Right my winged technology monkeys it's about time I got with the real world.
I would like (I think) a nas device to sit in a cupboard somewhere to hold my movies/photos etc. do I need raid or is there a better way to mirror my photos etc. I reckon about 2tb will do. What do you lot have?
Do you want to mirror the back up so it's doubly protected?
I have recently purchased on of these (http://www.sharkoon.com/?q=en/node/1806)from Sharkoon. It can be set to all the Raid configurations and I currently have 2 x 2tb drives contained therein which I mirror in case one fails. It also has lots of pretty blue lights which is lovely. Oh wait, it's USB 3 which is not Nas. It's very quick though.
Perhaps the dMW perennial favourite of old - an ICYBOX .... this one is dual bay and NAS or DAS: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-box-ib-nas5520-dual-bay-hybrid-enclosure-useable-as-(das)-or-(nas)-for-2-x-35-sata-hdd
I really like the synology boxes mate they are pretty rugged and work really well.
Quote from: BrotherTobious;362759I really like the synology boxes mate they are pretty rugged and work really well.
I used to agree with you Toby but the power packs on them go pop and take out your HDD's. I had one of my HDD's Die on my 4 bay 411J and got all kinds of errors on the other disks. Luckily ordered new disks and server and got Synology to send me out a new power brick so was able to copy everything over before it went pop again. I don't personally trust it anymore with storing my data. This is a big thing on the web. This happened to me before I went to the US and I have just made a new NAS out of one of the small HP micro-servers with 8 gig of RAM and Daul 1.5 ghz processor, 5 bays for disks, ESATA port PCI-E for GFX and PCI-E 1x for expansion, 6USB ports all of the bells and whistsles for £100 + £15 for the 8 gig of RAM. 3 times cheaper than the synologies and better IMO.
Only downside to it is that is doesn't support hardware raid the the synology so there is the possibility of the odd bit of corruption here and there as its SOFTWARE raid. However software raid has its advantages as I can chuck the 4 2tb HDD's in any PC and get the data off them as long as the OS supports the software RAID. This makes sense with Moorselaw still holding firm as you are not bound to specific hardware. Anything with a sata port will do.
I spent a lot of time ****ing about with LINUX distro's as there are some good ones out there for this kinda thing but I was spending too long with MDADM ****ing about with the config... then it was going to take 30 hours to build the bloody thing. Couldn't wait that long to copy over with the HDD's in a poor state so I chucked server 2008 r2 on there and did a software raid 5 as I know that you can write to it while its building the parity. WINDOWS 7 and WINDOWS 8 will also do this if you are wondering. Copies over in no time and I can write to it at 80MB/s continuous write rather than about 25-30 with the old NAS.
Also put a half height GFX in there which was laying about and using it as a media server over HDMI into the TV. Other great things like using it as a VPN tunnel into my home network, it runs VM's a treat... Screw Hyper v just install Vmware or Oracle Virtual Box on there and remote into the Vm's. Anything your OS can do it can do as its fully featured.
Overall its cheaper and can do much more, highly recomeneded, also it looks frigging cool, all black with a nice finish.
For sub £130 You cant go wrong.
Some pics to follow of my new Toy and the Dismantled Synology.
Let me know if you need more info.
DZ
Went for http://www.ebuyer.com/290542-netgear-rnd4000-readynas-nv-v2-4-bay-no-disks-nas-enclosure-rnd4000-200eus for my lab in uni. Had no problems connecting to it from all over, it handles GBs of data being written to it for hours on end*. We then analyse those GBs of data, and while it's not close to the performance of a local drive, it's never once lost data or had an issue of dropping connectivity.
It's solid as a rock. I'd prefer if it had faster read/write speeds (more comparable of a local drive) but I'd definitely recommend it.
*When we run an experiment we write files continuously, each data recorded might only take 1/10th of a second and they can be run back to back for 48 hours or more and I've never notice even 1 missing file.
Quote from: DrunkenZombiee;362769I have just made a new NAS out of one of the small HP micro-servers with 8 gig of RAM and Daul 1.5 ghz processor, 5 bays for disks, ESATA port PCI-E for GFX and PCI-E 1x for expansion, 6USB ports all of the bells and whistsles for £100 + £15 for the 8 gig of RAM.
Which HP micro-server out of interest? I've been looking at the DS1512 NAS but I like the price of your version better.
HP ProLiant N40L 1P 2GB-U Emb SATA NHP 250GB LFF 150W PS MicroServer or on the internet just google HP N40L Microserver.
I forgot to mention you get a free 250 gig HDD with this and I think you get an MS:OS for free with it too.
This was on UKHD for £85 a while back after cashback... I got it for £100 from amazon when my other NAS went pop and put 8 gig of RAM in there. I would recommend putting 4x2TB in there and leaving the 250 gig drive you get with it as the OS Drive, Swap etc. In raid 5 this will give you just under 6TB across the 4 disks with one disk redundancy.
It lightening fast at everything and I am currently hosting VM's for work on it, have various shares on there, running my downloading and decompression software for free papers etc. It will even play GW2 quite easily on Low as I have have added a 6670 into it. Does everything I ask of it well. Dont be put off by what seems as a low spec of the dual 1.5 GHz as it easily destroys the AMD3200 chips which were the same spec.
Great bit of Kit way faster for file transfers than my Synology by a long way (3-4 times faster). As stated earlier you can run what you want on it as its x64 so you can run a fully featured OS on there and any software you want.
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-n40l-micro-server-185-90-85-90-after-cashback-sold-elevenfirst-fulfilled-amazon-1331196
Hope this helps.
DZ
1 x Buffalo LinkStation Duo 2TB
1 x Western Digital MyBook Live Duo 4TB
1 x Buffalo LinkStation Duo 6TB
The WD drive has a cloud facility, to give you web access to your files stored on it.
The LinkStations are more fully featured. They have PHP/MySql webserver, Bittorrent client, FTP server and can join Workgroups, Domains & Active Directory. They support Mac TimeMachine backup and can support an external USB drive for additional store or backup.
Both drive types support auto-wake, but the LinkStations can be given a programmed wake schedule.
Just to give this a bump found this post on UKHD today..
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-proliant-n40l-microserver-194-29-delivered-94-30-after-hp-cashback-box-co-uk-1404081
This one is even cheaper:
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-proliant-n40l-microserver-187-99-87-99-after-cashback-morecomputers-1404499
Thanks DZ, and thanks TTB for screwing my FTTC so I haven't seen this until it expired. :(
Synology are brilliant NAS boxes, Nice performance / power consumption.
You can pretty much get a "app" to make the box do anything you want.
Recently replaced one of my NAS boxes with a Qnap, worst thing ive ever done.
Quote from: kregoron;363499Synology are brilliant NAS boxes, Nice performance / power consumption.
You can pretty much get a "app" to make the box do anything you want.
Recently replaced one of my NAS boxes with a Qnap, worst thing ive ever done.
With the Synologies its worth googling the power bricks as a lot of customer seem to have problems with them too like me. Seem to be the cheap part of the unit and a point of failure. Was happy with mine till it went pop however it was a little slow and didn't do everything I wanted. The apps don't work too well on them TBH as they are normally pretty underpowered. Rinning SABNZB or Squeezebox causes issues as there simply isnt enough RAM in those little boxes and not enough Horse Power in terms of CPU. Running as webserver with PHP is a very bad idea and media transcoding on the fly is a no go! It will do the basics well but for less money you can get superior performance in almost every criteria with Micro Server.
I am getting gigabit transfer speeds from my HP microserver while before with my Synology it was 20-30MB/s write at best. The HP wins there with 4 times that. 8 gig of RAM and a proper CPU makes a huge difference.
I have a friend with a Q-NAP and I am not too impressed with it. Noisey 2 bay horrible thing and the software interface is pretty poor compared the Synologies DSM which has a really nice OS style web interface with a desktop and everything.
A lot of routers have some nice options for attaching USB HDD's these days. While not a redundant NAS wioth RAID 1 or 5 etc its pretty useful for backups if your in a pinch or for use as a tersary archive that you can just eject and use and you have the data when your going out of the door.
DZ
Quote from: DrunkenZombiee;363506With the Synologies its worth googling the power bricks as a lot of customer seem to have problems with them too like me. Seem to be the cheap part of the unit and a point of failure. Was happy with mine till it went pop however it was a little slow and didn't do everything I wanted. The apps don't work too well on them TBH as they are normally pretty underpowered. Rinning SABNZB or Squeezebox causes issues as there simply isnt enough RAM in those little boxes and not enough Horse Power in terms of CPU. Running as webserver with PHP is a very bad idea and media transcoding on the fly is a no go! It will do the basics well but for less money you can get superior performance in almost every criteria with Micro Server.
I am getting gigabit transfer speeds from my HP microserver while before with my Synology it was 20-30MB/s write at best. The HP wins there with 4 times that. 8 gig of RAM and a proper CPU makes a huge difference.
I have a friend with a Q-NAP and I am not too impressed with it. Noisey 2 bay horrible thing and the software interface is pretty poor compared the Synologies DSM which has a really nice OS style web interface with a desktop and everything.
A lot of routers have some nice options for attaching USB HDD's these days. While not a redundant NAS wioth RAID 1 or 5 etc its pretty useful for backups if your in a pinch or for use as a tersary archive that you can just eject and use and you have the data when your going out of the door.
DZ
The cheap boxes doesnt pack a lot of horsepower to run huge amounts of services.. Most run ARM chips or small Atom cpu's, with good reason tho, most are made with cheap uptime in mind.. Its a NAS not a server..
Your microserver has a lot more horsepower to handle it all, tho it also comes with a higher consumption cost
Tho my Synology box is running, Samba, Twonkeymedia, print server and a number of other services without a hassle..
The best Synolgy i got has no problems hitting 80-90MB/sec without link aggregation active..
Ive had 6 Synology boxes over the last 5 years, (running 2 atm, and a Qnap(what a horrible idea))
My IBM Eserver also beats the crap out of my NAS boxes, and anything else i got server related, but again it comes at a price.. usually in the power consumption range..
sorry to hijack this thread, but in the interest in keeping things tidy, thought i would post here,
I have an external USB HDD which i have put some movies etc on, can I put this on a network (attached to a PC) and be read by other devices, mainly thinking of TV's (using Smartshare) which has wifi etc.
I can already send video's straight to the TV, but I would like to be able to choose from the TV instead. Possible?
Thanks
Most new routers have the option to act as a NAS by plugging in a USB drive in the USB port, tho the drive might have to be reformatted as a EXT3/4 drive
Quote from: kregoron;363921Most new routers have the option to act as a NAS by plugging in a USB drive in the USB port, tho the drive might have to be reformatted as a EXT3/4 drive
I agree with Kreg. You pay more for a NAS that is networked. Get a USB 3 drive that can be attached to the router which will treat it like network storage. Backup from your PC regularly to the drive. In the end a PSU failure can take our both drives in a RAID single box.
If you have your primary copy on one and backup on a PC or vice versa then you're safer.
Or go offsite as has been suggested with cloud storage. Or backup tape to iron mountain. :rolleyes:
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
I'm still faffing about. In the interim i've backed everything off to crash-thing that TL plugged a few weeks back. I want it mainly to hold movies so that I can pull them straight to the telly as required now. With the sales on I'll spend another 3 months deciding! That or some memory, or an SSD....
Sent from my flashy iPad keyboard, which is surprisingly cool.
I have formatted it to EXT 3 and plugged it into the BT hub as it has a USB port, powers up etc, but still can't see it on a PC (also tried NTFS and exFAT)
(Some good deals on SSD's at the moment, such as 250GB Samsung 830 for under £120)
you will probably need to map the drive as network accessible on the router
I've an external drive plugged into a Netgear 2200 router formatted to NTFS. I had to change some settings in the router admin panel to bring it to life. Then Windows just picked it up. Might be worth checking the routers settings if you have not already done so.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
Quote from: smilodon;363946I've an external drive plugged into a Netgear 2200 router formatted to NTFS. I had to change some settings in the router admin panel to bring it to life. Then Windows just picked it up. Might be worth checking the routers settings if you have not already done so.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
:withstupid: exactly
Tried looking in all the settings, It did ID, but it still would not see it from a PC, I think NAS is the only way
Strange as it should work.
I don't have any experience with the BT home hubs but i know my LINKSYS Dual band router works fine if not quite sluggishly. Can you not put tomato or DD-WRT on there to speed things up a bit?
Quote from: Snokio;363987Tried looking in all the settings, It did ID, but it still would not see it from a PC, I think NAS is the only way
i can have a look at it later if you want?
Do you have other things connected to your router such as laptops etc. that can be seen on the PC? There was a setting buried in Windows 7 network settings about Network discovery. I can't remember exactly what I did but I know I had to toggle a setting before I could see the USB drive in Windows. Not very helpful sorry.
Quote from: Benny;363929I'm still faffing about. In the interim i've backed everything off to crash-thing that TL plugged a few weeks back. I want it mainly to hold movies so that I can pull them straight to the telly as required now. With the sales on I'll spend another 3 months deciding! That or some memory, or an SSD....
Sent from my flashy iPad keyboard, which is surprisingly cool.
I have purchase several of THESE (http://m.wdc.com/en/product/640) over the last couple of years and have found them excellent for backing up.
The fact they're one or two TB means ican jut back up my entire drive using FREE FILE SYNC (http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/) and its a nice solution.
It's quick and easy and the fact it doesn't need power is great.
Benny, my only concern about your solution is that is if you suffer a fire or something (god forbid) then the fact it's on a cupboard won't mean jack. I think you need some sort of off site solution. Having the encrypted WD Passport left at your office would work.
Other things I have which work well are Microsoft Live Mesh which is free and will synchronise any file or folder or drive with another computer elsewhere.
None of these will help you with streaming though !
Aye, I've subscribed to crashplan and parked a few gig of photos there, which was my main worry. The streaming piece is interesting. I can use a USB into the TV or indeed direct from a Samsung Allshare app over the network, but I guess I was looking for a toy. I think the option will be the http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/seagate-expansion-sgr39211-external-hard-drive-2tb-black-16787143-pdt.html bargain here for now.
I hate Christmas because it makes me want to spend money!
Quote from: Penfold;364023I have purchase several of THESE (http://m.wdc.com/en/product/640) over the last couple of years and have found them excellent for backing up.
The fact they're one or two TB means ican jut back up my entire drive using FREE FILE SYNC (http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/) and its a nice solution.
It's quick and easy and the fact it doesn't need power is great.
Benny, my only concern about your solution is that is if you suffer a fire or something (god forbid) then the fact it's on a cupboard won't mean jack. I think you need some sort of off site solution. Having the encrypted WD Passport left at your office would work.
Other things I have which work well are Microsoft Live Mesh which is free and will synchronise any file or folder or drive with another computer elsewhere.
None of these will help you with streaming though !
It's certainly cheaper than the 2tb my passport but looking at its size I think it's probably 3.5" as opposed to the smaller 2.5" one but hey ho.
If I want to stream I tend to just plug my ipad into the telly and do it from there. Not seamless perhaps but it works for me.
I looked in the network settings and tried switching everything off, but to no joy
Thanks for your input and help though :thumb: :)
Quote from: DrunkenZombiee;362795HP ProLiant N40L 1P 2GB-U Emb SATA NHP 250GB LFF 150W PS MicroServer or on the internet just google HP N40L Microserver.
I forgot to mention you get a free 250 gig HDD with this and I think you get an MS:OS for free with it too.
This was on UKHD for £85 a while back after cashback... I got it for £100 from amazon when my other NAS went pop and put 8 gig of RAM in there. I would recommend putting 4x2TB in there and leaving the 250 gig drive you get with it as the OS Drive, Swap etc. In raid 5 this will give you just under 6TB across the 4 disks with one disk redundancy.
It lightening fast at everything and I am currently hosting VM's for work on it, have various shares on there, running my downloading and decompression software for free papers etc. It will even play GW2 quite easily on Low as I have have added a 6670 into it. Does everything I ask of it well. Dont be put off by what seems as a low spec of the dual 1.5 GHz as it easily destroys the AMD3200 chips which were the same spec.
Great bit of Kit way faster for file transfers than my Synology by a long way (3-4 times faster). As stated earlier you can run what you want on it as its x64 so you can run a fully featured OS on there and any software you want.
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-n40l-micro-server-185-90-85-90-after-cashback-sold-elevenfirst-fulfilled-amazon-1331196
Hope this helps.
DZ
Slightly old thread, but after months of looking at "huge sexy NAS systems that I can't afford" I took the plunge and bought an HP N40L today too with the intention of stuffing it full of decent-sized disks. £89.99 delivered after the £100 cashback from HP.
http://www.box.co.uk/product/id/1120795
Assuming the PSU can handle it, you can get up to 10 HDDs into this server if you start using 2.5" drives and internal 2.5" SATA bays. Seagate 3TB's are on offer atm for £100 from overclockers, but I might wait for a better deal to pop up.
Now I'm off to consider whether or not to use WHS2011 or something like Flexraid.
Quote from: TeaLeaf;366122Slightly old thread, but after months of looking at "huge sexy NAS systems that I can't afford" I took the plunge and bought an HP N40L today too with the intention of stuffing it full of decent-sized disks. £89.99 delivered after the £100 cashback from HP.
http://www.box.co.uk/product/id/1120795
Assuming the PSU can handle it, you can get up to 10 HDDs into this server if you start using 2.5" drives and internal 2.5" SATA bays. Seagate 3TB's are on offer atm for £100 from overclockers, but I might wait for a better deal to pop up.
Now I'm off to consider whether or not to use WHS2011 or something like Flexraid.
Flexraid is a odd size, it has some pretty damn nice advantages, like the option to add and remove devices to the array as you see fit, tho the performance is a bit weirdish at best...
You thought about using something as Freenas
Yep, I'm looking at FreeNAS too but have never used it before. What I really want is a Drobo/Synology-like raid solution where I can add drives of different sizes and expand the array over time as required. As I have not gone down this route before I need to research what the different alternatives are to see which one is best - the server will probably not be here until the end of the week anyway and I've not ordered any of the drives yet, so I have plenty of time to do more research. The community for these microservers is just huge, just like the amount of reading I need to do to get up to speed on all the things I can do with them!
Quote from: TeaLeaf;366170Yep, I'm looking at FreeNAS too but have never used it before. What I really want is a Drobo/Synology-like raid solution where I can add drives of different sizes and expand the array over time as required. As I have not gone down this route before I need to research what the different alternatives are to see which one is best - the server will probably not be here until the end of the week anyway and I've not ordered any of the drives yet, so I have plenty of time to do more research. The community for these microservers is just huge, just like the amount of reading I need to do to get up to speed on all the things I can do with them!
I looked a fair bit on Synologys hybrid raid a bit back, but i just thought tho whole SHR raid system is weird, and could be disastrous if it fails.. its quite weird how its structures compared to other raids.
SHR allows for the use of different disk sizes in a single volume, to accomplish this the system splits each disk up in a series of blocks, lets say 2Gig each (the actually size is most likely much higher) it then adds all the blocks from the different disks into a big pool by using LVM and you end up with a single large volume, the structure is random and should be optimized from a performance perspective.. how they accomplish the data security im not really sure, must be some checksum blocks to restore other blocks from, a little like raid 5 blocks.
you should be able to do the same as LVM with LDM or storage spaces in Windows Home server... else i bet Freenas supports the LVM setup (or so does a freenas alternative)
Beginning to look like I'll end up with ZFS under NAS4Free (the continuation of FreeNAS) installed via a Live USB stick, leaving the full quota of drives available for storage. The research continues.
...and strangely the WD Red 3TB drives appeared on an offer this afternoon, so I grabbed 4 x 3TB drives to install in the N40L.
http://www.ebuyer.com/390986-wd-red-3tb-3-5in-sata6-wd30efrx
the ZFS system is quite nice, havent had much time to test it myself nor read much, tho isnt the raid levels supported by ZFS pretty much the same as standard
Stripped and mirrored vdevs' (Raid 0 and 1)
RaidZ1 (Raid 5)
RaidZ2 (raid 6)
And so on.. Tho impacted by the same limitations when it comes to increasing the raid array?
Example, you create a RaidZ1 vdev with 4 drives, when you then want to expand the capacity, you can only expand it if you add another vdev (4 more disks) ? not entirely sure, tho i thought it could recall something like that?
....and my order for Reds was (effectively) cancelled (they said they had insufficient stock - despite the fact that they then had a bunch online showing as in-stock at a higher price). Found another supplier and ordered 5 x 3TB Red, but still undecided as to Raid-Z or Raid-z2 (the 5th disk is to give me the option of z2 but still retain a decent amount of storage).
i guess you have to ask yourself, how important is the data?
Downloaded the Nas4free LiveUSB img from here (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nas4free/files/NAS4Free-9.1.0.1/9.1.0.1.636/).
Used Win32diskimager to write the .img to the physically very small SanDisk Cruzer Fit 16GB USB stick
(http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41z4piM6TWL._SL500_AA300_.jpg)
Slammed the USB stick into the N40L and it booted right into NAS4free without any problems.
I bought 2x8GB DDR3 (Crucial CT102464BA1339) to upgrade the server RAM and I will install the RAM tomorrow to check it is accepted.
Then the disks will go in and raid-building will commence!
I swear that HDDs are like the Borg. They have a 'hive mind' and know what is happening to each member of the collective.
Knowing full well that I am picking up my 5 x 3TB HDDs this morning, one of my existing HDDs decided to fail this morning. :doh:
I hate the Borg...... :angry:
Quote from: TeaLeaf;366589I swear that HDDs are like the Borg. They have a 'hive mind' and know what is happening to each member of the collective.
Knowing full well that I am picking up my 5 x 3TB HDDs this morning, one of my existing HDDs decided to fail this morning. :doh:
I hate the Borg...... :angry:
Let me guess, the disk was a month over warranty :P
Not checked it yet, but yeah I am guessing so!
The RAM upgrade to 16GB went fine (despite the spec saying 8GB max) and all the drives bar one are installed. I made the somewhat basic error of miscounting the number of slots the N40L has, I thought it came with a 250GB + 4 spare bays, but it is 4 including the 250GB. I've ordered a 5.25" to 3.5" rail which will arrive tomorrow, so I'll put the 5th HDD in the unused optical bay.
Thur/Fri should see some software install & config I hope!
Am just curious what people think of http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421 (http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421)
With the £100 cash back it comes to only £119
same box tl bought me thinks
Correct, same as the one I have which I obught for £89 net of rebates. If you wait a day or so I suspect you'll see it on sale for less then £100 net, there was a £92 deal which closed only an hour or so ago - keep an eye on HotUKdeals (http://www.hotukdeals.com/computers/deals/hot) to spot it when it crops up.
I've put 5 x 3TB WD Red HDDs into mine and am running Nas4free from a LiveUSB stick (I flashed the BIOS to one that enabled AHCI on the optical port to which the 5th HDD is connected). The N40L is very well built, all the allen screws and the allen key are attached to the inside of the lockable front door. It's quiet too, it just has one big fan at the back. The community for these microservers staggered me when I first started looking into it. If you want to do something with an N40L then someone has already done it and put up a 'how to' guide, video and blog about it! Great little box and well worth the money. £92 + disk costs for what will be a 15TB NAS box is unbeatable imo.
Quote from: TeaLeaf;366732Correct, same as the one I have which I obught for £89 net of rebates. If you wait a day or so I suspect you'll see it on sale for less then £100 net, there was a £92 deal which closed only an hour or so ago - keep an eye on HotUKdeals (http://www.hotukdeals.com/computers/deals/hot) to spot it when it crops up.
I've put 5 x 3TB WD Red HDDs into mine and am running Nas4free from a LiveUSB stick (I flashed the BIOS to one that enabled AHCI on the optical port to which the 5th HDD is connected). The N40L is very well built, all the allen screws and the allen key are attached to the inside of the lockable front door. It's quiet too, it just has one big fan at the back. The community for these microservers staggered me when I first started looking into it. If you want to do something with an N40L then someone has already done it and put up a 'how to' guide, video and blog about it! Great little box and well worth the money. £92 + disk costs for what will be a 15TB NAS box is unbeatable imo.
Completley agree......i know i want one for that price....just need to work out what i want it for and clear it with "the management" and need to find the USPs that will get her to agree to me spending more money on techy bits ;)
Just saw this thread again... So this HP server is essentially a standard but small computer with raid capabilities, and comes ready to run out the box and would run a standard Linux distro (I see it's red hat certified) - nothing else required?
I have a little 2-disk netgear readynas but am increasingly frustrated by its lack of certain "normal" server features, specifically on the fly encryption. The nas could then be junked or become backup...
I've started moving a copy of my music folder onto it, movies, ebooks, data and piccies to follow. I'm getting about 200-320Mbps according to the Nas4free GUI graph.
To add the 5th drive you need a molex to sata power cable and a sata cable, along with 5.25" to 3.5" adapter wings so that it slides into the internal optical slot. All the screws needed for 5 drives and the adapter wings are already there screwed to the inside of the server's door.
I linked the USB drive I am using on a previous page and you'll need a second USB stick to install the embedded image from it (you boot from the 2nd USB and then install onto the 1st USB which is the one that sits in the N40L longterm. When you upgrade the OS it is then simply a matter of installing a new version on the USB as it has remained totally separate from the ZFS data pool).
Logged into the ZFS IRC help channel earlier to see what it is like and it is highly noob friendly, if the comments I saw were anything to go by.
@Suicidal_Monkey: aye it's a server with 1 x 250GB HDD already installed, no OS and 2GB RAM. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB (prob overkill but I chose to run Nas4free and ZFS on it which does better with more RAM). I added my own disks - it has 4xHDD bays (one with the 250GB in it) plus 1xoptical bay - I put in 5x3TB 3.5" disks by replacing the 250GB disk and also using the optical bay with the above mentioned convertor to house the additional HDD. I flashed the BIOS to a modded BIOS which upped the speed of the optical SATA channel by enabling AHCI which is an otherwise hidden option in the default BIOS.
Now that the Nas4free is installed and running I have removed the keyboard & mouse, so it is runing headless. I can't hear the N40L above my water-cooled system, so imo it is quiet. The GUI is nice too (I am not an ssh-friendly person).
Started copying a file from my PC over wired LAN and at the same time a file over wireless from my laptop. Am seeing in excess of 650Mbps write speed at the NAS end which I think is pretty impressive for this bit of kit.
Sounds like a nice setup - going to have to keep an eye on the deals for that litte server. I've not used the box site to buy stuff before - are they a decent outfit?
Nas4Free seems to have a pretty thorough set of features. I guess the reason you went with the usb stick OS was to cram in as many storage drives as possible, but if you were only using 2 or 3 (or 4 with your adapter thing) I suppose you could run the same thing off the 250Gb drive, still keeping it independent of the data. Any idea what happens if the OS drive is corrupted or something and you were using encryption - will you be able to retrieve the data simply enough with a new OS drive (or USB)?
Quote from: TeaLeaf;366801Started copying a file from my PC over wired LAN and at the same time a file over wireless from my laptop. Am seeing in excess of 650Mbps write speed at the NAS end which I think is pretty impressive for this bit of kit.
I am glad you took my advice but i am a little concerned by the WD RED drives you have put in there as they have write back cache don't they which on a software raid can be pretty dangerous as it can nuke the data after a few seconds of being inactive/in a faulty state.
You should see some very nice speeds to the NAS =). Great little bit of kit and you can run any daemons you want too on there for other feature such as VPN, APACHE, etc etc.
Quote from: suicidal_monkey;366864Sounds like a nice setup - going to have to keep an eye on the deals for that litte server. I've not used the box site to buy stuff before - are they a decent outfit?
Nas4Free seems to have a pretty thorough set of features. I guess the reason you went with the usb stick OS was to cram in as many storage drives as possible, but if you were only using 2 or 3 (or 4 with your adapter thing) I suppose you could run the same thing off the 250Gb drive, still keeping it independent of the data. Any idea what happens if the OS drive is corrupted or something and you were using encryption - will you be able to retrieve the data simply enough with a new OS drive (or USB)?
5 x 3.5 inch Disks are no problem without modification =). I am running a 250 gig drive for the OS and then 4 drive RAID 5. You can put a half height GFX card in it and use it as a media server with HDMI and storage if you wish. Its a great bit of kit.
Greetings from Sunny Orange County.
DZ
Quote from: DrunkenZombiee;366871I am glad you took my advice but i am a little concerned by the WD RED drives you have put in there as they have write back cache don't they which on a software raid can be pretty dangerous as it can nuke the data after a few seconds of being inactive/in a faulty state.
5 x 3.5 inch Disks are no problem without modification =). I am running a 250 gig drive for the OS and then 4 drive RAID 5. You can put a half height GFX card in it and use it as a media server with HDMI and storage if you wish. Its a great bit of kit.
Under ZFS I am not considering this a problem at the moment. The N40L is on a UPS too, so unless I get 3 drives failing at the same time then I should not have a problem under ZFS (Z2).
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide
The optical sata is not full speed afaiaa from all the community forums out there, unless the latest N40L's have a changed bios. So you can run drives without modification, but the 5th drive will not be at full speed.
@Suicidal - aye to max out storage space. If the OS USB corrupts then I just image another and stuff it in as the data pool is separate from the OS and not corrupted. Upgrading the version of Nas4free is similarly easy, you simply write the new image to the USB, plug it back into the N40L and boot it up again.
Quote from: DrunkenZombiee;366871I am glad you took my advice but i am a little concerned by the WD RED drives you have put in there as they have write back cache don't they which on a software raid can be pretty dangerous as it can nuke the data after a few seconds of being inactive/in a faulty state.
You should see some very nice speeds to the NAS =). Great little bit of kit and you can run any daemons you want too on there for other feature such as VPN, APACHE, etc etc.
5 x 3.5 inch Disks are no problem without modification =). I am running a 250 gig drive for the OS and then 4 drive RAID 5. You can put a half height GFX card in it and use it as a media server with HDMI and storage if you wish. Its a great bit of kit.
Greetings from Sunny Orange County.
DZ
WD reds have write back cache disable from stock.. It can be dangerous, tho data nukage is rare, as most modern software/hardware raid controllers just kicks out the disk that isnt fast enough to return from inactive/suspend state... Which is annoying in itself as it takes so darn long to add the drive to the array again. (DARN YOU SEAGATE!!!)
Write Back Cache is only dangerous if you got a power outage while the controller is writing new data, but thats why you got a UPS
Hmmm, ebuyer is now up to 139 and box up to 119, so it's become a game of chicken - will they run out, go up in price, or have a nother dip into the 90 region... aaargh.
...and for those looking to buy one of these here's what looks to be a sub-£100 price net of cashback:
http://www.serversplus.com/microserver_cashback
Thanks for the heads up but serversplus (when I looked at least) is 184 ex vat, so after vat and p&p it's about the same as ebuyer's £130 after cashback
We all missed a trick, we should have copied Backblaze and built our own 180TB NAS box!
Quote from: TeaLeaf;366619RAM upgrade to 16GB went fine (despite the spec saying 8GB max)
how critical is this quantity of ram? Will the existing 2gb work okay in a less intensive setup (two 2tb HDD, mirrored), albeit more slowly. Mainly light file storage with encryption, possibly some VMs at a later date, tbd.
... did you have plans for the 2gb you took out of yours...? :cool:
It's not critical, but if it is working out which parity bits to put where then when it gets busy it helps. Many people use 2GB and have no issues at all. With fewer disks it's less important. With more disks it is nice but not essential.
If I can find the old RAM you are welcome to it, but I don't remember where I put it now or even if there are enough slots for it to be of any use!
It's not critical, but if it is working out which parity bits to put where then when it gets busy it helps. Many people use 2GB and have no issues at all. With fewer disks it's less important. With more disks it is nice but not essential.
If I can find the old RAM you are welcome to it, but I don't remember where I put it now or even if there are enough slots for it to be of any use!
Aside:
My refund for the £100 cashback offer was acknowledged within a week of submitting the form and the cheque is due some time before 7th May.
Quote from: TeaLeaf;369614Aside:
My refund for the £100 cashback offer was acknowledged within a week of submitting the form and the cheque is due some time before 7th May.
I got mine within the month which I was not expecting as usually it can take some time for deals like these.
I am still loving my little Server, running a few interesting services on it these days like a media indexing tool to relabel all of my MP3s properly and the recent addition of one one of these (http://www.ebuyer.com/366601-sandberg-mini-dvb-t-usb-dongle-133-59) for just over a fiver plus NEXTPVR server and XBMC12 frodo clients means TV on any device on my home and TV on the move in different countries. I did have to hack 2008 R2 to use BDA digital devices which was a PITA but it worked in the end!
DZ.
Quote from: TeaLeaf;369614If I can find the old RAM you are welcome to it, but I don't remember where I put it now or even if there are enough slots for it to be of any use!
Aside:
My refund for the £100 cashback offer was acknowledged within a week of submitting the form and the cheque is due some time before 7th May.
let me know if you find it and if there's a slot in the server for it we can work out the beers :cool:
I missed the best deals and the cashback, which could have been a third hard drive and raid 5 or the 16gb ram but decided it was still worth it! Those additions can come later. Ram is more likely than disk space based on my current usage/plans. Don't know what you lot store on all those GB :eek:
:g:Are any of you using encryption in your file-servers?
Within Nas4Free, so far as I can tell from my searching, the only encryption option is to encrypt each disk individually, and entirely, before adding them to a ZFS vdev. There's no partial encryption option (at least not one I have found) and the password for each disk can be different. The encryption happens at the disk level, underneath ZFS, not certain how that interacts with. You need to mount/decrypt each disk after a reboot, and then re-init the ZFS pool.
The other option seems to be to create (with or without disk encryption) the ZFS vdev, pool, and dataset/volume and then create an encrypted volume with something like truecrypt (...or this (http://pthree.org/2012/08/21/encrypted-zfs-filesystems-on-linux/)?) inside/on-top-of ZFS. ZFS will essentially manage the read/write/mirroring of already-encrypted data. Not certain nas4Free supports this sort of setup going by the forum posts I came across - perhaps I need to go with a more generic linux distro to achieve that...?
:blink:choices. I guess I could encrypt everything and be done with it. Anyone with any suggestions / thoughts / experience setting this sort of thing up?
Decided to try putting Ubuntu Server on my microserver...
Turns out that it's a bit of a pita to make Ubuntu server install off a usb stick. It kept complaining it couldn't find the cdrom. The forum posts I found on it were confused, so I gave up and went to look for a CD-ROM drive. I have two - One is old and is PATA/Molex, the other SATA (with SATA-Power, no Molex) - and the N40L has a SATA data connector, but Molex power, and I couldn't find a Molex-->Sata power adapter in my drawer of computer junk.
:eyebrow:
I got there in the end, with a bit of help from an old PSU that did have sata power connectors...
[ATTACH=CONFIG]2047[/ATTACH]
:rolleyes:
My god Ben you still have that keyboard!!!!!!
Indeed, it has survived well over a decade of abuse now, and is still useful for LANs and last-night computer configuring. Only had to disassemble it 2 or 3 times to rinse out beer and wine... :cool:
MDADM will take an age to make your RAID array. It told me 2 days so I gave up and put another OS on.
Quote from: DrunkenZombiee;369889MDADM will take an age to make your RAID array. It told me 2 days so I gave up and put another OS on.
I was planning to still use zfs for Linux, which I think is instead of (?) MDADM, but then I was going to put something like a truecrypt container on it that I will mount and share.
I am not certain I properly get the proper architecture of a file server yet, but in my mind I have this: ZFS pool as underlying (redundant raidz) volume. On this I create folders like /music and /photos, which I mount in the server and share over the network. I then create my truecrypt container, mount it on server, and share the mounted directory. Access to the shares should not require any interactive login (might sort out certificates...) but if a drive is removed or stolen the truecrypt container should be a reasonable barrier.
The main reason I decided to try a more complete server distro was because it looked like nas4free didn't give me the option of an encrypted folder/share? I'm less keen on the full disk encryption as the only solution it offers as it's not clear how I could access the data off one disk following os/system failure. Happy to be persuaded otherwise! :cool:
Quote from: suicidal_monkey;369934ZFS pool as underlying (redundant raidz) volume. On this I create folders like /music and /photos, which I mount in the server and share over the network. I then create my truecrypt container, mount it on server, and share the mounted directory.
After some more reading, I think I might now understand why this might not work well with zfs...
To zfs the truecrypt container would appear as a large file. When a file is modified zfs doesn't modify the file in place, but it actually writes a new updated version, to protect the data. As the truecrypt container is a relatively large "file" this makes for a significant amount of writing for small changes. Should have a little time next week&weekend to experiment :cool:
Edit: mind you, the observation that it was slow/inconsistent writing was taken from a translated forum post in which the guy had a 1.6tb truecrypt container on a 1.8tb array, so perhaps 1 or 2 Gb won't be too bad :-) also probable that zfs would only rewrite portions of the file that change and not the entire thing, so provided truecrypt processes in blocks, which it must do surely, this should still be workable
Quote from: suicidal_monkey;369628let me know if you find it and if there's a slot in the server for it we can work out the beers :cool:
I sent you a PM a couple of weeks back but got no response. Do you still need that RAM stick or do I get to bin it? :P
Quote from: TeaLeaf;370404I sent you a PM a couple of weeks back but got no response. Do you still need that RAM stick or do I get to bin it? :P
Definitely yes please!
*goes to look at long lost pms...
£100 refund cheque arrived Friday. :thumbsup:
The RAM stick goes in the post on Monday Suicidal!
If anyone is still interred in getting a NAS or a micro server then please note that Ebuyer appear to have a supply of the HP N54L servers at £99.99 after the rebate and free delivery included. Other suppliers may have some too.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2
Long term use update:
The NAS is still going fine, still whisper quiet and nothing has failed. It's left on 24/7 most of the time running a media server and simple storage with different accounts for each member of the family with accompanying permissions.
Very highly recommended for a cheap self-build NAS option and there are still regular deals to be found on this micro-server, net cost of circa £100 (http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-proliant-n54l-microserver-137-88-inc-vat-delivery-99-54-after-30-cashback-serversplus-1990409).