Currently I have an Opteron 165 on an Asus VIA A8v-VM SE as a home server. The board was to hand at the time but it's a little limited in that it only had 100/10 lan and 2 SATA ports.
There are 2 PCI slots which are filled. One with a Geovision four channel CCTV card and one with Dlink gigabit lan card.
Currently I have a single PATA drive connected for testing purposed but I have three 250GB SATA drives from other machines ready to make a raid array. For this I have a XFX Revo the port Raid 3 SATA PCI card on the way from an OCUK'er. This means I loose a PCI slot and so will am back to 100/10 lan which is a quarter of the current thoughput I get. The only PCI-E network cards I can find are £30 which is touch expensive.
Thing is though, I need a fair bit more storage than a 500GB array since I have around 150-200 DVD's (Haven't counted yet) I'd like to backup in mpeg2. It has to be mpeg 2 as I use GBPVR software to stream to several dumb MVP clients which don't like Mpeg4 or DivX as the server has to recode on the fly which can cause dropout.
I can probably squeeze the DVD's into a 1 TB if I'm selective as most of them seem to be around 4-5GB for the main feature. However if I do this my array would be full immediately so I figure I'm better of with 1.5TB minimum.
Now the difficulty.... doing this without breaking the bank.
1) First off - Drives.
I'm looking at the Western Digital RE2 series, are these really worth the extra £20 per drive for a couple of years warrenty. They are quoted as having a feature which stops them trying to recover data for more than a few seconds to avoid drive dropout in an array. Is this feature required for softraid systems i.e. onboard raid or the sub £100 raid cards which are really software or is it more geared towards enerprise raid controllers.
I'm thinking 3 x 750 would give me 1.5 TB with the ability to upgrade to 2.25 should I need to.
I've also considering a stright raid 0 stripe with 2 drives, living with the small risk of drive failure for a couple of months before adding a third and migrating the array to raid 5.
The lure of cheaper 500 or 750 drives can't escape me though. This drives will be powered 24/7 but will spin down under operating system control and the duty will be fairly light.... there's a limit to how many DVD's I can watch and how often. I'm almost tempted to make it a seperate box which only powers up when needed.
Too many options. It's easy to just splurge the cash on buying the best of everything but the the two drives I've had fail in the last 20 years were a quantum fireball SCSI 2GB which was about 6 years old at the time and the other was a 40GB 2.5 IDE in a light external case which I accidently dropped.
2) Nvidia Raid and s939
I've found a cheap ASUS A8N-VM CSM which is a fair s939 matx board with 4 sata raid 5, gigabit lan, 2 PATA connectors and onboard video. With this board I'd still have 1 free PCI , 1x16 and 1x1 PCI-E should I need to upgrade later.
I've looked at the higher spec Nvidia boards and considered AM2 or socket 775. The thing is though, I have a number of single core s939 chips and a stash of small DDR so I'm reluctant to jump ship just yet. Also although some of the higher spec AM2 boards support 6 sata Raid 5 I doubt I'd want 6 drives in a single raid array. 4 seems the best balance of risk vs capacity. I'm likely just to drop my opteron 165 into it though unless I decide to use it as a pure NAS with Freenas or Ubuntu in which case a single core should be able to handle streaming a couple of DVD's without breaking sweat.
Has anyone had any experience of Nvidia raid, it's robustness in raid 5 and in recovering from a failed drive?
Am I crazy sticking with s939? I can't see any advantages of changing platform at this time other than the cheapness of DDR2 which I don't need right now but perhaps I'm deluding myself.
3) Other raid options.
I'm really struggling to drop £200+ on a proper PCI-E hardware raid card. Raid 6 would be great but for the cost of decent 6 port + card I could near build a duplicate raid 5 file server using the CSM board and the DDR, CPU's, PSU's I have kicking about.
So folks, Any thoughts...... Am I deluding myself.... should I buy a real raid card or is onboard raid going to be ok. Should I change platform? Are enterprise drives worth it? Have I missed anything or is my logic flawed?
Thanks
AD
There are 2 PCI slots which are filled. One with a Geovision four channel CCTV card and one with Dlink gigabit lan card.
Currently I have a single PATA drive connected for testing purposed but I have three 250GB SATA drives from other machines ready to make a raid array. For this I have a XFX Revo the port Raid 3 SATA PCI card on the way from an OCUK'er. This means I loose a PCI slot and so will am back to 100/10 lan which is a quarter of the current thoughput I get. The only PCI-E network cards I can find are £30 which is touch expensive.
Thing is though, I need a fair bit more storage than a 500GB array since I have around 150-200 DVD's (Haven't counted yet) I'd like to backup in mpeg2. It has to be mpeg 2 as I use GBPVR software to stream to several dumb MVP clients which don't like Mpeg4 or DivX as the server has to recode on the fly which can cause dropout.
I can probably squeeze the DVD's into a 1 TB if I'm selective as most of them seem to be around 4-5GB for the main feature. However if I do this my array would be full immediately so I figure I'm better of with 1.5TB minimum.
Now the difficulty.... doing this without breaking the bank.
1) First off - Drives.
I'm looking at the Western Digital RE2 series, are these really worth the extra £20 per drive for a couple of years warrenty. They are quoted as having a feature which stops them trying to recover data for more than a few seconds to avoid drive dropout in an array. Is this feature required for softraid systems i.e. onboard raid or the sub £100 raid cards which are really software or is it more geared towards enerprise raid controllers.
I'm thinking 3 x 750 would give me 1.5 TB with the ability to upgrade to 2.25 should I need to.
I've also considering a stright raid 0 stripe with 2 drives, living with the small risk of drive failure for a couple of months before adding a third and migrating the array to raid 5.
The lure of cheaper 500 or 750 drives can't escape me though. This drives will be powered 24/7 but will spin down under operating system control and the duty will be fairly light.... there's a limit to how many DVD's I can watch and how often. I'm almost tempted to make it a seperate box which only powers up when needed.
Too many options. It's easy to just splurge the cash on buying the best of everything but the the two drives I've had fail in the last 20 years were a quantum fireball SCSI 2GB which was about 6 years old at the time and the other was a 40GB 2.5 IDE in a light external case which I accidently dropped.
2) Nvidia Raid and s939
I've found a cheap ASUS A8N-VM CSM which is a fair s939 matx board with 4 sata raid 5, gigabit lan, 2 PATA connectors and onboard video. With this board I'd still have 1 free PCI , 1x16 and 1x1 PCI-E should I need to upgrade later.
I've looked at the higher spec Nvidia boards and considered AM2 or socket 775. The thing is though, I have a number of single core s939 chips and a stash of small DDR so I'm reluctant to jump ship just yet. Also although some of the higher spec AM2 boards support 6 sata Raid 5 I doubt I'd want 6 drives in a single raid array. 4 seems the best balance of risk vs capacity. I'm likely just to drop my opteron 165 into it though unless I decide to use it as a pure NAS with Freenas or Ubuntu in which case a single core should be able to handle streaming a couple of DVD's without breaking sweat.
Has anyone had any experience of Nvidia raid, it's robustness in raid 5 and in recovering from a failed drive?
Am I crazy sticking with s939? I can't see any advantages of changing platform at this time other than the cheapness of DDR2 which I don't need right now but perhaps I'm deluding myself.
3) Other raid options.
I'm really struggling to drop £200+ on a proper PCI-E hardware raid card. Raid 6 would be great but for the cost of decent 6 port + card I could near build a duplicate raid 5 file server using the CSM board and the DDR, CPU's, PSU's I have kicking about.
So folks, Any thoughts...... Am I deluding myself.... should I buy a real raid card or is onboard raid going to be ok. Should I change platform? Are enterprise drives worth it? Have I missed anything or is my logic flawed?
Thanks
AD