Kodi Community Forum

I've been running XBMC now for a year or so and I'm delighted with it. My wife and kids are getting far more use from it than I could have imagined. So a big +1 for XBMC....... The machine is a Silverstone GD04 case with a 64GB Crucial SSD, AMD A6 5400K, F2A85-M LE, 4GB RAM etc. Nice little HTPC....

Up to now I've been feeding this from a HP N40L Microserver running Windows 7 with FlexRAID parity/pool of 4 x 2TB drives (5.6TB usable). Also have a couple of smaller drives in there for the OS and downloads. Now though I'm running out of space so I need to upgrade.

The cheap option might be to replace the 4 x 2TB drives with 4 x 3TB drives in the HP Microserver but that's not giving me a huge amount of extra space or any further future expansion. With that in mind I'm thinking of a new build.

What hardware would you recommend for a 24/7 fileserver running Windows 8.1? I'm thinking I might give up on FlexRAID and use the Windows Storage Spaces.

Case wise I'm thinking of the Silverstone GD08: 8 x 3.5" drives, 2 x 2.5" drives and 2 x 5.25" bays. So if I put an optical drive in, that leaves me with space for 9 x 3.5" drives plus a 2.5" SSD for the OS. I'll then put a spare 2.5" drive in there and use for something or other. Using my current 4 x 2TB drives and purchasing a further 1 x 3TB drive it's giving me 11TB of storage (not including any parity or mirroring) and leaving 3 bays unused (for a further potential of 12TB should 4TB drives become affordable). The case is more or less standard media equipment width so I'll locate it on my media rack under the stairs. I may match this case with a Silverstone Strider PSU.

So my main question is what other hardware to put inside the case. I think I'll want a low power CPU (thinking an i3 3220T), 4GB RAM, motherboard and SATA cards (assuming I can't get a board with 11 or 12 SATA ports).

Essentially this box will be used to store all my media and perhaps run a Bit Torrent VM. If I put a Bluray drive in I might use this machine to rip movies instead of my work PC.

Any hardware suggestions welcome.......

I'm in a similar situation as you. I have a selfbuild Windows Home Server 2011 (i3-2300T, 4GB) with 5x2TB configured as Raid 5 (Motherboard), so that leaves 4 drives useable.

The biggest problem I have is money. I can't purchase 5x4TB HDD at once right now, but with Raid 5 it leaves me no other choice. So I also evaluated other options, that let me slowly upgrade my data store. You have to keep in mind that you need to transfer all your stuff too. In my case, I have to have a temporary space of roughly 8TB, then switch HDDs in server and then copy everything back.

Since Raid 5 is quite inflexible I had a look at other options. I really want to have a parity disk, so that I don't lose data if one drive fails. Hardware or Software Raid is still inflexible though. I quickly installed Windows Server 2012 R2 since I get it for free as student and played around with the Storage Spaces. My conclusion: Don't use it! There are a lot of reviews about it on the net and I had a discussion on a German Homeserver Forum about it. Here are some links that popped up:

http://arstechnica.com/information-techn...-it-works/
http://helgeklein.com/blog/2012/03/windo...ign-flaws/
http://www.eightforums.com/general-suppo...space.html
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Foru...progeneral

Especially the post from eightforums is the exact same conclusion I got after testing it in a virtual machine with multiple virtual hard drives. Also the write speeds are very poor apparently. Currently I'm used to be able to copy at 90MB/s to the Raid 5 array. I don't want write speeds at around 20-30MB/s.

Also are you sure you want to have this many drives? They use more power and you need a special case, more drives = higher probability of failure and so on. Personally I don't want to have more than 6 in my server. I think you can fit 5 in the HP if you diss the DVD drive.

In my case the storage also only needs to be available when I use XBMC or when a PC is being backed up (Windows Home Server does this by himself, waking up the clients at night, and than going back to sleep), so I use Lights-Out on the server which automatically puts it to sleep when no client is active. That's a feature most of the other OS's are missing. FreeNAS for example is unable to do this.

In the future I also want to backup my Macs to it, so I need a Linux installation. I was thinking about hosting a VM or maybe even a 2nd server just for backups (like a HP N54L just for Backups) - than I can use my old drives for this and the new server is purely for media.

As for the OS, through this forum I found unRaid and I plan to use it in the near future. Right now it covers everything I need, plus I don't need to install any OS to disk, an USB stick is fine.

Oh and btw, in Germany a 4TB costs only minimal more than a 3TB (price per TB I mean).

Unraid has some significant advantages here:
1) Like you said, runs off of a USB drive, so disks are data-only
2) Can mix disk sizes, as long as your parity is at least as big as your largest data disk
3) Can add new disks without rebuilding the entire array.
4) When streaming media, the only disk that needs to start & spin is the one that holds the specific file that you're watching. With RAID, all disks need to spin up and run during viewing.
5) If by chance, you lose more than 1 disk at a time, you will not lose data on the unaffected disks with Unraid. With RAID you will have total loss of everything.
6) Well supported by the developer, as well as an active user community.

(2014-01-13, 23:10)billybarty Wrote: [ -> ]Unraid has some significant advantages here:
1) Like you said, runs off of a USB drive, so disks are data-only
2) Can mix disk sizes, as long as your parity is at least as big as your largest data disk
3) Can add new disks without rebuilding the entire array.
4) When streaming media, the only disk that needs to start & spin is the one that holds the specific file that you're watching. With RAID, all disks need to spin up and run during viewing.
5) If by chance, you lose more than 1 disk at a time, you will not lose data on the unaffected disks with Unraid. With RAID you will have total loss of everything.
6) Well supported by the developer, as well as an active user community.

Thanks for the feedback.

I had looked at unRAID (and purchased a license) before but moved away from it. One question with unRAID - what happens if there's a power cut or similar and the OS gets corrupted? How can you recover the data on your drives?

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(2014-01-13, 21:10)falc410 Wrote: [ -> ]I'm in a similar situation as you. I have a selfbuild Windows Home Server 2011 (i3-2300T, 4GB) with 5x2TB configured as Raid 5 (Motherboard), so that leaves 4 drives useable.

The biggest problem I have is money. I can't purchase 5x4TB HDD at once right now, but with Raid 5 it leaves me no other choice. So I also evaluated other options, that let me slowly upgrade my data store. You have to keep in mind that you need to transfer all your stuff too. In my case, I have to have a temporary space of roughly 8TB, then switch HDDs in server and then copy everything back.

Since Raid 5 is quite inflexible I had a look at other options. I really want to have a parity disk, so that I don't lose data if one drive fails. Hardware or Software Raid is still inflexible though. I quickly installed Windows Server 2012 R2 since I get it for free as student and played around with the Storage Spaces. My conclusion: Don't use it! There are a lot of reviews about it on the net and I had a discussion on a German Homeserver Forum about it. Here are some links that popped up:

http://arstechnica.com/information-techn...-it-works/
http://helgeklein.com/blog/2012/03/windo...ign-flaws/
http://www.eightforums.com/general-suppo...space.html
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Foru...progeneral

Especially the post from eightforums is the exact same conclusion I got after testing it in a virtual machine with multiple virtual hard drives. Also the write speeds are very poor apparently. Currently I'm used to be able to copy at 90MB/s to the Raid 5 array. I don't want write speeds at around 20-30MB/s.

Also are you sure you want to have this many drives? They use more power and you need a special case, more drives = higher probability of failure and so on. Personally I don't want to have more than 6 in my server. I think you can fit 5 in the HP if you diss the DVD drive.

In my case the storage also only needs to be available when I use XBMC or when a PC is being backed up (Windows Home Server does this by himself, waking up the clients at night, and than going back to sleep), so I use Lights-Out on the server which automatically puts it to sleep when no client is active. That's a feature most of the other OS's are missing. FreeNAS for example is unable to do this.

In the future I also want to backup my Macs to it, so I need a Linux installation. I was thinking about hosting a VM or maybe even a 2nd server just for backups (like a HP N54L just for Backups) - than I can use my old drives for this and the new server is purely for media.

As for the OS, through this forum I found unRaid and I plan to use it in the near future. Right now it covers everything I need, plus I don't need to install any OS to disk, an USB stick is fine.

Oh and btw, in Germany a 4TB costs only minimal more than a 3TB (price per TB I mean).

Great, thanks. Yes the Microserver can hold 5 x 3.5" drives and this is what I'm running. I also have a 2.5" hard drive in there for the OS. I'll have to think further about Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8.1. Currently I find writing data to my Windows 7 server (N40L) quite slow and not sure is is the hardware or software (FlexRAID/Windows itself etc)

If you would use linux and have no problem with all disks spinning on acces I can give you some advice:

With the new case build a raid5 with your actuall 4 disks.
Put lvm on it.

To increase storage add 2 new disks f.e. 4TB as raid1. If you want you can add this raid 1 to your lvm VolumeGroup. So both raids will be combined storage or just leave it alone as single raid volume.
With each new disk grow this array and convert to raid5 with 3 disks. Reaching 5 you won't have anymore space for new hdds.

Now it's time to remove one disk from the 2TB raid5 (move data to free 2TB, shrink FS, shrink lvm, shrink raid). Replace 2TB for 4TB and add this to your "new" array. When you once have 9 4TB disks and need new storrage, replace this way with bigger or more disks.

For CPU a cheap dual core celeron will be enough.

I've deactivatet the write cache of all drives to avoid corruption on power loss. Still getting over 230MB/s write speed on raid6 with 10 disks.

I think Flexraid in combination with the CPU is responsible for slow write speeds. I haven't tested Flexraid personally though.

Not sure what happens when the power is cut with unRaid, but since it uses a normal Linux filesystem nothing big should be happening. Still I invested the money in an APC BackUSP Pro or something like this, was around 70 Euros I think and it saved me a couple of times in the past 3 years. Because everytime I lost power the Raid 5 had to rebuild and this could take up to 48 hours! I don't even want to know how long it would take with 5x4TB disks.

Once my gf got her new iMac I can take her old PC and do a test installation of unRaid. Being able to just pull a hdd and plug it into another PC and read it there is a very big advantage imho. No other solution offers something like this. With Windows Storage Spaces you also lose all data stored on a new hdd you add to the pool. Don't know what happens with data on a hdd when you add it to unRaid - that's a question I still need answered.

(2014-01-14, 00:10)falc410 Wrote: [ -> ]Being able to just pull a hdd and plug it into another PC and read it there is a very big advantage imho. No other solution offers something like this.

FlexRAID can do that. You can remove a HDD and put it in any Windows machine and the data is readable. Can you also do this with unRAID?

I think this is the reason I went with FlexRAID was that if my OS got corrupted, the drives could be put into another PC with no loss of data (unless one of the drives corrupted). I'd be interested if the same can be done with unRAID. I also have a UPS which I bought when I was going to install unRAID 3 years ago. I wonder what the chances are of finding my original USB key that was matched to my unRAID license......

If you know the UUID your unraid was registered to you can change the uuid of any usb key with "tune2fs -U uuid /dev/sd?"

(2014-01-14, 00:40)CaptainPsycho Wrote: [ -> ]If you know the UUID your unraid was registered to you can change the uuid of any usb key with "tune2fs -U uuid /dev/sd?"

Thank you for that. Still have the key in my email which quotes the UUID of the USB key.

(2014-01-13, 23:16)essjay Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for the feedback.

I had looked at unRAID (and purchased a license) before but moved away from it. One question with unRAID - what happens if there's a power cut or similar and the OS gets corrupted? How can you recover the data on your drives?

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The way that Unraid works is that there is a specific parity drive, and the others are dedicated data drives. If you take a data drive out, it can actually be read in another system (you would need to set the other system to read ReiserFS, which Unraid uses -- but that's not a big deal). If you lose your parity drive, it can be rebuilt from the data drives. If you lose a single data drive, it can be rebuilt using the other data drives & the parity drive. If you lose 2 drives simultaneously, you still have your files on the remaining good data drives -- which is safer than traditional RAID - which would cause complete data loss.

I've never heard of anyone having data corruption from a power loss or anything like that. I've lost power on mine a number of times. When it powers back up, it automatically does a parity check to make sure that everything is OK. I've never had an error show up during a parity check.

That said, I think that to be very comfortable that one's data is truly protected, you really need to keep an off-site copy (e.g. at the house of a friend who shares the same taste in media).

(2014-01-14, 04:47)billybarty Wrote: [ -> ]The way that Unraid works is that there is a specific parity drive, and the others are dedicated data drives. If you take a data drive out, it can actually be read in another system (you would need to set the other system to read ReiserFS, which Unraid uses -- but that's not a big deal).

Are you shure about ReiserFS?

The only lonesome developer is not getting much time from his company to work on reiser4 and it's practically dead since 2010.
Yes there are new kernel patches, but no bugfixes or even plans of new features.
It's not even mainline.

This would be what i call "riding on a dead horse".

I have found drive bender to be very good
http://www.drivebender.com/

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(2014-01-14, 00:18)essjay Wrote: [ -> ]

(2014-01-14, 00:10)falc410 Wrote: [ -> ]Being able to just pull a hdd and plug it into another PC and read it there is a very big advantage imho. No other solution offers something like this.

FlexRAID can do that. You can remove a HDD and put it in any Windows machine and the data is readable. Can you also do this with unRAID?

I think this is the reason I went with FlexRAID was that if my OS got corrupted, the drives could be put into another PC with no loss of data (unless one of the drives corrupted). I'd be interested if the same can be done with unRAID. I also have a UPS which I bought when I was going to install unRAID 3 years ago. I wonder what the chances are of finding my original USB key that was matched to my unRAID license......

As can drivebender

Unraid does use ReiserFS internally. From the user's perspective, the array is seen as SMB, NFS, AFP, etc. - but ReiserFS is how the drives themselves are formatted.

It's possible to mount the data disks on a Windows PC using this utility - but I've never tried myself;
http://yareg.akucom.de/

Easy solution

http://www.alternate.es/Sharkoon/8-Bay_R...=7&lk=6710

http://www.alternate.es/Sharkoon/5-Bay_R...=7&lk=6710

http://www.alternate.es/Sharkoon/5-BAY_R...=7&lk=6710

(2014-01-14, 16:24)Swindiff Wrote: [ -> ]I have found drive bender to be very good
http://www.drivebender.com/

I bought DriveBender about a year ago and was disappointed to realize that it didn't support NFS with its pools, a limitation that wasn't clearly advertised anywhere. Hopefully it's working now? I also remember feeling that the UI was somewhat unintuitive, but that may be my fault.