The $550 $587 1.5 Terabyte Network Server
A while back, I posted a pathetic plea for help in putting together a home server. After considerable thrashing in both hardware and software, I finally got it working a couple of weeks ago. For those who’re interested, here’s what I did (and for those who aren’t, Martini Boy will be back with something considerably more entertaining than this in a couple of days):
I’ve been planning to add a home media server for a while now. I wanted to save my DVD collection to hard disc for instant access (bite me, MPAA, they’re my DVDs), plus have a place to store all out digitized music, as well as any new video extracted from my DVRs, all to be playable anywhere in the house, but mostly at the main entertainment system in the living room.
My requirements were something like this:
1. It’s gotta be cheap.
2. It’s gotta have a lot of capacity.
3. It’s gotta feed high-definition video to a playback device (probably a Mac Mini).
4. It’d be nice if it were robust enough to recover from a hard drive failure.
After doing a mind-numbing amount of research and niggling price comparisons, I settled on building a server with six 300GB hard drives configured in a software RAID 5 array. In English, that means taking a bunch of hard drives and telling a piece of software to view them as one huge drive (that’s the RAID part) with the extra feature of being able to recover all the data on the array if any single drive fails (that’s the “5″ part). That would give me just under 1.5 terabytes of storage, since under the rules of RAID 5, you lose roughly one drive’s worth of capacity in order to save all the just-in-case recovery data.
Once I had the basic plan in place, it was time to start buying hardware. I found what looked like an ideal enclosure and motherboard on eBay for $50, and since the seller was local, I didn’t even have to pay shipping; I just met up with him. I got a lucky break with the box, since it came with an unadvertised Gigabit Ethernet card (I also got a considerably less lucky break with the motherboard, but more about that later). A boot hard drive to run the thing was $13 (used), and the six 300GB drives wound up costing $425 total, using every demon-customer trick in the book. Three cheap Rosewill PCI cards to handle the hard drives totaled $51. I could have spent a lot more if a wanted/needed the higher performance of hardware RAID, but my requirements just didn’t merit either the expenditure or the added umph. Eleven bucks worth of cables and a second fan for the case, and I was ready to go–or so I thought.
The first major roadblock was chronicled in my previous post. In brief, the Shuttle AK12 motherboard that I’d bought with the computer case just didn’t want to boot with the hard drive controller PCI cards installed. A couple of weeks of fruitless tweaking later, I gave up on the Shuttle board and spent another $37 on an Intel D815EEA board with an 867MHz Pentium III CPU, again from eBay (this kind of home-use server with no more than three or four clients connecting on a really busy day just doesn’t need a super-fast chip).
The Intel board worked like a charm, recognizing the PCI cards and booting without a hitch, and I was finally in business–or so I thought. Now it was time for software problems.
I’d planned all along to use a little OS package called FreeNAS to run the server. FreeNAS is basically a stripped-down version of FreeBSD (an open-source UNIX variant, similar to Linux) that’s tweaked for home server use. “Perfect,” I said when I ran across it. “It even supports software RAID 5. What’s not to love?”
As it turned out, plenty. While FreeNAS does advertise RAID 5 support, once you dig into the documentation (and bad on me for not doing so before installing it), you find out that the RAID 5 implementation is, as C-3PO would say, “not entirely stable.” In real life, that meant the array fell apart the first time the server was rebooted, and couldn’t be recovered. Lucky for me, I hadn’t saved anything of note on it yet.
To be fair to FreeNAS, it’s a great idea, and one that’s very openly still in the development stage. That said, my experience with it indicates that like so many open-source projects, it’s just not ready for prime time. I’m sure I’ll get plenty of messages from *NIX gurus telling me if I’d just recompiled the fargle in the kernel and tweaked the shazbot files in the wkjtb program, the supercalifragilisticness of the open source world would have become clear immediately–but that’s not why I picked out FreeNAS in the first place. I picked it because it had a great feature set and a friendly GUI (the latter of which really is very nice). When the feature set is solid, I’ll have another look, but in the meantime, I needed something that “just works.”
Now, I am not a Microsoft fan. I am most definitely not a Windows fan. But when I ran across this site describing how to hack Windows XP so that it will create and maintain a software RAID 5, I figured I’d at least give it a shot. I had an extra Windows license laying around from the wife’s deceased lightning-struck Dell, so I installed a copy on the server’s boot drive and proceeded to walk through the RAID hack.
And what the heck, it works. The main downside is, recovering after a reboot is painful–you have to re-start the RAID from the Disk Management tool, and re-set its sharing preferences so the rest of the network can see it–but the data stored on the array pops right back up as soon as the RAID is running again. Performance is, as you would expect, not anything to write home about, but it does work well enough for my needs.
So there you have it, the story of the cheapest excuse for a 1.5TB network server known to man. Like they used to say on “Jackass,” we must insist that no one attempt to recreate or reenact this stunt at home…
What kind of cooling are you providing for those 6 hard disks?
Fans, fans, and more fans.
I set up something similar a couple of years ago, using Linux.
After a couple of upgrades it now has 5x”300GB” drives (actually, 4x”300GB” and 1x”320GB”) for about 1.15TB of space. It works great.
The advantage of Linux is that its software RAID is very stable, easy to set up, and works fantastically. And recently they added a feature so you can add another disk to a RAID5 without losing your data!!
I did that about a week ago. Hence the newer drive I added. Went like a charm, although it took all day to perform the addition. Then I grew the file system (XFS) and had “300GB” more space
Why do I put “300GB” in quotation marks? Because a “300GB” drive is actually about 275GB and a “320GB” drive is actually about 298GB. They just call it a larger number to make you think it’s better. Same goes with Flash cards
I use mine for music, movies and miscellaneous storage. It’s fantastic having access to all my CDs and DVDs with the click of a mouse.
Nice, you should cluster it next. 1.5 Tarabyte server is an awesome idea. Use SCSI drives and things will move like lightning.
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Check out the new Mac Pros
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macpro.ars
There’s 4 drive bays that allow you to load any standard drive and pop them in – no cables, direct attach. Assuming each bay has a 500 GB drive, that’s 2 TB in a single tower case. Use the new 750 GB drives hitting the market right now, and well….that’s a lot of DVD.
Apple’s Disk Utility provides free built-in support for RAID 0 and 1 via software
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106594
A pretty sweet system by anyone’s standards!
> Assuming each bay has a 500 GB drive, that’s 2 TB in a single tower case.
… if you have no redundancy. If you use RAID5 you get 1.5TB.
I thought the new Macs were great, until I saw the price… it’s always the way with Apple products.
They’re basically rackmount server systems in a desktop form factor. And they cost about the same too.
The specs on the Mac Pros are great, but as others have noted, they’re way too pricey. Apple has always made its real money by marking up the high-end models. The new boxes are no exception, and they’re out of my price range. I might pick up a refurb when they’re last year’s model, or I might even try building my own OSX86 box (once again, don’t try this at home, kids) instead…
Yeah, the drive manufacturers rate the drive size in powers of 10, but operating systems count the size in powers of 2. So according to the box, 300GB is 300 billion bytes, but to the OS, it’s roughly 279,396,772,384 bytes (plus or minus a few ten-billionths of a byte). Kinda sux, since you’re “losing” about 20GB. Then you have to format that, which loses you a goodly chunk more. Ah well, nothing we can do to change that, I suppose.
TO: Will Collier
RE: Interesting Report
Especially if you have:
[1] The time.
[2] The skill.
[3] And MOST importantly, not caring about the freedoms we enjoy here.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Microsoft opposes the Bill of Rights, when it supports their bottom line.
Thank you for 'caring'....]
If you’re in the market for network storage, you might check out the Infrant NAS boxes… Link here. I just picked up one and populated it with 300gb drives.
The have gigabit ethernet connections, and gobs of features (and they run linux under the hood).
Very happy with mine, and it allowed me to reassign my huge linux box to other things. Much smaller and quieter than the big tower-case RAID-10 (running Slimserver) that was supplying music to my home network.
IIRC, drive capacities are quoted unformatted. Come up with a storage protacol with no sectors and headers and you’ll be able to fill the drive with data.
Windows? Windows?! Good lord man. That’s almost as bad as running Linux.
I think you’ll find that just about everyone’s software RAID implementation sucks. gvinum on FreeBSD is decent, and stable, but it’s a bitch to set up. I assume the fact that someone tried to gui-fy it had more to do with your array going boom than the subsystem itself. It’s not forgiving to mistakes.
I stopped trying to dork around with it years ago, as plunking $200 on a hardware RAID card or two seemed a sound investment given the hours of annoyance, hair-pulling and profanity it saves.
I gave up and got one of those Infrant boxes. They’re a little pricy, and I got one of the earlier models, which has a loud fan. The best thing about it is the web interface.
When the drives start dying on this thing, I don’t know if I’ll go back to a regular Linux RAID or not.
IIRC, drive capacities are quoted unformatted. Come up with a storage protacol with no sectors and headers and you’ll be able to fill the drive with data.
Nope, Red Five got it right- the drive manufacturers marketing departments (all of them) claim a gigabyte is one billion bytes*.
Your computer’s OS says a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30).
Check it out- here’s the datasheet for some Seagate drives-
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_db35.pdf
Look for this small text at the bottom of the table: “One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity.”
IIRC, one of the major drive manufacturers recently settled a class-action suit over this. Unfortunately, the settlement does not seem to have included a provision that required them to correct their advertising.
*This is one of the (many) reasons why hardcore techies tend to have a low opinion of any information from the marketing types. They seem to think computers round off big numbers. IMO, the numbers on marketing types paychecks should be in binary**- maybe then they’d understand how people feel when number X is advertised, and the actual number turnes out to be Y.
**Congratulations! Your new annual salary is $101,000 (binary).