NAS CPU recommendation
#16
There's a Microserver Wiki which details those RAM kits that are 16GB compatible, amongst other things.

(2013-05-31, 18:28)masterbyllet Wrote: On a side note, can anyone comment on this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Hewlett-Packar...1e7b67beb6

From what I read of the HP cashback scheme, as long as it is a UK seller it qualifies but I'd prefer a second opinion before I take the plunge (I'm only considering this over Ebuyer who have the same price because they still have some instock)

No, I wouldn't buy from ebay, just not worth the risk unless someone can say for sure they were able to claim their cashback after buying from this company. It has to be a *certified* HP re-seller selling UK-sourced stock to qualify for the HP cashback scheme, so you have to be very careful who you buy from. More than a few people have purchased Microservers only to discover their cashback claim is refused as the seller doesn't qualify.

Threads like this one often contain information on the latest deals and also which resellers qualify (or don't qualify) for the cashback scheme. Just because they're a UK retailer doesn't mean they qualify, and you could end up £100 out of pocket. CCL, for instance, do not qualify (presumably because they're not a certified HP retailer, or their stock is not UK sourced), whereas box.co.uk do qualify.

I don't know where you live, but assuming you are not in the UK then I don't think you will qualify for the cashback either. Full HP cashback terms & conditions here (pdf).
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#17
Thanks for the speedy reply, I'm glad you straightened out the cashback scheme, I'll hold off until Box / Ebuyer have some stock then

I do indeed live in the UK, in the sunny (overcast) York, I'll give that deals thread a look over

I wish box.co.uk gave an ETA ...


edit: I got curious and looked at CCLonline, feedback from the CCL staff do say they guarantee it in the Q&A section
edit: Nevermind, it's just a 'user' answer, my bad
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#18
I feel like I'm the only person that didn't get a check from Oracle and FreeNAS to say ZFS and FreeNAS are awesome and cheap. They are more expensive and slower.

(2013-05-31, 15:27)MilhouseVH Wrote: @justgosh: Strange, how then do you account for my 60MB/s CIFS writes from Windows 7 to N36L/8GB/FreeNAS 8.3/RAID-Z1?

That's my point exactly.
HP Proliant Microserver N36L @ $350
8gb of ram @ $50
3? hard drives @ $300?

Dump all but 2gb of ram. Dump FreeNAS for Solaris or Ubuntu Server. Dump the silly ZFS raid. Switch to EXT4 on a single drive. 60MB/s and $250 cheaper.

You are able to accomplish the same throughput with a cheaper processor/mobo, less power, less ram, and only 1 drive. By adding FreeNAS and ZFS you now need more resources to accomplish the same.

I'm not saying you can't fill a GigE pipe with FreeNAS/ZFS. I'm saying that 1. FreeNAS does a terrible job with CIFS. 2. If you aren't in an enterprise (and maybe even if you are) but instead a SOHO an rsync offsite is better than a RAID mirror. 2b. You aren't using any of the features of ZFS. i.e. self healing, dedup, LDAP, or snapshots so why are you paying the overhead in processing, RAM, and throughput? 3. If someone is going to spend $1500 on hard drives, extra ram, extra processors, power supplies, special cases, and hard drive controllers; a FusionIO or similar PCI-E MLC & internal hard drive with a cron mirror and any mobo and processor you find in a trash heap is a hell of a lot faster. 4. Ubuntu Server does a much better job with SAMBA (which is still terrible) but alteast you get DLNA. 5. Solaris has a native CIFS (stay away from EXT3 and EXT4) and ZFS. 6. Just because you can put FreeNAS on any hardware you find, doesn't mean you should.

tldr; FreeNAS is terrible and ZFS requires you to spend ALOT more money to get the same throughput.
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#19
(2013-06-01, 22:18)justgosh Wrote: I feel like I'm the only person that didn't get a check from Oracle and FreeNAS to say ZFS and FreeNAS are awesome and cheap. They are more expensive and slower.

I guess when you make up figures to suit your flawed argument, these other systems are always going to be the most expensive.

(2013-06-01, 22:18)justgosh Wrote:
(2013-05-31, 15:27)MilhouseVH Wrote: @justgosh: Strange, how then do you account for my 60MB/s CIFS writes from Windows 7 to N36L/8GB/FreeNAS 8.3/RAID-Z1?

That's my point exactly.
HP Proliant Microserver N36L @ $350
8gb of ram @ $50
3? hard drives @ $300?

I paid $135 for my N36L - they were extremely cheap here in the UK, as is their replacement (£90 for the N54L).

The cost of the hard drives is entirely irrelevant, as they will be the same for all multi-disk solutions. Three disks in a $1500 i7 solution will be the same as three disks in a bare-bones N36L.

(2013-06-01, 22:18)justgosh Wrote: Dump all but 2gb of ram. Dump FreeNAS for Solaris or Ubuntu Server. Dump the silly ZFS raid. Switch to EXT4 on a single drive.

ZFS is "silly"? How so - please explain.

LOL. Replace ZFS (or any other RAID solution) with EXT4 on a single drive? Talk about comparing apples with oranges. Please, @justgosh, if the OP simply wanted an external disk he'd hang it off a USB port - instead, he asked about a NAS, I'm beginning to think you may not know what that is.

(2013-06-01, 22:18)justgosh Wrote: You are able to accomplish the same throughput with a cheaper processor/mobo, less power, less ram, and only 1 drive. By adding FreeNAS and ZFS you now need more resources to accomplish the same.

People want a NAS, with redundancy, not a single point of failure.

(2013-06-01, 22:18)justgosh Wrote: I'm not saying you can't fill a GigE pipe with FreeNAS/ZFS.

That's good, because plenty of people do fill GigE pipes using FreeNAS (or Nas4Free or OpenIndiana) and ZFS. I'd hate to think you were making things up again.

(2013-06-01, 22:18)justgosh Wrote: tldr; FreeNAS is terrible and ZFS requires you to spend ALOT more money to get the same throughput.

Please troll this nonsense elsewhere, you're not adding any value to the discussion of a NAS OS. I don't care what kind of system OP builds or what OS or filesystem he uses, I have no vested interested in FreeNAS or ZFS, but suggesting a single disk ext4 solution as an alternative when the OP specifically stated he wanted to use 6 disks kind of suggests you have a problem with comprehension.
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#20
(2013-05-31, 15:27)MilhouseVH Wrote: I paid $135 for my N36L - they were extremely cheap here in the UK, as is their replacement (£90 for the N54L).
$135 is a solid price. All the ones I've seen are $330.

(2013-05-31, 15:27)MilhouseVH Wrote: ZFS is "silly"? How so - please explain.

ZFS is silly for a home user. It's terrible at that scale. 8GB of RAM to get any sort of buffer. The bottle necks are things like controllers. You have to spend money just to get back to the 60MB/s that you would have had if you hadn't added those layers. Again,
(2013-06-01, 22:18)justgosh Wrote: 2b. You aren't using any of the features of ZFS. i.e. self healing, dedup, LDAP, or snapshots so why are you paying the overhead in processing, RAM, and throughput?
If the goal is to spend more money to say you are doing "raid" at home then this is awesome! If you have 24GB of ram and a 100GB MLC based cache which was used to host 12 drives, all run on Solaris this would be substantially faster than a hardware raid solution (and $1900).
I'm reading post-after-post where people throw processor, RAM, controller, and hard drives at a ZFS/FreeNAS speed problem that doesn't exist if you just don't use either. I don't understand. Just switching to Solaris would be substantially faster (CIFS) with the same setup (assuming it will run on your hardware) will be faster. Switching to Ubuntu will be marginally faster with the same setup.

(2013-05-31, 15:27)MilhouseVH Wrote: LOL. Replace ZFS (or any other RAID solution) with EXT4 on a single drive? Talk about comparing apples with oranges. Please, @justgosh, if the OP simply wanted an external disk he'd hang it off a USB port - instead, he asked about a NAS, I'm beginning to think you may not know what that is.

It's a NAS and I am saying to throw out ZFS and FreeNAS and you will be a NAS without that version of RAID. NAS is just network attached storage. You don't need RAID for a NAS. Your analogy fits fine with a pogoplug USB. Dockstar is a great example. I wish it had a SAMBA ASIC so it was actually suitable for several content streams at a time.

(2013-05-31, 15:27)MilhouseVH Wrote: People want a NAS, with redundancy, not a single point of failure.

Cron mirror on local storage. RSYNC offsite.
But they are willing to buy them with single NIC's, single power supplies, single processors, non-ecc memory, disreguard for offsite, no DLNA... Single point of failure has nothing to do with it. Interoperability has nothing to do with it.

(2013-05-31, 15:27)MilhouseVH Wrote:
(2013-06-01, 22:18)justgosh Wrote: tldr; FreeNAS is terrible and ZFS requires you to spend ALOT more money to get the same throughput.

Please troll this nonsense elsewhere, you're not adding any value to the discussion of a NAS OS. I don't care what kind of system OP builds or what OS or filesystem he uses, I have no vested interested in FreeNAS or ZFS, but suggesting a single disk ext4 solution as an alternative when the OP specifically stated he wanted to use 6 disks kind of suggests you have a problem with comprehension.

1. No need for ad hominem. Sad
2. My point was speaking directly to OP and challenging the entire notion that any processor was fine if they changed their entire storage strategy. By picking a different NAS strategy entirely he could accomplish the same goals for far cheaper (but would require more work).
3. Try it the way I suggested. It will take you a few hours to build. It will be FAR more difficult than setting up FreeNAS.
4. I've said my peace. Sorry for the attempted derailment OP.

Feel free to IM me directly if anyone wants to discuss this further.
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#21
(2013-05-31, 02:31)masterbyllet Wrote: Hello,
Some interesting threads on here, I've read a few which touch on my topic but none I could see that outright answered it....


So, I'm looking to build my own NAS for XBMC, I'm pretty much set on FreeNAS as the OS....
Obviously as a NAS I'd like it to be as low power as possible so I can keep it on 24/7, or maybe have it sleep, I'm not sure that's a whole other question...

I was looking at the Sempron 145 as the CPU which seems to offer a nice low power draw while still being cheap to buy...
I would want it to run SAB, Sickbeard, CouchPotato and Headphones and I wonder how well they'd run on that sort of system? - I've only ever ran them on my desktop before


Other information:
Not considered the RAID setup yet but I would probably choose JBOD...
Based on the price of RAM lately I'd get 4 or 8GB
Running a mixture of HDD's approx 6

3x 2TB, 2x3TB and a 1.5TB

low cpu won't just limit the unrar speed on SAB, it will limit your download speed as well Link

A lot seem to consider atom chips as adequately "low" power for a server. In that regard, if the price were compelling enough I would think i3/i5/i7 should be considered as well. Back when atom came out, several sites compared the idle state to that of the current intel lineup of desktop processors and found the idle power draw was within 5%. Sandy bridge was very close to atom in idle power draw LINK and the same review site says the ivy bridge idle power state is unchanged. Essentially you have a higher "price" and more power available if you go with an i3/i5 but you aren't using it the whole time link. It idles down to 5-6 W, and the 6/7 series chipsets can do the same. There was a good comparison of chipsets but I can't remember where. The winner in low power usage was Gigabyte and Asus had the highest power usage (since they offer so many boards they also had a low power user as well). If you have a nearby microcenter, you can get an i3 3225 and Gigabyte B75 for $120 + $25 (after $40 discount) bringing you to a total of $145+tax. Or you can pick up the overly capable G1610 for $35 from there (no discount on motherboard that way) and a $65-$70 motherboard which would come in right around $100. The only thing you'd really save with that route is overall cost since the idle power draw (common usage of a NAS) will be the same. Then add cheapest or best for your case memory and drives.

One of the boards like I quoted would have 6 sata connectors, and either windows or linux would let you run each drive at it's max throughput if you stay with a JBOD configuration. Which by the way, is not linked by default. It's just the default way to have 6 drives attached to your OS without RAID. They would appear as separate disks, and be formatted by the OS as whatever you choose. Linux can support already full disks from just about every format. Windows could support most formats to at least read the data off of them, but it's easiest to use their builtin formatting. Windows would add and automount everything for you, but you could junction them if you wanted. Or buy 3rd party stuff to pool the drives. Ubuntu server might automount them (but it didn't last time I used it) you'd need to add them to your fstab w/ automount, permissions, and file system type if you wanted to keep things consistent. Nothing too complicated, here's a link that can get you started

Snapraid (free) gives you parity protection and datarot protection

Going the windows as a server or ubuntu server route will let you add SAB, sick, couch, headphones, etc as well as easily expand your number of disks as you need to grow your storage space by adding additional drives with something like the M1015 flashed to IT mode. Also a case with 3x5.25 drive bays will let you add 5 drives with the Norco 5in3 hot swap module

I use W8 w/ an i5, 9 HDDs, 1 SSD, 8GB ddr3 1600, z77 asrock matx, and a 400W silencer mkIII. It's a 24/7 server that doubles as an HTPC

Idle w/ all disks spun down - 49W
Idle w/o any disk spindown - 62W

XBMC (both "fresh" from idle w/ all disks spun down - dxva2 enabled)
1080p blu-ray from idle - 54W
1080i live tv in XBMC/NPVR - 56W (HDHR Prime usage not measured)
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#22
I think somewhere lost in here was my recommendation for the ASUS P8H77-I and Celeron G1610. It has 6 x SATA and the Celeron is a pretty powerful CPU despite its name. I've built a few servers with the P8H77-I + some Ivy Bridge CPU in the Lian-Li PC-Q25 or PC-Q08 cases with a 300W Seasonic SFX PSU + ATX adapter. Everyone loves them.
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#23
(2013-06-04, 03:58)Dougie Fresh Wrote: I think somewhere lost in here was my recommendation for the ASUS P8H77-I and Celeron G1610. It has 6 x SATA and the Celeron is a pretty powerful CPU despite its name. I've built a few servers with the P8H77-I + some Ivy Bridge CPU in the Lian-Li PC-Q25 or PC-Q08 cases with a 300W Seasonic SFX PSU + ATX adapter. Everyone loves them.

Good suggestion, for case node 304 also looks great.
If you're a M$ fanboy w8 also works great as a nas with their raid5 clone that does different hdd sizes (unlike raid5) - but you'll need more power so a celeron or higher is required.
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#24
Thanks again for the replies, I've taken @MilhouseVH and ordered a N54L Microserver, for the price I can't really fault it. Even the cheapest of hardware combinations struggled to get it to below ~£90.

And also thanks for the OS recommendations, I'm not dead-set on any yet so still looking at all of your suggestions....
I was wrong before to say I wanted JBOD I misinterpreted the wiki page

All 6 of the drives I want to include are full, and I'd rather not sacrifice space for parity and the files are not of huge importance so again I'm not looking for any parity
Although JBOD sounded like what I wanted I don't really want to lose everything in one go, if I lose one hard drives worth, I can live with, but losing all 6 would be a real pain....


Any suggestions on what I should format to if I want to keep all the space on all the drives, but have them appear as one 'volume' (so I don't have to keep hopping drives) other than JBOD?

Additionally, if I could get it set up the way I wanted above ... would that be able to have independent drive spin down?


Thanks
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#25
If the drives are already populated then just them in the machine and (once you've decided on your OS) mount them as separate drives, then share them. You should be able to access all of the media on the drives via their respective share/mount points, and XBMC won't have a problem with this solution either - just create a single source referencing all of the relevant shares.

You won't be able to create a single volume without additional volume manager software but going back to your earlier point, as it's not a single volume if you were to lose a disk, you'll have lost only that disk and its associated data, the rest of the drives/data would remain accessible.

Independent drive spin down should also work.
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#26
I was using the Sempron 130 for a while with unRAID. Worked great for the basics-- sab/sb/cp.

After I installed Plex Media Server the Sempron couldn't keep up with transcoding. Had to upgrade to Intel. Went with the i3-3220T
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#27
(2013-05-31, 03:56)masterbyllet Wrote: The more I read, the more it sounds like what I need half the price of the NAS I was planning to build once I factored in the case and PSU etc...

DigitalVortex you said it can take 6 drives easy? - I can see the 4 regular bays, and a fifth possible in the 5.25" bay ... where is the 6th going?

Thanks

(Talking about the HP N40L Microserver)
The top bay is a "Cd rom" bay - 5.25. I bought an adaptor that houses two 3.5" hard drives into the 5.25" space. It's called a Nexus DoubleTwin
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#28
Newegg.com has the HP ProLiant N54L for $299.99 after rebate:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6859107921
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