[delski3]

Almost all of the above is misleading or entirely untrue. I started a point by point rebuttal but gave up on the grounds it's not worth it. I currently look after 197 servers with RAID controllers. Occasionally a disk fails, the RAID software alerts me and we pop in a new disk. Would I prefer to be using unRAIDed disks? Of course not.

JR

@ JR
I don't claim to be an expert but I had a raid system running raid 5 with roughly 4.5 terabytes of info and I had 2 drives fail at the same time. I don't think Tugboatbill is misleading anyone.

[TugboatBill]

@ JR
I don't claim to be an expert but I had a raid system running raid 5 with roughly 4.5 terabytes of info and I had 2 drives fail at the same time. I don't think Tugboatbill is misleading anyone.

We changed our recovery procedures when this happened to us on one of our servers. It was an older Linux system that was up 24*7*365 for several years. A drive failed, and the system was rebooted to access the controller BIOS in an attempt to do a diagnostic before replacement of the bad drive. On the reboot another drive refused to spin up.

Yeah, the chances of this happening are small, but in a home environment backups are very often not done or are done infrequently. Loss of an entire array means re-ripping an entire collection which can easily be hundreds of disks.

That's one of the big advantages to the media focused NAS solutions. Loss of a couple drives doesn't mean the loss of your entire collection.

[MartijnGP]

I've been using a RAID5 array for media storage as well. It works, and it does the job! But your biggest problem is, as stated before, drives failing to spin up. Generally, RAID5 drives are running 24/7. Actually this isn't too bad because spinning up and down does a lot more damage to the drive than running 24/7. But the drive may silently fail. Compare it with an old refrigerator. Typically those devices can work for up to 20 or even 30 years without any trouble. Switch it off and on and it's dead.

I 'fixed' this by having my server reboot every monday at 5AM. But the biggest problem is expandability. You can't just order another 2TB drive because you will have to rebuild your RAID array. In the meanwhile you need to store your data somewhere else. There's your problem with a 10TB array.

[PANiCnz]

Typically RAID 5 arrays are not expandable.

Not the case with software RAID, allows for online migration and expansion.

Have a look at FreeNAS and ZFS/RAIDZ it trumps both RAID5 and unRaid, how can you not love realtime error checking!!!

[N3MIS15]

A couple of small points... I know everyone here likes to recycle an old PC for this duty.. but make sure its not a power hog. An old thunderbird system is going to cost you more in power over a year than it would be just to put together a low-power ITX / fanless type deal.

I recently considered building an itx based server with a pci raid card using freenas(recently used an old pc for the job) but i decided to fork out the cash and get a drobofs and 5 2tb drives. I must say i would recomend the drobofs to anyone, its very easy to use and upgrade and your files are always protected, but its not the fastest thing out there... i combined that with a gigabit switch and a homemade itx router running untangle and now my network is complete.

Homemade servers are great (ive been running 1 for years) but the power they consume was a bit much for me.

FIRST POST w00t!

[poofyhairguy]

I second the Unraid recommendation.

Only Unraid (and I guess Flexraid) allows you to mix and match disks of different sizes into a single array, and only Unraid allows you to sleep disks when they are not in use.

Considering the difference between consumer HDs and enterprise HDs, these two features of Unraid put together means you won't suffer disk failure from a bad HD batch (as you SHOULD mix up disks and vendors) or from overworking the disks (since they will sleep like they expect).

Unraid is basically the perfect media server software. The only downsides are that you can't really do much else on a Unraid server (its add-ons are much more difficult to work with than say WHS), and that it costs money. But if you serious about a dedicated server then you should look past these limits to find a really nice solution.

I don't work for Unraid by the way, just was very happy to finally find a storage solution for mortals that works (and no, RAIDZ doesn't count on that list!)...

[JustinAiken]

Moving all my movies off my HTPC onto my new Unraid as we speak

[west1134]

Very cool...

yeah at this point I think I'm going to research the UnRAID setup and see what thats all about. Really I just want one massive storage area to store all my current movies, music, TV shows, and pictures (roughly 1.5TB at this point. Then start ripping the 200+ DVD's I have to the NAS as well. I will certainly compress it down to 4.7GB/ea as I'm not too much of a picture quality snob *yet* (once I'm a bit further in my career, have bought a house, and put my media room together THEN I'll be all about high quality. Until then I'll just be stoked to be able to access ALL of my media via XBMC without having to go through racks of DVDs!!) So I'm thinking about building my own custom case (I learned how to fiberglass last summer, built a couple sub boxes etc. and this might be a cool project for that?) or repurpose something into a case just for fun, then start with two 2TB drives and build from there as I need more space. Of course it'll need to have 10/100/1000 capabilities (which means I'll have to buy a switch since my WRT54G is only 10/100 and I'd like to put this together in my closet.

Anyways just researching now but hopefully soon I'll get the plans and $$$ together and post up what I build.

Thank again all for the input, very helpful!

[jhsrennie]

Have a look at http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...0434067956

This is a Dell RAID controller for external drives (NB it doesn't have connectors for internal drives) and you'd use it with an external drive bay. Drivers are included with Ubuntu and it's detected automatically by the Ubuntu install. Likewise for Windows 2008 if you prefer Windows. The Perc5/E will support up to 8 SATA (or SAS) drives or if you need more drives just add a second Perc5/E. After all they're only $99 :-)

This is the controller used by Dell in their Enterprise servers. Well it's been succeeded by the Perc 6 range but the 6 differs only in adding support for RAID 6. The performance with modern SATA disks is astonishingly good.

Personally I use the Perc5/i, which uses internal drives, but this restricts the number of disks you can use unless you go for a large case. Others in my group of XBMC using friends use the Perc5/E because you can use a small quiet server and add on extra external disk cases as you need them.

If you're after a server that just hides in the basement and shares out data then I'd seriously consider looking for something like a Dell Poweredge 440 or the Compaq or IBM equivalent rather than building your own. You'll find these very cheaply on eBay, they have a proper server chipset and they're quiet so the wife won't complain. Ubuntu flies on them! For example look at http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...0411871080 at $99! Actually that one uses a Pentium D processor which uses more power than a Core2Duo, but $99!!!

JR