[Evanrich]

I've run out of space on my 4TB media server for movies, TV shows, and PC backup images, so time to build another one. I'm working on a 14TB box (2TBx8 in RAID 5) using an atom board and pcie x4 card for RAID. My current system runs on FreeNAS, and so the drives are all formated in Ext3 I believe. I get good enough performance from the current server (at least 60MB/sec across my gigabit network when transfering files), and so I am happy with that.

For the new server, I was thinking about installing a copy of windows 2008 R2 I got free from a microsoft event as the host OS, as I am more familiar with windows than FreeBSD or linux, however I am not sure if NTFS will be faster than linux and Ext3 or 4.

Can anyone help me decide which way to go? I know that if I go with NTFS and windows, I'll have probably schedule defrag's of the raid array.

Thanks.

[jhsrennie]

I'd be very surprised if there was a significant difference in speed between any of the file systems. Unless you're using a really powerful RAID controller the bottleneck will be the disks.

As for the defragging, the disk would have to be really badly fragmented before you'd notice any slowdown. I schedule defrags once a week on my servers because it's free, but I can't honestly say it makes any difference. Defragging once a year would probably be enough :-)

You don't say what RAID controller you're using. I use Perc5/i or 6/i controllers because we're a Dell house and I have a lot of experience with them. In fact I have a couple of Poweredge 2900s with 8 1TB disks on a Perc6/i and they're really *really* fast. Far faster than you'll need for a simple NAS setup. We use them as Hyper-V servers running a dozen virtual servers!

JR

[Evanrich]

Thanks for the response, I kinda meant to say more like OS, but FS depends on OS too haha.

I'm going to use a Highpoint Rocketraid 2680 8port card. I'm very familiar with Perc controllers, as we use them in our Virtualization servers at work (I pretty much run our virtualized systems and the Hosts they're sitting on), however I havent been able to find any decent 8 port pci-e cards that are cheap, and I don't really require BLAZING performance (60MB/sec streaming is more than enough, though I'll take faster.)

I was pretty sure, especially after first googling that there wouldn't be much of a difference, but I'm not well knowledged in the linux realm yet, so wasnt sure if Ext3/4 offered any benefits that i wasn't aware of.

[jhsrennie]

I would look on ebay to see if any Perc cards come up. I have three, one in my server and two in my development workstations, and they all came from ebay at around £100 each. For example (if you're in the UK) this one: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?V...0529405071 or http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?V...0456795793. NB those cards, like a lot of Percs on ebay don't have a brackets probably because they're from 29x0 servers. You can usually find the brackets from ebay.com or make up a stay yourself.

Everyone requires BLAZING performance :-)

JR

[zimdba]

I have that RocketRaid card. The linux support is only so-so, IMHO. It works, but the management features are a bit lacking. I am running 4x2TB (Seagate) in RAID-5 with EXT4 and get about 55MB/s over my gig-e network.

I think one of the perfomance advantages of Linux is that I don't have to run an intensive A/V solution as I do with Windows. When I had XP as my server OS, I was lucky to get 5MB/s. I switched to Ubuntu (9.04 then upgraded) and my transfer speeds increased to what I mentioned above.

FYI, I split the 5.75GB partition into two filesystems. In case I ever had to do an fsck, I didn't want it to take days.

[poofyhairguy]

Unraid!!!!!!!!!