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Strict 9
Jun 20, 2001

by Y Kant Ozma Post
I'm getting an Acer Revo to serve as my HTPC, and would like that hooked up to some type of storage system to stream 1080p content via a wired gigabit connection.

I'm just not sure what my best option is. Here are my requirements:

1) Streams 1080p content without a problem
2) Runs an operating system that can run a torrent client and SABnzbd
3) Has drives that can be accessed by a Mac - but I assume any NAS should be capable of this

What I don't need:

1) Raid, as I won't be using this as backup and while it would suck to lose the data, I could live without it
2) Backup capabilities (currently backing up to an external drive via Time Machine and offsite using Crashplan)
3) Storage capabilities > 4TB

Low price would definitely be nice. I'd also like to run Windows Home Server, as it's what I'm most comfortable with.

I was looking at the D-Link DNS series, but I read several (conflicting) reports about problems streaming 1080P content.

The Acer Easystore looks like a pretty good option, though a tad expensive (I don't really even need the 1TB it comes with since I have enough drives)

I'm not completely averse to putting one together myself, but have no clue when it comes to picking out hardware and matching it up correctly. I also have a new house and baby so I don't have tons of time to set one up.

Thanks for any suggestions.

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FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
Here's my crazy idea guys, tell me if I'm crazy or not guys.

Build my NAS all crazy big. Ridiculous amount of disks. Haven't figured out how to do that yet, but I'm working on it. Then get a ridiculous CPU. At least quad core, something server class maybe (Opteron or Xeon). Then run Xen on the box. Run an OpenSolaris VM to do ZFS, Samba, and NFS. Run an Ubuntu VM to do all the other stuff that I could never loving get to work under OpenSolaris.

Is this completely crazy guys? Help me out. I should probably cross post in the Virutalization mega thread too...

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

Allistar posted:

$95.00 and change.

You'll even turn a profit on shitcanning that P4! I would also suggest going dual core. It's typically a really cheap upgrade for a massive boost to the useful life of your system.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

FISHMANPET posted:

Here's my crazy idea guys, tell me if I'm crazy or not guys.

Build my NAS all crazy big. Ridiculous amount of disks. Haven't figured out how to do that yet, but I'm working on it. Then get a ridiculous CPU. At least quad core, something server class maybe (Opteron or Xeon). Then run Xen on the box. Run an OpenSolaris VM to do ZFS, Samba, and NFS. Run an Ubuntu VM to do all the other stuff that I could never loving get to work under OpenSolaris.

Is this completely crazy guys? Help me out. I should probably cross post in the Virutalization mega thread too...

Somehow I don't think this would work out very well. ZFS is going to want direct access to the disks for best performance.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Goon Matchmaker posted:

Somehow I don't think this would work out very well. ZFS is going to want direct access to the disks for best performance.

I was hoping to somehow give the OpenSolaris VM direct access to the disks. That's basically the most important part, and if I can't do that the idea won't work.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

FISHMANPET posted:

I was hoping to somehow give the OpenSolaris VM direct access to the disks. That's basically the most important part, and if I can't do that the idea won't work.
just run opensolaris as your dom0. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

adorai posted:

just run opensolaris as your dom0. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

I guess if that's possible? I don't actually know much about Xen yet. I'm trying to read up about it but it's very :psyduck: compared to what I've assumed it to be.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





adorai posted:

I wouldn't care about speed either, but I would strongly recommend going with a dual core proc. If you plan to use compression or dedupe in the future, you don't want your only core to be pegged, slowing down all other access.

Seconded. When I built mine, I went for the cheapest dualcore available (Pentium E2140) because I'd dealt with single-core CPUs for it and it makes a remarkable difference.

Plus, looking around Newegg, you can get combo deals with a dual-core Athlon for somewhere between $10-$20 more at most. There's just no reason to get a single-cre these days.

MachinTrucChose
Jun 25, 2009
I'm a first-time user looking for a home NAS solution but other than the NAS200 they're almost as expensive as a new PC.

I need something with 2 internal drive bays as well as two external USB ports so I can hook up external drives for backup. The NAS200 is ~100$ but all the others I found are 300$+. How do they justify this price when the home user can build a new PC for that money?

If there's no cheap alternative, I'm thinking of just buying the first Mini ITX Atom system I see on newegg and a case and RAM. A quick glance shows I could build such a system (minus the RAM) for 110$ CAN.

I'd get the NAS200, but all the reviewers are slamming it for atrocious performance. Something like 4MB/s read/write speeds. I'm curious why it's so slow, where would the bottleneck be?

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
This might be obvious, but it's a lesson I recently learned the hard way: If you're going to build a RAID array, make sure you have individual activity LEDs for each drive, so that if one of them is flaky (but not enough for the RAID card to pitch a bitch) you can find which drive is murdering your array's performance.

Not in response to any recent posts; just wanted to share. :)

Lilleput
Jul 22, 2006

First time WHS user here, im using a HP MediaSmart EX 490 and i want to set up a FTP Client on it, not a FTP Server but a client so i can set it to download stuff over night from a Seedbox. The only software i can find are your generic FTP clients that you apparently can hack to run on a WHS, but as im still pretty green i was wondering if there was a .msi FTP Client out there that will just install as an Add-In.

Also, where do i find the VNC info on my WHS?


Edit: Finally figured it out, had a hard time getting past HP's fluff.

Lilleput fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Dec 25, 2009

Supersonic
Mar 28, 2008

You have used 43 of 300 characters allowed.
Tortured By Flan

MachinTrucChose posted:

I'm a first-time user looking for a home NAS solution but other than the NAS200 they're almost as expensive as a new PC.

I need something with 2 internal drive bays as well as two external USB ports so I can hook up external drives for backup. The NAS200 is ~100$ but all the others I found are 300$+. How do they justify this price when the home user can build a new PC for that money?

If there's no cheap alternative, I'm thinking of just buying the first Mini ITX Atom system I see on newegg and a case and RAM. A quick glance shows I could build such a system (minus the RAM) for 110$ CAN.

I'd get the NAS200, but all the reviewers are slamming it for atrocious performance. Something like 4MB/s read/write speeds. I'm curious why it's so slow, where would the bottleneck be?

I have a D-Link 323 and its great. It has two internal drive bays, a USB port for printers (or one external HD I believe). I also use it as a seedbox, and it is Linux-based, and has a large hacking community behind it (google fonz fun plug)

nobleclem
Apr 13, 2005
HOW MANY RED TITLES DO I HAVE TO HAND OUT BEFORE YOU PEOPLE LEARN TO STOP CLOSING THREADS IN SH/SC?
Does FreeNAS support optical drive data backup? If not any non-windows solutions that might? Ideally I would like to do regular backups and annual archives to a Blu-ray Rewritable disk.

squash86
Feb 25, 2005
Saving the world, one snack at a time...

Supersonic posted:

I have a D-Link 323 and its great. It has two internal drive bays, a USB port for printers (or one external HD I believe). I also use it as a seedbox, and it is Linux-based, and has a large hacking community behind it (google fonz fun plug)

I just got mine, and am setting it up now. Couldn't be smoother so far.

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

I installed FreeNAS on an old PC, but I'm having trouble accessing it.

I can ping it just fine, but the web interface returns "500 Internal Server Error" 95% of the time, and the other 5% I get a blank page.

complex
Sep 16, 2003

Sweevo posted:

I installed FreeNAS on an old PC, but I'm having trouble accessing it.

I can ping it just fine, but the web interface returns "500 Internal Server Error" 95% of the time, and the other 5% I get a blank page.

Do you have a small amount of RAM on the box? From quickly scanning the forums it looks like you might have a problem with swap.

If RAM isn't your problem then I would just suggest reinstalling, maybe with a slightly older or newer version of FreeNAS.

Wanderer89
Oct 12, 2009
Hey all, was wondering if there was preference when picking up a new mobo for my opensolaris based raidz box, currently operating on a s939 gigabyte board and 4400+ that only has 4 SATA and no on-board video. Have a am2(+, I think) 5200+ lined up, and I'm looking for a new board that has ...

*At least 6 sata, (prefer 8, I realize anything above 4 probably means a separate sata controller I need to check compatibility with)
*On-board dvi/hdmi video
*gigabit (duh)
*sound to work, if possible digital out to work, but that's asking a lot on *nix
*cheap :v:

Obviously there are plenty of boards that fit the bill, but even though I had zero issues with my current board which I just had lying around, I've heard others having major difficulties. The HCL doesn't seem to list specific boards if I'm not mistaken. US-based, buying from newegg most likely.

tl;dr: need a new am2+ board for opensolaris raidz box

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Wanderer89 posted:

tl;dr: need a new am2+ board for opensolaris raidz box
I am running this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157139 with this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106033 because the onboard nic at one point had driver issues. Pretty sure any 780g or v board will work fine.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Wanderer89 posted:

tl;dr: need a new am2+ board for opensolaris raidz box

Get a motherboard with 6 ports at least, because from what I can tell the AHCI standard or whatever supports 6 ports. All the motherboards I've seen with more than 6 use a seperate controller chip.

If you need more than 6 ports, here are my recommendations:
2 more ports: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124027
I've used that card in OpenSolaris, so I can personally vouch for it
4 more ports: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027
This has a well supported chipset (SIL 3124). Not much comes up googling for that particular model with OpenSolaris. One review on Newegg says it works just fine in OpenSolaris, but it boots slowly because the card BIOS thinks there aren't any drives connected (even though once it boots OS sees them...)
8 more ports: SuperMicro AOC-USAS-L8i or AOC-USASLP-L8i
Not on NewEgg, but you can get it from lots of other places. It's a UIO card, which for us basically means the PCI bracket is backwards. You can either bend it around or just not use one and let it fly free. You'll also need some SAS to 4x SATA cables. If the bracket thing worries you, get this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118100
It's got the correct bracket, but it also costs $100 more.
Both of those use the same chipset. The LSI card is basically the same card that Sun puts in their workstations (that's the 3081E-R, SUN has the 3081E-I (which you can't actually buy) The only difference is firmware, and you can download the correct firmware from LSI. I think the Super Micro card might require flashing the firmware too, but there are enough people using these cards on the mailing lists that it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

complex posted:

Do you have a small amount of RAM on the box? From quickly scanning the forums it looks like you might have a problem with swap.

If RAM isn't your problem then I would just suggest reinstalling, maybe with a slightly older or newer version of FreeNAS.

You were right about the RAM. The machine I installed it on had 160MB. I guess the FreeNAS documentation is out of date, as it says the minimum required is 128MB.

loosewire
May 16, 2004

This is The MAN
Grimey Drawer
Just a quick question hope someone can help as i have had no luck with searching - When copying files to a CIFS share running on Opensolaris how do you set the default unix file creation permissions for those files in the unix side file system?

Gyshall
Feb 24, 2009

Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.
Anyone have experience with this Intel NAS? I'm mostly concerned about running something other than the stock software on it.

movax
Aug 30, 2008

loosewire posted:

Just a quick question hope someone can help as i have had no luck with searching - When copying files to a CIFS share running on Opensolaris how do you set the default unix file creation permissions for those files in the unix side file system?

Ahahahaha. Hahahahahah.

ACLs. Specifically, NFSv4 ACLs. I got my rear end kicked by them this winter break, but I think I understand now, though I'm certain my configuration would make a real Solaris admin cringe. Without ACLs, the group will keep getting set ephemeral IDs and its terrible. Living outside of a domain is oh-so-tough.

If you sudo to root, you will be using the ls located in /bin/ls. This is important for one very important reason: -V. This shows you the ACL permissions as well. Likewise, the chmod located in /bin gains some extra abilities. Abilities like so:
code:
movax@megatron:/tank/video/tv# ls -Vd .
drwxr-xr-x+ 37 movax    staff         40 Jan  5 01:41 .
                 owner@:rwxpdDaARWcCos:-d-----:allow
                 owner@:rw-pdDaARWcCos:f------:allow
                 group@:r-x---a-R-c--s:-d-----:allow
                 group@:r-----a-R-c--s:f------:allow
              everyone@:r-x---a-R-c--s:-d-----:allow
              everyone@:r-----a-R-c--s:f------:allow
Here is a basic overview: http://breden.org.uk/2009/05/10/home-fileserver-zfs-file-systems I printed out the Sun ZFS reference as well and studied it.

This is what I did:
code:
chmod A0=owner@:rwxpdDaARWcCos:d:allow .
chmod A1=owner@:rwpdDaARWcCos:f:allow .
chmod A2=group@:rxaRcs:d:allow .
chmod A3=group@:raRcs:f:allow .
chmod A4=everyone@:rxaRcs:d:allow .
chmod A5=everyone@:raRcs:f:allow .
(applied recursively, et. al. as needed)

Flaw: Executable permissions can get weird...
A0 sets the permissions to basically allow the owner to do whatever the gently caress he wants. That ': d :' makes it apply to directories only, and all the subsequent directories created. If you look at A1, it lacks the 'x', the executable property, because A1 only applies owner properties to files (: f :). 'x' is needed for you to list directories.
Respectively, A2/A3 apply to your user group, A4/A5 apply to everyone. What I have done is allow my user movax to do whatever the gently caress I want to my files because hey, it's my poo poo. I also made a generic user, 'media', with no shell for CIFS purposes. He falls under 'everyone' and can read and list dirs to his content, perfect for sharing files. Using the magic of ACLs,
code:
chmod A4=everyone@:rwxpaRcs:d:allow .
chmod A5=everyone@:rwapRcs:f:allow .
I set that in a public folder, allowing anyone to upload poo poo to my machine. Slapped a 500G ZFS quota on it so no one can fill me with more horse porn that I would like. You can use ACLs to set arbitrary permissions on whatever. Want user joebob to have write/append capability to a certain file? Just chmod A+user:joebob:<perms>::allow <file>!

Be warned, Windows applies all the DENY rules first, followed by ALLOWs.

If there's interest I can post more details on my setup.

:siren: AMD Family 15 and below CANNOT FREQUENCY SCALE AS OF 1/1/2010. Get a newer AMD CPU if you don't want it running full-tilt all the time. It will go between C0 and C1, but no intermediate P-states are supported. :siren:

:siren: ZFS de-duplication is cool, but owns the poo poo out of your CPU. I saw load averages of 14 with a 4450e. Admittedly, it was underclocked/undervolted, but if you want dedup, get a beefy CPU backbone going :siren:

:siren: LSI 1068E running in non-RAID mode is the poo poo. Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8i, I got two of 'em running in an Asus M4A78-E. mpt driver works perfectly with it :siren:

I have enough confidence in ZFS + RAID-Z2 that I pulled out 3 drives at random from a 16-drive array that was 14TB full at a convention panel to prove my point. RAID-Z only rebuilds data that was present. Additionally, RAID-Z3 is available now for the insanely paranoid.

movax fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Jan 6, 2010

Raluek
Nov 3, 2006

WUT.
These are kind of stupid questions, and I apologize if this goes in HoTS. I've been messing with iSCSI recently, and two things I've not had any success googling for:

Using the linux package iscsitarget, how can I present a disk as "removable" to a Windows initiator? How can I do this with any target, if this is not possible? I also wasn't able to get ISOs to mount directly, this may solve my problem if they show to the target as removable devices instead of fixed volumes.

Using the Windows program iSCSI Cake, how do I get the RAMdisk feature to work? In the logs it says "Not enough storage is available to process this command" but when I google that phrase nothing useful comes of it. A few links from that search mention page file, but it would be pretty lame if I had to have a paging file as large as my RAM disk. Kind of defeats the purpose. I have a bunch of RAM, more than enough for the 2GB disk I want to use to be non-problematic. The partition I am using as a working dir is also 2GB in size, although I hope that doesn't have to be the same size as the RAMdisk. My boot drive has 20GB free, so it's not that either. It's not making much sense.

I hope I'm not the only one messing with this software, because google, for once, ain't helping.

Edit: One think I noticed in the log file is that it thinks there is only 4GB memory in this system, when in fact there are 16GB. Maybe it's a 32-bit program? It's installed in the 64-bit Program Files directory. Maybe they're being dumb about it and I have to use another program to make my RAM disk. Who makes a good free one that can do a large (let's say 10GB) RAM disk? I can't find any.

Edit 2: Their site does say "iSCSI Cake supports iSCSI initiators in Windows, Linux and Solaris, works with 32/64 bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista and is not limited by 32-bit addressing, which enables it to work with disks of up to 4 PB in size." so it would be a huge oversight for them to use 64-bit disk addressing but 32-bit memory addressing. I would use a different target (or one in linux), but it does what they call copy-on-write, which acts like Deepfreeze with writes. I really like this feature. If it is implemented elsewhere, do tell.

Raluek fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Jan 7, 2010

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

movax posted:

:siren: LSI 1068E running in non-RAID mode is the poo poo. Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8i, I got two of 'em running in an Asus M4A78-E. mpt driver works perfectly with it :siren:

Do you just have them flying free in the case? Did you have to flash the firmware to enable non raid mode? Any pics? I want so bad to pull the trigger on those bad boys.

phorge
Jan 10, 2001
I got banned for not reading the Leper Colony. Thanks OMGWTFBBQ!

FISHMANPET posted:

Do you just have them flying free in the case? Did you have to flash the firmware to enable non raid mode? Any pics? I want so bad to pull the trigger on those bad boys.

Also, how did you get them mounted in the case? Seems they have some funky standard.

movax
Aug 30, 2008

FISHMANPET, they come stock in "IT" mode, no RAID firmware present. I got mine from eBay.

phorge/FISHMANPET, I have 'em hanging free for right now, but a buddy of mine just used nylon spacers between the board and bracket, and used the next slot over to secure them. There are a bunch of creative ways to mount it.

Pics (my flickr):





Speed:


Machine has since gained another L8i and 4x2GB sticks of RAM.

Avian Pneumonia
May 24, 2006

ASK ME ABOUT MY OPINIONS ON CANCEL CULTURE
Are there any plans to update the op?
It seems awfully dated and I'm looking to learn the basics about storage options

I have 1tb of data that i've been manually backing up and mirroring on 2 1tb western digital elements external hard drives

And i'm looking for the easiest and least expensive way to expand my capacity to at least 2tb mirrored

Would a 4 bay external enclosure be best? What's a good one?

heyou
Dec 30, 2004
Mr. Green....Gesundheit.
Trying to figure out how to set this up, but the more research I do, the more options I seem to have! Here's what I want to do:

- Move all my music, pictures and movies to one location that any computer on my network can access. Right now it's spread over 4 computers on the same network.

- Be able to use a Logitech Squeezbox (or several) to play music wirelessly in whatever room I may be in.

- Stream movies and pictures to my TV.

- Stream Netflix/other internet content to my TV.(My Blu-ray player will do Netflix)

Wasn't sure if this would be better here or over in AV. My first thought was a WD TV Live connected to a 1TB external drive set up as a NAS. Would there be a more elegant solution like a dedicated computer to handle all of this? I've got a 3ghz Pentium 4 in the basement with a fresh XP install on it that I used to use to stream Netflix to my TV until I got the blu-ray. Might this work with more HDD's and something like freeNAS?

devmd01
Mar 7, 2006

Elektronik
Supersonik

heyou posted:

Trying to figure out how to set this up, but the more research I do, the more options I seem to have! Here's what I want to do:

- Move all my music, pictures and movies to one location that any computer on my network can access. Right now it's spread over 4 computers on the same network.

- Be able to use a Logitech Squeezbox (or several) to play music wirelessly in whatever room I may be in.

- Stream movies and pictures to my TV.

- Stream Netflix/other internet content to my TV.(My Blu-ray player will do Netflix)

Wasn't sure if this would be better here or over in AV. My first thought was a WD TV Live connected to a 1TB external drive set up as a NAS. Would there be a more elegant solution like a dedicated computer to handle all of this? I've got a 3ghz Pentium 4 in the basement with a fresh XP install on it that I used to use to stream Netflix to my TV until I got the blu-ray. Might this work with more HDD's and something like freeNAS?

Just remember, a single storage location means a single point of failure. Run at least RAID-1 to help protect against a single drive failure, and consider what your backup options are for the data you are storing on it. Mirroring it back to a single external attached to another wired pc would probably be the easiest way to go.

If your clients are using either the logitech squeezebox software which I believe is fairly lightweight, or accessing cifs shares, then a 3ghz PIV would be adequate for just serving up files. The more ram the better, of course. If you get into anything transcoding, you'll need a faster box.

I currently have a win7 DC7800 ultra slim as my htpc, and will be replacing it with a WDTV Live for media playback on the tv eventually.

Randuin
Dec 26, 2003

O-Overdrive~
How bad of a practice is it to be running drives in NTFS under Linux? I moved over a bunch of data drives to my linux server and they are in NTFS. Should I convert them to ext4 or something or would I be okay keeping things are they are?

Raluek
Nov 3, 2006

WUT.

Randuin posted:

How bad of a practice is it to be running drives in NTFS under Linux? I moved over a bunch of data drives to my linux server and they are in NTFS. Should I convert them to ext4 or something or would I be okay keeping things are they are?

Unless someone else has contradictory information, I was led to believe that NTFS-3G has been entirely stable (as much as anything ever is) for years. There might be (probably will be) a performance increase going to EXT4, but I doubt that there would be a data integrity reason for it.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Raluek posted:

Unless someone else has contradictory information, I was led to believe that NTFS-3G has been entirely stable (as much as anything ever is) for years. There might be (probably will be) a performance increase going to EXT4, but I doubt that there would be a data integrity reason for it.

It's pretty stable but very slow. I was originally using NTFS-3G to transfer data to an external drive for offsite backup and on a whim plugged the drive into a windows box, created a share for the drive in windows, and mounted it in Linux. Easily doubled the transfer rates to the drive. I'd suggest converting to ext4 unless you have a reason to stick with NTFS.

qutius
Apr 2, 2003
NO PARTIES

Gyshall posted:

Anyone have experience with this Intel NAS? I'm mostly concerned about running something other than the stock software on it.

I'm in the same boat and am thinking of picking one up to run Windows Home Server on it. A guy I work with just purchased one but doesn't have it up and running just yet. I haven't been able to find a whole lot of people running them, so I'm curious to hear how they've been holding up.

Debrain
Jul 11, 2006
When I grow up Im going to be the Bling Bling King.
Anyone have any experience updating the firmware to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives to SD1A and running it in raid? I have one of the 500gig hard drives laying around and figured I could learn how to set up a raid. Seems like a lot of people are complaining about all the problems with their hard drives not showing up in bios.

DLCinferno
Feb 22, 2003

Happy

Debrain posted:

Anyone have any experience updating the firmware to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives to SD1A and running it in raid? I have one of the 500gig hard drives laying around and figured I could learn how to set up a raid. Seems like a lot of people are complaining about all the problems with their hard drives not showing up in bios.

I have four of the 1TB drives that had the firmware issue. Never had any problems with them, but I decided not to risk it and upgraded all the drives. Everything went smoothly, just make sure you read up on it and get the right version of the firmware for your drive. It's a pretty simple process in the end.

qutius
Apr 2, 2003
NO PARTIES

Gyshall posted:

Anyone have experience with this Intel NAS? I'm mostly concerned about running something other than the stock software on it.

Alright, I've got this thing up and running with Windows Home Server finally. I started with two 1.5TB drives and have about 2.3TB total in my disk pool. I figure by the end of this year, I'll add two more 2TB drives once they come down into a the correct price point.

The install was kind of a bitch and took a few attempts before it finally took. There is a ton of info to help and so far, I'm pretty pleased with the OS. The connector console is a bit weird, but I like connect via RDP so it feels like regular ol Windows 2003 server.

Overall, I really love the hardware design. The fans run super quite, I like how the hard drives mount, and it feels like a pretty sturdy system. I still need to add a gig switch and a wireless N hotspot into my home network, but it's been streaming 1080P content without any problems so far. For the price, it seems pretty hard to beat, and it is nice not having a tower plugged in somewhere. Doesn't look half bad sitting on the shelf with the rest of the home theater gear.

If you have any specific questions, let me know!

Jazzzzz
May 16, 2002
I've been loving around with trying to build a low-power home NAS this week and while I have it mostly running there's a pretty nasty performance snag that's biting me in the rear end. I'm pretty certain I know what it is but if someone can help confirm my suspicions I'd appreciate it.

My idea was to take a cheap case with 9 external 5.25" bays, some 3-to-5 hard drive cages like this, throw in a 4-port internal Sil3124-based SATA card and some port multipliers, slap it all on an Atom-based board with as much RAM as I could, and have a slow-ish but expandable bulk storage box that didn't eat a ton of power. I originally planned on using OpenSolaris via the EON appliance distro, but I found out that as of snv_130 it still does NOT correctly support SATA port multipliers. I downloaded OpenFiler and got it installed, updated, and booting off a USB key.

Quick hardware overview:

Mobo: SuperMicro X7SPA-H Atom 550 all-in-one w/ 4 gigs of RAM
Storage: 5 x WD 1.5TB Green SATA drives, 64MB cache in software RAID 5 (this is what I think is killing me)
Sil3124-based 4-port SATA card
Sil3176(?)-based SATA port multiplier card
OpenFiler 2.3 (2.6.29-6-0.23 kernel)

I get between 48-100MB/sec write speeds for 10-15 seconds to any share I provision off the array no matter if it's via SMB (underlying filesystem doesn't seem to matter) or iscsi, but then the NAS falls on its face and write speeds drop to under 20MB/sec. Read speeds are close to peak write speeds but remain stable.

I'm guessing that the array is falling on its face calculating parity but I don't really know how to confirm that short of trashing the RAID-5 setup and testing a non-parity layout. I've eliminated the SATA card + port multiplier as an issue, because I have the same problem when the drives are connected to the SATA ports on the motherboard.

I thought that the Atom would have enough horsepower for a software RAID-5 config, but I'm not really sure where to check for other bottlenecks before definitively labeling the CPU as the culprit. Seems like there's gotta be something I'm missing - perhaps the boot-from-USB config could be playing a part somehow? Any ideas?

edit: update - tried starting with an older kernel revision, 2.6.26.8-1.0.11, and the problem disappeared. do I try to get the newer kernel working properly, or do I just forget about it

Jazzzzz fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Feb 13, 2010

xPanda
Feb 6, 2003

Was that me or the door?

Jazzzzz posted:

I originally planned on using OpenSolaris via the EON appliance distro, but I found out that as of snv_130 it still does NOT correctly support SATA port multipliers.

Are you able to elaborate on this? Finding information on PMP support in Opensolaris is really difficult, but the build log says it was added in build 122 or thereabouts. I've seen a few posts around of people who claim to have it working.

I set up an opensolaris system to test PMP support, and used the development repositories to update to snv_131, and the system froze when I turned on the external 3176 PMP connected to an internal 3132 chipset card. I'm yet to try other scenarios.

When you say that as of snv_130 they are still not correctly supported, do you mean that they are supported but incorrectly, or that they are not supported at all? If its the first case, what is wrong with the support?

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Jazzzzz
May 16, 2002

xPanda posted:

Are you able to elaborate on this? Finding information on PMP support in Opensolaris is really difficult, but the build log says it was added in build 122 or thereabouts. I've seen a few posts around of people who claim to have it working.

I set up an opensolaris system to test PMP support, and used the development repositories to update to snv_131, and the system froze when I turned on the external 3176 PMP connected to an internal 3132 chipset card. I'm yet to try other scenarios.

When you say that as of snv_130 they are still not correctly supported, do you mean that they are supported but incorrectly, or that they are not supported at all? If its the first case, what is wrong with the support?

In my case, the system did not lock, but each port connected to a multiplier showed errors and did not show any connected drives. Happened in snv_129 and snv_130, gave up and started looking elsewhere.

In other news, downrevving kernels didn't really resolve my issue with transfer rate slowdown. Bleh. If this poo poo keeps up I'm going to end up installing Windows Home Server :(

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