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I figured I would ask this here, since hard drives are main component of this thread. This is not for a NAS, just for a reliable new big drive for my main storage. I am thinking of getting a new WD 1.5tb drive, but apparently the drive must be new enough that newegg only has like 20 reviews so far, and like half of them say the things are bad. Is this a symptom that a lot of 1.0+tb drives now have, or is this just a bad review sample? Their 1tb drive of the same type has like 300+ reviews and 90% are good, which sounds like a better review sample.
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| # ¿ Apr 14, 2009 20:37 |
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| # ¿ May 23, 2013 21:37 |
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IOwnCalculus posted:This can be summed up in a few points: I pretty much expect that most newegg reviews will be negative since if you are happy with your purchase you can't be bothered to type in a review or poo poo. I was just curious if there has been a rise in problems in 1tb+ drives, as this thread is full of folks who use large drives, so I thought I would ask.
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| # ¿ Apr 14, 2009 23:30 |
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What's the popular consensus on 'green' drives these days? I'm in the market for a new 1.5+ tb drive, and I was just going to buy another WD Green drive to suppliment the one I currently have, but this is in a non-raid environment and I was pondering about making a full on NAS in the near future. I've read that WD Green drives are not good for raids, since they spin down their heads after a few seconds of idleness. Are most 'green' drives like this? Like the Samsung line as well? I care about this because I want to minimize power consumption and it seems these types of drives are best for it.
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| # ¿ Apr 11, 2010 18:55 |
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I seriously doubt I'd be going hardware raid, just software-- if I got raid at all. I think my next 1.5tb drive will be the Samsung instead of the WD Green, seeing how I already have one of those.
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| # ¿ Apr 12, 2010 18:28 |
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eames posted:Funny that you mention this here, I just received my Fractal Design Define R2 (the midi-tower) and came to this thread to recommend it. Smell? Seriously? That's kind of hilarious. Reviews are going to have to make a new smell scale to go along with noise!
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| # ¿ May 9, 2010 20:05 |
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NAS folks: So would it be cheaper to buy a pre-made mini-box like the ACER REVO for media center playing, then attach a JBOD array externally via eSATA or Cat6, or just build a HTPC with all of the big HDs I would have put in the JBOD internally but running something like Windows Home Server that can make a easy raid of all of those discs into one? I don't really want to get into the whole unix pro-RAID thing like most of you folks are doing in this thread, I just want a box that I can add another 2TB hard drive to when I run out of space without having to rebuild a raid or something.
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| # ¿ Nov 17, 2010 04:53 |
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Why can't the WHS be used as a HTPC? If you have a decent enough video card can't you just have Media Player Classic run things? My girlfriend has gotten used to my laziness with not setting up a full HTPC environment with a remote/indexed whatever, so I would think WHS could run most stuff just fine?
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| # ¿ Nov 18, 2010 00:57 |
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That is really disheartening to hear. Right now I have a 2 year old ASUS EEE-Box as my home server, which streams out (via an ethernet cord, not wireless) to my girlfriend's mac laptop which we have been using as our HTPC/media player to the tv. I keep most of my media archive on two terabyte drives inside my own desktop (seperate from the ASUS) but since I like to turn it off a lot to save power, my girlfriend can't easily access the media on it-- plus due to crappy design on my desktop's case, I can't actually install any new hard drives while also having one of those comically large nice video cards that have become the norm. I was hoping to migrate all of my archive drives out to a HTPC, and use it for both expandable storage+media playing, but if WHS can't do that well then that is a huge let down. I'd rather not have to buy another tiny-PC just for playing, as my ASUS Box I'm going to keep as my remote desktop/downloads/low power-24/7 server and it is not powerful enough to play HD stuff, and I was hoping to have a bit of a beefier machine for the achieves/playing that I could turn off/hibernate to save on power when not in use.
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| # ¿ Nov 18, 2010 03:34 |
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Wait, what? WHS removed pooled drives? Wow. I don't know what to say.
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| # ¿ Nov 23, 2010 19:46 |
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So are most NASes people have pretty loud or what? I realized the only real place I can keep a NAS in my apartment is going to be near my computer desk by my bed. I'm so spoiled by being able to just turn off my normal/loud computer when not in use, and my tiny ASUS EEE Box being near-silent (but only having a max capacity of 500gb). Having a much louder thing to use as my 24/7 powered-on home server is a bit daunting, especially since my GF is a light sleeper.
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| # ¿ Nov 28, 2010 04:45 |
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MrMoo posted:With a NAS hooked up with a UPS the UPS is actually louder, although for sleeping the lights on the NAS are the most distracting. My EEE Box had a super bright light under it's little flap that covered the USB ports and such-- I was lucky enough to find some thick black paper to cover up the light via the back of the flap 
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| # ¿ Nov 28, 2010 05:10 |
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I have never set up a raid before, and I'd love to play around with my own home server with it than do it at work where I have the potential to gently caress things up. I am tempted to just make my own Win2008r2 server at home than go the WHS route, as I have enough technical know-how that I don't mind the extra initial work of installing Win2008 than just paying to have a pre-installed WHS server from HP or such-- plus I can get a licence of Win2008 for free via my job. (Plus WHS's Drive Extender just seems easy to use, but kind of a lazy-knowledge route of trying to learn new job-applicable skills rather than learning how to make raids in a real windows server). I get the technical knowledge behind RAIDS(0,1,5,etc), and JBOD. I am just curious what the current raid setup that the cool kids use for their home server. My setup will most likely be system disk+5-6 drive raid array, for use of archiving home media and files (with raid just as a drive-loss prevention, not as a backup solution). However when I researched raids, I've seen a lot of sites saying RAID5 is horrible and should never be used anymore, due to bad performance/headache issues. Is this just people who run real professional data servers talking (as they have the amount of drives to use something crazy like other bigger raid modes), or is RAID5 still the preferred home raid setup for people who don't need exact duplication of mirroring? (I don't mind losing a whole drive worth of space for Raid5 just for the peace of mind of knowing my entire raid won't die if one drive goes bad, especially since Lian-Li case has a bananas six HD spaces and is only barely bigger than an MediaSmart tiny server (as long as I remove the horrible front LED fan). jeeves fucked around with this message at Apr 2, 2011 around 03:31 |
| # ¿ Apr 2, 2011 03:27 |
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Factory Factory posted:What sites? RAID 5 is pretty much the standard for three to six drives. Above that, you start using multiple RAID 5 arrays or RAID 6. Enterprise-level stuff that's speed-needy will sometimes to RAID 50, which is two identical RAID 5 arrays used as the volumes in a RAID 0 stripe, or they'll start going into ZFS or other, crazier, things which use dozens of drives in different roles all presented as a single logical storage pool. Yeah, I think I just accidentally read some sites/commentaries written by people who work with big time production servers and thus were bemoaning Raid 5 over something like Raid 5+0 without realizing it was not meant for a home server audience. I think I'll pull the trigger on that Lian-Li setup. It's not as compact as a MediaSmart for sitting on my desk in my bedroom, but I'd rather have full control of installing Win2008 to replace my current EEEBox+Win2003 setup instead of buying into a now-discontinued HP WHS series stuff with paying for tons of add-ins I'll frankly never use.
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| # ¿ Apr 2, 2011 04:03 |
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dietcokefiend posted:
Yeah it sucks that there was an initial issue with the Samsung F4's, but frankly they've made good with releasing a firmware to fix it, so good on them. It sucks that you have to do it, but they fixed it, unlike Seagate which would have probably denied the issue even happening or something. Plus they don't do head parking like WD drives. Samsung is really becoming a huge player in the large storage size market drives quite quickly. As long as you're not adding the F4's into a WHS/Win2003 (and thus dealing with advanced formatting sector issues on pre-Vista/2008 machines) then they are honestly amazingly awesome drives.
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| # ¿ Apr 2, 2011 04:06 |
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RAID question: To make a raid do all drives have to be on the same controller? I am guessing yes, but it seems most Mini-ITX mobos are only 4 SATA ports, which sucks for my new 6 HD bay case I am considering. Plus most PCI raid cards are only 4 SATA ports too. Can I stick 4 SATA connections on the PCI card, with the extra 2 coming off of the Mobo's ports and still have them in the same Raid5? Or is this a horrible idea that would cause endless headaches down the road? Edit - looks like this is a moot point for my own personal use, as I found a 50$ more expensive 8 port PCI card here that is not bananas 400$+ expensive like the others. I'm still curious if putting a single raid on separate controllers is a general no-no or what? jeeves fucked around with this message at Apr 2, 2011 around 05:00 |
| # ¿ Apr 2, 2011 04:57 |
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I got a free license to Win2008r2 from my job, so I'm probably just going to stick to software raid via that as yeah there is most likely a reason that card is 100$ whereas all of the other options for 8-port PCI cards are like 400-800$. I'll probably just pick up the card anyhow, as I can save a small amount of money buying an Mini-ATX mobo with less internal SATA slots and use that bit of saving to apply to this card, as the case I'm looking at has space for a PCI card I highly doubt I'll use that PCI slot for anything else like a real video card in a dedicated headless server. I was just curious if cross-controller RAIDS were a slight 'no-no' or a 'OH GOD DONT DO IT EVER OH THE HUMANITY". I forgot all about the hardware/software raid distinction. jeeves fucked around with this message at Apr 2, 2011 around 05:25 |
| # ¿ Apr 2, 2011 05:21 |
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I'm looking for a mini-ITX board, but most have 3-4 SATA ports, meaning if I want to fill out a 6-7 drive system I'd have to buy a PCI-E expansion card. I've seen a lot of cards with slots called "SAS". What are those? And I've seen a few SAS to SATA cords (1 to 4), so is it just like a high density SATA port?
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| # ¿ Apr 2, 2011 17:32 |
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Factory Factory posted:WHS Vail (2011) or WHS v1? v1 is based on Windows Server 2003, and you will run into two problems: 1) You will need an 80 GB boot drive, and 2) the Samsung 2 TB drives are 4 KB sector Advanced Format drives, which do not play well with Server 2003 (it is a major, major headache to align them properly). If it's WHS 2011, you will need a 160 GB boot drive, but you won't need to worry about alignment. This is a lot of good info, and I would highly recommend going the AMD route for a file server versus Intel. I am quite an intel fanboy, but honestly there are no good mini-itx motherboards that have: more than 3 SATA slots AND eSATA AND USB3.0 AND PCI-E for expansion AND mini-PCI if you wanna put in a tiny SSD. The E350 has just that right here, by Sapphire at a good price for an excellent motherboard+cpu: combo http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...4-019-_-Product If you get a Chenbro case, then you don't have to worry about ever making use of the PCI-E slot, but if you want the monster Lian-Li case (6 normal drive bays + full size optical + 2.5" system drive bay-- so 8 drives if you just put HDs in each) then you'd need an extra PCI-E controller card. (Note: Chenbro case is NOT an overall quiet one. It uses weirdly sized 70mm case fans that are like re purposed cheap CPU stock coolers and thus are pretty non-quiet compared to most HTPC/mini server cases). Also keep in mind that WHS2011 is not going to have Drive Extender, relying solely on RAIDs. As I asked before in the thread, it's probably not an absurdly great idea to make a raid across both a motherboard's SATA and a PCI-E controller card, as that sounds like something drive-extender would make a breeze versus raids. But WHSv1 has all sorts of aging problems like trying to get new huge advanced format drives aligned correctly. (Which of course can be done, it just requires reading like a 5 page tutorial here: http://www.mediasmartserver.net/for...php?f=3&t=10097) jeeves fucked around with this message at Apr 2, 2011 around 17:57 |
| # ¿ Apr 2, 2011 17:50 |
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vanilla slimfast posted:SAS stands for "Serial Attached SCSI" and basically yes it is an interconnect that has the bandwidth to support multiple SATA channels simultaneously
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| # ¿ Apr 2, 2011 17:59 |
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FISHMANPET posted:The most practical use for SAS in a home environment is a 2 port PCI-E SAS card, which will drive 8 SATA drives. Yeah, when I spent my evening researching PCI-E controller cards, there are WAY more SAS cards than straight SATA cards. I was glad to find out that 1x SAS ports basically mean 4x SATA ports.
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| # ¿ Apr 4, 2011 04:34 |
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lilbean posted:I currently backup my home server to an external 2TB disk in a USB enclosure (JMicron). The backups are about to surpass 2TB though and I'm going to order a 3TB drive. Will I have any problems with the OS (Linux) seeing the 3TB disk through a USB enclosure? Research this based upon your specific OS, but it is definitely based on the OS of where it is linked to, and not on whether or not your enclosure is new. Like WHS runs on Win2003 and thus will never see a drive above 2.1, regardless of whether or not it is in an external enclosure.
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| # ¿ Apr 4, 2011 19:24 |
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:1x mini-SAS can usually be fanned out to 4 SATA. You're going to confuse a lot of people if you start saying 1x SAS = 4x SATA. I'm glad you corrected me then, as I didn't know that there was such a thing as mini-SAS and SAS.
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| # ¿ Apr 5, 2011 00:29 |
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HERAK posted:You could use a sata backplane system like this so all you have to worry about is mounting that instead of individual drives. This would also solve some power and cooling issues as it has it's own fan and a single power hook-up. Also if you need to swap drives or replace a dead one it's so much easier than having them internal mounted. It says four 3.5" drives in three 5" drive bays. So do you use that as a free-standing little fake NAS, or do you have that mounted in a case taking up 3 drive bays? (Vertical or horizontal?)
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| # ¿ Apr 6, 2011 21:24 |
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HERAK posted:Mounted internally so I've got 5 drives in the space of 3 x 5.25" bays. Nice. That's actually pretty nice, since thin atx cases with like three to five 5.25" drive bays are much easier to come by than cases with huge hard drive cages. Where do you buy those from, for future reference? That brand isn't finding search results on newegg.
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| # ¿ Apr 7, 2011 07:46 |
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I am glad I held off on making my own Mini-ITX NAS (or buying a now-overpriced Mediasmart series to turn into a NAS), as I found this Proliant Microserver which seems to fit the bill quite well. It has 5 drive bays (if you count the CD bay as one), and even an internal USB port for running something like FreeNAS off of a USB key. Also 2x PCI-e ports (16x and 1x) seem to definitely make it quite a nice little machine. Anyone have any experience with these as a NAS? It seems pretty nice. I just hope that 40mm fan on the PSU isn't loud as poo poo as the only real free space I have where I don't have to worry about housemates turning it on and off is my bedroom. Also, people seem to say it that the eSATA port on the back doesn't have a port multiplier. What does that mean? Do eSATA multipliers let you chain various external things together in a daisy chain, and if you don't have a multiplier only one device can be attached at once-- or what? jeeves fucked around with this message at Apr 7, 2011 around 20:52 |
| # ¿ Apr 7, 2011 20:40 |
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Factory Factory posted:That looks pretty spiffy, not gonna lie. I have no experience with it, but had I known about it I would have considered it instead of my Chenbro pedastal-based server. Yeah, I am really glad the vastly huge increased price point of the now out-production Mediasmarts made me hold off on picking one of those up, as I did NOT need any of the HP-add-ins (video transcoding, iTunes streaming) that you pay for with mediasmarts. Plus the drat things don't even have a VGA port nor PCI upgradability that this one does I just hope this sucker will not be loud. I've heard conflicting reports about how loud it is, which a concern to me since I don't trust that 40mm fan in its power supply. Factory Factory posted:A SATA port multiplier just means that the single SATA channel can be used to connect multiple devices through one port, like some external enclosures with a JBOD mode, which just passes on control of all of the individual drives to the host computer. FakeRAID enclosures also need port multipliers, even though they represent one logical volume. IOwnCalculus posted:That's pretty much the gist of it. An eSATA with multiplier support can run a single eSATA cable to one of the 5-bay enclosures and run all drives in it on that cable. So basically if I ever bought an external NAS expansion for this, I would have to make sure it was something that explicitly did not need a multiplier (and thus would probably be more expensive since it would run its own little NAS OS, like a DS411 does)? Eh, this is not that huge of a deal, since the Proliant Microserver does have 2x PCI-E half height expansion ports. I could just throw an eSATA with port multiplication into one of those if I really needed it.
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| # ¿ Apr 7, 2011 21:17 |
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jmu posted:That is actually quite a neat little server. Given that the on-board RAID controller doesn't support RAID 5 I'm wondering what a good RAID card would be for this. there is a whole 15+ page on the Proliant Mircroserver over at the HardOCP forums. They have a lot of card recommendations. Also they have a lot of insane people doing things with that model, like a full 4*2TB drive raid 5 in the regular HD slots, and then a full raid 5 of 4*2.5" drives in the 5.25" bay.
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| # ¿ Apr 9, 2011 19:49 |
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For you guys running Win2008R2, do you use software or hardware raids? I was tempted to wait until a DE replacement was made for WHS2011, but to be honest I wouldn't be using my Mircoserver for anything other than fileserving and remote desktop from work access. Win2008 can handle that just fine, and probably be more stable. I'm just wary of Windows raids, due to one bad experience I had when I didn't know what I was doing and reinstalled my system disk thinking my data disks could just be added on just fine. Boy was I wrong.
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2011 07:29 |
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Is a power outage that bad? Is it due to Windows not shutting down properly or something that would cause the software raid 5 to un-sync?
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| # ¿ Apr 30, 2011 07:35 |
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JaundiceDave posted:I'm getting an external hard drive. I need it to be USB 3.0 compatible, portable, reliable, and have plenty of room. This is my first choice right now. Should I go with it, or does anyone have any other recommendations that I should look at. Newer WD external drives have pretty horrible rootkits installed on them that want to try to auto-load or auto-run their backup software every time you plug them in. It sucks rear end, because I like the look and feel of some of their newer 2.5" drives over the competitors. You are most likely better off buying an empty USB3.0 or eSATA external enclosure, then buying a Samsung 2TB F4 for like 75$. Will come out to about 10$ cheaper than just the WD drive/enclosure combo.
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| # ¿ May 9, 2011 07:40 |
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I just bought 4x Samsung F4 2TB drives, and installed the firmware update they needed. Now I am curious what is the best way to test to make sure they are good versus sending any back while they are still under the much easier Newegg return policy versus Samsung's warranty? Just run a non-quick format in Windows? Or is their a better utility to test the drives with?
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| # ¿ May 19, 2011 17:13 |
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Factory Factory posted:You could check SMART with CrystalDiskInfo, but, really errors won't show up until you start using the drives. I'm thinking a full low level (non-quick) format will at least write to every sector, so if something pops up it will do so then. I was just curious if anyone knew about any handy hard drive stress testing programs or such to try before committing my data to the drives-- especially before building a raid?
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| # ¿ May 19, 2011 17:45 |
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I've decided on just keeping my little extremely low power ASUS EEE Box as a headless server I remote into from work for email/proxy, as I didn't want to hassle with making a NAS be Windows Server based just so I could remote into it as a replacement for the EEE Box. So what seems to be the favorite blend of Linux/Unix NAS OS these days? FreeNAS?
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| # ¿ May 29, 2011 21:17 |
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How many of you out there use wake on LAN a lot with your NAS devices, and to what success? I am thinking of trying to turn it on for my future FreeNAS build, as my NAS will mostly be for media storage, and thus doesn't need to be spinning at 100% all of the time. However, I am curious if booting/using my own main PC or my girlfriend's Mac that both have mapped network shares to it will constantly wake it up, even if we are currently not accessing those shares? Or will the NAS be smart enough to only wake when we actually access it?
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| # ¿ May 30, 2011 07:22 |
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I am forgoing my idea of just defaulting to my Win2008r2 that I know so well (through usage at work), and am going to branch out to try a unix/BSD/whatever nas OS on my new Proliant that has a spare internal USB port to boot from. What is the best of those to choose from? FreeNAS? My main thing besides general NAS stability is that I want Wake-On-LAN service to work well, as I'd like to save power by having this thing go to sleep a lot when not in use.
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| # ¿ Jun 13, 2011 04:22 |
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Tornhelm posted:So I just remembered I have a HP ProLiant Microserver that has been sitting around since I ordered it, and figure I should actually do something with it. I just want to use it as a file server for all my tv/movies I've ripped from dvds/recorded with media centre, so what would the best option be? I do have a copy of WHSv1 laying around unused and I do like the idea of drive extender, but I've heard a bit about ZFS too and as far as I can tell it has less overhead when it comes to redundancy and recovering from drive failures (also it would take advantage of the ECC ram I can use in the Microserver). How hard is it to learn enough of OpenSolaris to build a functional file server for someone with little *nix experience (my last linux system was Ubuntu about 8 years ago when I was playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory) and I know its expandable, but do multiple vdevs appear as one large storage pool like Drive Extender does in WHS? Or should I just stick with WHS since I've got it available? WHSv1 has Drive Extender, but the OS is running off of Win2003 and that is almost 8 years old now and thus a pain to deal with in some respects. If you want to deal with a raid, get Windows Server 2008 R2, WHS2011, or FreeNAS. Or get WHS2011 if you want Drive Extender Replacements, including Drive Blender. jeeves fucked around with this message at Jun 26, 2011 around 07:16 |
| # ¿ Jun 26, 2011 07:14 |
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My brand new Proliant Microserver apparently has no sleep function built into its bios, meaning it can not be as a FreeNAS device that tries to go to sleep to save power when not in use. That was my main concern for trying to just make it a pure NAS device, as I already have a low power server for home server (non-NAS) needs. I guess I'll just make my Proliant run on WHS2011 and keep it on 24/7 instead of having two machines on all of the time.
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| # ¿ Jun 28, 2011 22:18 |
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Here is a pretty generic question for you NAS buffs-- spinning hard drives down: good or bad? I'm trying to put together a new microserver running on Win2008 or WHS2011, as I need to remote into it from work to home for proxy/etc, so it can't be a pure NAS device. I bought a nice low power Proliant Microserver, but the system itself will be on 24/7 since it is a home server. Should I set the non-system hard drives to spin down to save power, or is it not worth it? I am used to having all of my huge hard drives in my own personal computer that is off whenever I am not using it, so I don't know how much wear and tear having 5x drives on 24/7 will be. However I've read having drives spin up and down causes more wear than just having them run all of the time? My non-system disks on this server will be not in use like 95% of the time, so that is why I am curious. Do RAIDS allow for drives to spin down? Would it be better to just non-raid them, to let the non-system drives spin down when not in use?
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| # ¿ Jun 30, 2011 19:58 |
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MrMoo posted:You can spin down with RAID 1 but not RAID 5. It's a good idea for home use to combat power outages, heat, and humidity. The question is whether you have any ports open on the Internet. I found that with script kiddies scanning ports all the time the machine is constantly spinning up to only serve the login page. My system disk won't be raided, and it is what I will be remoting into to check my email and use proxy, which I do a lot. The secondary disks will store my NAS/home media data, and those are the ones I am considering spinning down. I take it head-parking on various hard drives is different than disks spinning down? I notice that it takes 2-5 seconds for my big secondary data disk on my main computer to spin up when not in use, and I am curious if my microserver will have the same thing. I am guessing if I NAS/DE those secondary disks then the drives will never be idle long enough to spin down/head park?
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| # ¿ Jun 30, 2011 20:41 |
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| # ¿ May 23, 2013 21:37 |
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Wireless is always going to be way slower than wired. And yeah, the ReadyNAS series seems good, if you don't mind them being loud. That was a problem for me due to a small apartment with my sound-sensitive girlfriend, so I had to buy a HP Microserver. I wish I had just been able to buy the easier to set up ReadyNAS, but oh well.
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| # ¿ Jun 30, 2011 23:17 |
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