the controller I have in mind is the Adaptec 6405 which comes in at ?135 with the fan-out cable for the 4 SATA connections. In all cases this controller is required as I will mention later. The server will be performing several tasks. Primarily it'll be a file server for all my media and backup device for the network, but will also be running Plex, Sickbeard, Sab, torrents and potentiall handling IP camera recordings in the future. One of my options allows me to make other uses which I will explain. OS will either be Windows 7 or Home Server 2011, They're both about the same price but I'm struggling to see the benefit of WHS over Win7.

I'm left with a couple of options for the box though.

Option 1

Buy an HP MicroServer. The prices range wildly depending on the model but a good Gen 7 model with 4GB RAM can be had for about ?200. The processor will be low end, at best a dual core Turion, which is slower than that in my current server. Out of the box they don't do RAID 5, so I'll need the Adaptec card mentioned above. Basically if I go down this route I'm just paying ?200 for a small, quiet box that sips electricity. However it lacks the power of option 2 and means I have 3 machines, one of which is potentially sitting around doing nowt.

Option 2

Turn the box I'm currently using into a server. It's my trusty C2Q 9550 with 8GB RAM. Work were getting rid of a custom Core 2 Extreme beast that was used for many years as a 3D modelling machine, and naturally this has more power than the C2Q, along with DDR3 RAM. This means I could move over to that beast as my main machine and re-purpose this one, with the disks and controllers mentioned above. The P5Q Pro board can already support RAID 5, but a quick search will reveal many complaints about speed so I'd rather just spend the money and get something reliable. Advantages are it's essentially free and along with all the other tasks I can use it as a video render machine, something I've really been wanting recently. No other solution can do this.

The only main downsides of using this box are it's size and volume. It's a full ATX board so other than shoving it in a rackmount chassis it has to stay as-is, a big midi-tower. It's currently rocking 3 big fans (inlet and exhaust built in to the case) but if I drop it back to standard clock speed I could probably get the volume down. It still won't be quiet though so I'll need to locate it carefully if I'm going for 24/7 uptime. Power usage is a concern because none of this kit was designed to run on low power, I have no idea what it uses while idling though.

Opinions appreciated. :)
 
Semi off-topic but on-site backups are not enough. What happens in the case of fire? :)

I use Crashplan to do two things when it comes to my important data:

1. Back up to another local storage device. In my case one of my RAID 5 Synology NASes, but the important thing here is it's not on just a single drive/device. This is a local backup and fast to restore in the event of drive failure since I don't store my important data on a RAID.
2. Back up to Crashplan's cloud incase of fire. It's only a couple dollars a month and they have no size caps. I'm currently backing up about 300GB -- only the stuff I can't possibly replace (photos, documents, etc.). Stuff like Top Gear videos and such, while stored on my NASes, can easily be redownloaded.


I can't weigh in on your actual question though as I run Synology NASes to store all my stuff. Plex can run on them technically but they're too underpowered to do it well. I just run Plex on my desktop and have it read over the gigabit network.
 
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Here is my current home server setup:
OS: FreeBSD
Hardware: Supermicro X9SBAA (Atom based) with 8GB ECC memory
Harddrives: 4 x 3gb RAIDz

I have absolutely no trust in hardware RAID and use a ZFS RAIDz array instead. It has been proven by SUN/ORCALE to be a more reliable platform. Plus you aren't locked into a vender.

If the server will be running 24/7 ECC memory is a must.

I use FreeBSD as it has a mature ZFS implementation and comes from people with the mindset that drastically changing everything for no apparent reason is a bad way to make a server OS (you can tell I don't like Linux). FreeNAS (FreeBSD based) is the easiest way to go. Not only is the management web based, but it also has plugins for things like Transmission and Plex.

If you can afford another drive I would recommend RAIDz2 (that way you still have full redundancy when you have a drive die on you).

ZFS also will do snapshots so you can return your data to a previous saved state if you accidentally hose something.

Oh and I run Plex Media Server off my Atom server without much issue. Even on-the-fly transcoding is decently quick.
 
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Semi off-topic but on-site backups are not enough. What happens in the case of fire? :)

Very true, I currently don't have anything more than some odd files on Dropbox. Crashplan seems very good from what I've seen, the unlimited package seems like very good value.

I've used NAS devices in the past and they've failed on me so I'm not keen to go down that route again.

I've also tried FreeNAS and Ubuntu server before and they're both great in their own ways but don't meet my needs.

I'll look up the prices of ECC DDR2, I suspect they're going to be prohibitively expensive but if I can get a decent chunk back for selling my Dominator 2 sticks maybe it won't be so painful.

Thanks so far. :)
 
You'll need to check if your motherboard supports ECC.
 
I have absolutely no trust in hardware RAID and use a ZFS RAIDz array instead. It has been proven by SUN/ORCALE to be a more reliable platform. Plus you aren't locked into a vender.
I completely agree. ZFS and Btrfs are the only options that provide end-to-end protection against data corruption, and I don't trust Btrfs yet. ZFS is known for its stability and general awesomeness.

If the server will be running 24/7 ECC memory is a must.
If you have a checksumming filesystem like ZFS or Btrfs I don't think this is completely true, at least if a reboot isn't the end of the world for you, but obviously it's an advantage. Get it if you can.

I use FreeBSD as it has a mature ZFS implementation and comes from people with the mindset that drastically changing everything for no apparent reason is a bad way to make a server OS (you can tell I don't like Linux). FreeNAS (FreeBSD based) is the easiest way to go. Not only is the management web based, but it also has plugins for things like Transmission and Plex.
I use the zfsonlinux package both at home an at work (on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) and it is performant and reliable. The FreeBSD implementation is really solid too, although I don't much care for FreeNAS. Use Linux or FreeBSD, whichever you're more familiar with, but if you want to run a bunch of software you should double-check that it works on your distro. Either way, use ZFS.

If you can afford another drive I would recommend RAIDz2 (that way you still have full redundancy when you have a drive die on you).
I would consider RAIDz2 a necessity. Anything less than raid6 is not reliable given today's disk sizes and error rates. Basically, if one drive fails you have to go through and read every sector of every other drive, and the chances are good that you'll hit a random read error when you're doing that on TBs of data. If you have RAID6, you're not hosed when that happens.


Oh Matt2000, you said you're going to use Windows. Nevermind, you're SOL on reliable filesystem until ReFS comes out, and I wouldn't trust a new filesystem completely anyway. Use Linux/FreeBSD and use the money you save to buy an extra HD for RAIDz2 unless you can actually justify why you're paying for Windows.
 
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