Help with a home server build!

[sizo]

Hi,

I am looking to build a home server to allow my movie collection (which i add to everyday) to be streamed to a variety of boxes around the house, including an atv2 an acer revo running xbmc and games consoles if possible.

Still being a student i have to work under some form of budget, so heres my spec:

• Intel Core i3 3220 Ivy Bridge Dual Core Processor £91
• Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H Socket 1155 VGA DVI HDMI 8 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard £95
• Corsair Memory Vengeance Jet Black Low Profile 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz CAS 9 XMP Dual Channel Desktop £30
• XFX P1-450S-X2B9 Pro Series Core Edition 450W Power Supply (PSU) £35
• 2/3/4 x Seagate 3TB Performance SATA 3 Hard Drive ST3000DM001 7200rpm with 64MB Cache SATA II Compatible £102 each
• Antec 1100 Eleven Hundred Case £90

Looking to run Ubuntu Server as WHS is no longer supported and Windows 8 with some features of WHS incorporated just doesnt appeal to me.

I'm not too sure on the case, im after something with 6+ 3.5 drive bays to cater for possible expansion as the mobo has 4 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors and 4 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors, but something around the £100 mark.

Heres where i need some extra help and knowledge ...

1. Would a wake on lan network card be beneficial? Some of the build ive seen on the web have them. Would WOL allow me to remotely send files to be downloaded by the server?

2. Would it be beneficial to have the OS on SSD? or would that be an overkill? should i look to run it on a usb pen drive? or even a ide HDD? also would i need a backup of the OS file system?

3. Is it worth having RAID? If so do i go for 5,6 or 10? Im more concerned with being able to retrieve my movies after a disk failure rather than file corruption. Is it worth having say 4 HDD's, 2 of them are masters and are backed up to the remaining 2, eliminating the need for RAID altogether?

I'm also concerned with the possibility of another disk failing under pressure when rebuilding the array. But would i not experience this disk pressure when rebuilding from a backup? or could my backup disk become my master disk and i just add a new disk to become the new backup disk?

Also without using RAID would my HDDs would be seen as separate disks as opposed to one whole storage pool? Meaning that i would have to add several network file shares on each device?

Sorry for an incredibly long and possibly confusing post, any help would be much appreciated!

 

[R088ieS86]

Luckily Streaming requires almost zero processing power.

So you could get away with:
YOUR BASKET
1 x ASRock B75M Intel B75 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £52.99
1 x Intel Pentium G620 2.60GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £44.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED34096M1600HC11DC) £22.99
Total : £130.87 (includes shipping : £8.25).



Low powered processor, nothing you have mentioned will come close to using even 2GB of RAM so 4GB will be fine and that motherboard, along with supporting WOL has 8 SATA ports for when you add more drives.

1. Would a wake on lan network card be beneficial? Some of the build ive seen on the web have them. Would WOL allow me to remotely send files to be downloaded by the server?

No the WOL won't be able to send files to be downloaded, depending on how you um, aquire your files there are some web apps that can do this, or you can set up remote desktop / SSH for remote access. WOL will allow you to put your PC to sleep when it isn't needed and wakeup on request.

2. Would it be beneficial to have the OS on SSD? or would that be an overkill? should i look to run it on a usb pen drive? or even a ide HDD? also would i need a backup of the OS file system?

I would say yes, a small SSD for the OS is perfect for a server as they run a very low power. I run WHS2011 on a 40GB drive and it is brilliant. I wouldn't recommend USB pens for an OS as they are quite slow and can be unreliable. As all it is doing is acting as an OS the backup option is completely up to you.

3. Is it worth having RAID? If so do i go for 5,6 or 10? Im more concerned with being able to retrieve my movies after a disk failure rather than file corruption. Is it worth having say 4 HDD's, 2 of them are masters and are backed up to the remaining 2, eliminating the need for RAID altogether?

I would recommend a backup rather than RAID. In a home server it is relatively un important for you to be back up and running withing 2mins of a drive failing.
(Although becareful because if your media collection grows you end up needing a completely different PC to back everything up to )

 

[sizo]

Thanks for the reply and answers to much questions!

Some people have said that streaming 8gb h.264 mkv files requires a bit more processing power which is why i went for a more powerful cpu, is that still the case?

Would using WOL allow me to configure my server to sleep unless one of the devices wants to access a movie, which will turn the server on?

As a user of WHS, would you recommend it, even though it is now unsupported, over using windows 8's home server features, or even a linux server based distro? Also, do you use the WHS backup facilities as your backup solution?

Thanks again

 

[R088ieS86]

My MKV files are full size, so some are 42GB (can you see why i have backup issues now ) It definately doesn't need processing power as all it is doing is allowing access to the files. if it has to decode it then you may need some more power. (Except for the RAM that is the same CPU and Mobo that I use)

Yes, if your server is WOL enabled then it can be set to sleep untill a file is required. Lights on can do this in WHS2011.

Well, I went for it because I had never played with home server software before and it was windows, so, yeah . It certainly forfills my requirements, but it is quite bloated for what I need. I do use WHS w/ lights out to do my backups because it can wake itself and other PCs up to do backups. I've been lucky enough not to have any issues.

A linux distro would cetainly be lighter and their maybe more features to play with. I haven't had a chance to play with Win8 yet so can't comment on that. Maybe some other users might eb able to help there.

 

[blastman]

my 2 cents...

any pc will do really. as pointed out above, all your doing to building a fancy nas, so unless you want to transcode on the fly (might be required for console viewing, but certainly not for xbmc) it'll do fine.

Personally, I'm a ubuntu fan, so my htpc has been ubuntu for a while now. setup some smb shares, and away you go.

As for the raid options, it really depends on how much space/money you need/want.

An ideal solution would be raid 5 as it'll create redundancy for a failed drive. however in my experience, I'd just add each drive as a different share and link those shares to xbmc.

if your doing backups to another disk, then losing a hdd won't be that much of a ball ache as you've got the file on a different disk anyhow.

hope that helps a little.

 

[RimBlock]

The B75 board suggested looks good although the specification on OCUK could do with a proof read as it looks like someone was a bit over enthusiastic with the copy-paste.

People see streaming in different ways. Sharing usually denotes making files available via network shares for a player to pull from the server. Some people also refer to this as streaming and the file is being passed, or streamed, to the player. Streaming is more commonly used for the process that usually involves and application pushing a stream of the audio / video content to a player and in some cases transcoding the material in to a format the player can cope with if the native file type is not supported (e.g. streaming from a media server to an XBox 360). It helps to clarify if streaming of the file or streaming of the audio/video is required. Streaming of a/v which required transcoding will require a CPU with a bit of grunt and the i3 is probably a good bet. Sharing a file requires almost no processing and so the G620 will do just fine.

As for raid and backup...

A simple way to look at it is Raid is for availability and recovery of the last state of the data, backup is for recovery of the data in various states over a time period.

For media, most people are happy with raid but for important files (home accounts / phots etc), a decent backup solution is advisable. WHS 2011 comes with a backup solution which works quite well.

Raid 10 will give you a pretty good solution if you are only interested in the last data state but at the cost of having to provide 2 sets of drives for 1 set of data.

Raid 5 will require only 1 extra drive for a raid set which will hold parity but the parity calculations do require processor work and can slow down disk speed. Raid 5 can also only handle 1 disk failure and can take a very long time to recover depending on what you are using to provide the raid 5 functionality. Software raid 5 / Controller fake raid 5 can take days for recovery. Proper hardware raid 5 controllers can cut the time down but can cost quite a bit.

Raid 6 is the same as raid 5 but with two parity drives and so can withstand 2 drive failures. The problem is that the parity calculations require twice the processing power, the recovery time can take even longer and hardware raid cards are usually very expensive.

Both raid 5 & 6 can also suffer from the raid 5 write hole. The problem occurs when you loose power whilst there is still data to be written to the disks. This can cause corruption of the data as the unwritten data is lost. If the power loss after the data is written but before parity data is written then when the power is restored, everything will look fine until a disk failure occurs and a rebuild starts and corruption occurs due to using the old parity data. Higher end raid cards protect against this by enabling either a battery backup unit or using flash based write cache. Bottom line is that raid 5/6 is note really advisable without a raid card with a BBU or FBWC.

There are also a number of non traditional raid solutions. One of the most popular is ZFS which provides raid 5/6 type functionality but also uses data scrubbing and other techniques to try and prevent write hole like issues. Of course these extra techniques come at a cost of ram and processor requirements required to maintain decent speeds.

Other solutions that are also gaining favor are the raid on filesystem (RoFS) type solutions. It sort of started, popularity wise at least, with WHS and it drive pool technology and exploded from there. The various solutions try to provide redundancy and pooling of multiple disks in to one large storage drive. There are a nubmer of free solutions out there and a few paid ones. The advantage of these are that if a drive fails, the data on the other drives are still accessable on other machines as the raid like redundancy is implemented on top of the OS filesystem and not underneath it. For example, take a drive from a drive pool created by Stablebits drive pool product and plug it in to another Windows machine and with a couple of tweeks you can see the data stored on that drive. Of course these are software solutions and take a drive speed hit. Remember though, for a NAS, you are usually bound by your network connection and so drive speed is rarely a big issue for the home environment. FlexRaid is a commercial (paid for) solution but there are a few other free solutions as well.

Solutions like NAS4Free or UnRaid are generally turnkey appliances that you can just install, use a web-gui to manage and have all the bits in them for most users needs. They tend to be a bit more closed with what you can do other than the features provided but are very popular. Most RoFS and appliances have free trials (Nas4Free is, well, free )

For my money, for an easy setup then thow some more ram and use the i3 with Nas4Free. If you want something to aid learning then WHS 2011 is a good place to start with Windows Server learning and it will be supported for a few years yet. If you prefer Linux then you can take your favorite distro and add / remove and configure as you wish.

The only gotcha is that some raid schemes do not allow you to srink your array after it is created so changing from one raid solution to another can be tricky if you do not have a full backup available.

RB