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I'm a big fan of hardware RAID vs software based solutions like unRAID, but Lime technologies has a pretty cool product.
I personally run a linux box (Fedora) in a Norco 4220 case with a pair of 3ware 9550X 12-port SATA cards. I picked up the cards and working pulls off of ebay for a very reasonable price. I currently have 2 arrays - a 12 drive array built with WD Green 1Tb drives and an 8 drive array built with WD Green 1.5Tb drives. I run XFS as the native filesystem because it supports large volumes, volume expansion (I didn't start with both arrays fully populated), and the initialization time for the FS is nearly instanteous compared to ext2/3 FS. The motherboard I chose has 2 64bit PCI-X slots for the RAID cards, as well as a dedicated 64-bit channel for an onboard dual gigE ethernet controller which I have bonded to my switch for full 2x throughput.
I don't have hard benchmark numbers, but I can transfer a BD rip from my main workstation to the storage array and simultaneously play full BD rips from both of my XBMC pc's without a hiccup.
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I have no idea why people are concerned with the speed of writes to a NAS designed for media storage. It's write once, read many times after all.
If you're doing things on the machine (eg downloading torrents, usenet or whatever) then you simply have a separate "cache" drive (unraid doesn't have to know about it) to download to, then you copy the completed file to the array. That way it's again write-once.
If you're after a server with fast write speeds, then you're not after a media-storage device.
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2010-09-02, 14:19
(This post was last modified: 2010-09-02, 14:20 by Praesten.)
I'm about to start getting the last supplies for my new NAS. It's gonna be a homebuilt system with the Asus P5Q Premium motherboard (10 SATA-channels on 2 controllers) running raid1+0. I've done some calculations and a lot of research and I've concluded that if I want to run a raid1+0 with at least 20TB space, I'll either need to pay an insane amount of money for a complete NAS or build it myself and get the grand total to around 2k euro including all the disks.
It's really a simple choice and this way I can get it all setup just the way I want to. I understand this isn't a choice for everyone since it requires some knowledge on computers and setting up your OS of choice correctly. But if you don't mind reading guides online, I would suggest building your own computer in a big case and slap a bunch of disks in it. It's like 1/5 the cost of a so called professional device. And it's only limited by what you buy.
Just my 2 rambling cents.
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I agree that write speed for a media server is basically a non-issue. I care about simultaneous read/write performance though, because we often have both XBMC boxes playing movies at the same time, and I'm often transferring movies to the array while watching movies. Nothing irritates my wife more than having her Sex in the City movie (blech! hence the 2 xbmc boxes) stutter when the disk performance slows down because I'm transferring over a GOOD movie....
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rrambo
Senior Member
Posts: 138
another UnRaid user here... mine has been rock solid.