I think that they are instructions as to how to re-instate your array, before you do that your existing drive will still work alone- as the one which has died is just a mirror copy of it; that is to say they can work independently.
Wolvers' Home Server Build
- Thread starter wolvers
- Start date
Personal preference I suppose. Debian over ssh is fairly familiar, so I don't waste much time looking for configuration files. I'd also much rather edit the files directly, as then I can read the comments and set whatever options I wish. The gui on my nas doesn't allow you to create read only samba shares for example, over ssh everything is fair game.
I'm going to try to answer some of stockhausen's questions too. I agree with everything Wolvers has said, but a second perspective probably wont hurt. I'm using this device for much the same purpose.
I can say that the off the shelf box I'm using comes with 256mb of ram, I haven't seen it hit 50% utilisation yet, and it's rated for 50 mbyte/s according to the manufacturer and some independent testing.
There are issues with booting from a greater than 2 TB hard drive using the traditional bios which is now on its way out, there's no problems accessing them. I had a 2.1TB ext2 volume built out of four nominally 750gb drives, which is at least a little bit over 2TB.
The only really appealing way to back up a NAS that I can think of is a second NAS, but for the mean time I'm also going for the usb-hard-drive-in a-draw approach.
One of my friends has a usb cable that connects two computers together, and allows file sharing between them. So the answer is probably yes. I wouldn't bet on it working under linux though.
Raid isn't a backup. Raid 1 isn't either. If the psu in his new case dies, or the motherboard dies, or one of the hard drives fails and takes out the controller with it, all the drives are dead. A usb hard drive on the other side of the room is immune to such faults, though a fire would still get it. All raid 1 protects against is a hard drive failing, which is a fairly frequent occurrence, but not the only way your data could be lost. A backup is good protection against accidental delete too.
Where I think Wolver's device will shine in the future is as a four disk raid 5. If a drive fails, the array still works, and read / write speeds to a degraded raid 5 on mdadm are perfectly usable. Write speeds should be slightly better than a single hard drive, that's a play off between parity calculations and not writing as much data to each individual disk at a time. Read speeds however should hit around three times what a single drive is capable of, i.e. the array read speed would comfortably saturate gigabit. 2gb of ram is surplus for this, and I'm fairly confident the atom is more than capable of it too. The potential stumbling block is the onboard nic and how fast the machine at the other end can write the data.
Would this RAM work with the D525 mobo http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-296-CS&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=1180 ? Would I need to do anything to make it run at 800 or will it just work when I plug it in?
That's basically the same as the RAM that I bought, except it's branded. I haven't checked to see what speed it's running at but I assume it's 800. All working fine though.
Thanks.
If I wanted to go down the fanless route and use a motherboard like the Intel Desktop Board D525MW (which only has 2 SATA ports) is there enough space in the CFI-A7879 to add a PCI SATA card?
For the 120mm case fan, can you buy LNA adaptors separately or do they just come with some fans? Are they easy to fit?
If I wanted to go down the fanless route and use a motherboard like the Intel Desktop Board D525MW (which only has 2 SATA ports) is there enough space in the CFI-A7879 to add a PCI SATA card?
For the 120mm case fan, can you buy LNA adaptors separately or do they just come with some fans? Are they easy to fit?
Last edited:
In case you haven't met it yet, there's the Supermicro X7SPA-H and similar. The star points in my opinion are the two Intel 82574L Gigabit LAN ports, six sata, no fans. It does use sodimm unfortunately.
Not that two gigabit ports are particularly useful for a NAS I suppose, but it's a nice board nonetheless.
Not that two gigabit ports are particularly useful for a NAS I suppose, but it's a nice board nonetheless.
There are boards available that have 4 SATA and are fanless. Asus AT3IONT-I is one and is also available with a laptop style PSU so you don't have to use the onboard PSU and that cuts out another fan.
If you were to tell me what size the PCI card is that you have in mind I can check it for you.
For controlling the 120mm fan just use one of these and you can set it whatever speed you like;
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=OA-000-ZA&groupid=701&catid=57&subcat=189
I like the way you're thinking maximum silence!
Very nice, looks like the perfect board. Bit pricey at £165 though. I like the dual LAN thing I was thinking of adding a second giga NIC to mine cos I though it would increase throughput. Not sure how or why though!
I've added a recycle bin to my samba share tonight
by following this;http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1252880&postcount=7
Before hand I added an SSH package to Webmin so that I can do all this stuff from my Win7 laptop.
Its quite a pricey board too from what I can see, £160 or so compared to £60 for Intel & Gigabyte ones. Whats bad about SO-DIMM?
There are boards available that have 4 SATA and are fanless. Asus AT3IONT-I is one and is also available with a laptop style PSU so you don't have to use the onboard PSU and that cuts out another fan.
If you were to tell me what size the PCI card is that you have in mind I can check it for you.
For controlling the 120mm fan just use one of these and you can set it whatever speed you like;
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=OA-000-ZA&groupid=701&catid=57&subcat=189
I like the way you're thinking maximum silence!
The AT3IONT-I only has an Atom 330 though, doesn't seem worth going fanless for lower spec processor.
Umm, can't seem to find the dimensions of the SATA card, I was thinking about using something like this: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CC-000-LL
Last edited:
- Joined
- 30 Jul 2006
- Posts
- 12,130
So, an implementation in software then?
Other than that, sounds like a nice (if pricey) motherboard
Yeah, £160 is the problem with it. It can be justified to some extent by offsetting the cost of two intel nics, but even then it isn't great. The only problem I have with sodimm is price really, it's consistently more expensive than desktop ram. It would be very easy to pass £300 before hard drives with a supermicro board. It might then last forever though.
Two nics can be bonded together, though you need a fairly clever switch to cope with it. The idea is not only to push 2gbit up and down the wire, but also to have the network survive pulling one of the cables out without down time. I think a four disk raid 5 works out at around the same performance as two gigabit nics, at least in terms of best case scenarios.
I'm a bit confused by the samba recycle bin. Is it a safety mechanism against people deleting files by mistake? If so I rather like having the share(s) read only, with a separate read write one for adding data to the server. I'm currently moving data to and from the nas exclusively using rsync over ssh.
It's the Intel ICH9R, so it's as close to hardware raid as any of the overclocking motherboards get. It doesn't have a dedicated processor for it, though with some uses for the board, raid calculations would be pretty much all the atom is doing. The Intel network cards do various checksums locally instead of interrupting the processor, I am told that this makes a considerable difference to throughput.
Two nics can be bonded together, though you need a fairly clever switch to cope with it. The idea is not only to push 2gbit up and down the wire, but also to have the network survive pulling one of the cables out without down time. I think a four disk raid 5 works out at around the same performance as two gigabit nics, at least in terms of best case scenarios.
I'm a bit confused by the samba recycle bin. Is it a safety mechanism against people deleting files by mistake? If so I rather like having the share(s) read only, with a separate read write one for adding data to the server. I'm currently moving data to and from the nas exclusively using rsync over ssh.
It's the Intel ICH9R, so it's as close to hardware raid as any of the overclocking motherboards get. It doesn't have a dedicated processor for it, though with some uses for the board, raid calculations would be pretty much all the atom is doing. The Intel network cards do various checksums locally instead of interrupting the processor, I am told that this makes a considerable difference to throughput.
I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure that the 330 is still powerful enough for a server.
If you ask OcUK I'm sure they would give you the dimensions.
Is it worth buying the cheaper motherboard though if you then spend the difference on an SATA card that has more ports than you can use? There must be a cheaper one around that has just the 2 ports that you need.
Yes, I prefer it to work that way. Read only, I don't think, would be any good as the network drive is the primary storage for some PCs.
Well even if I get the Gigabyte motherboard, I'm going to need a SATA card or an IDE to SATA converter for the OS drive.
I think I may need to do it that way anyway because all the SATA controller cards are PCIe but both the motherboards (Gigabyte and Intel) only take PCI, or can PCIe cards work in PCI slots?
No PCIe and PCI aren't cross compatible. I'm sure there are SATA controller cards available in both flavours though.
What size is the OS install?
Edit; search '4 Port SATA PCI Expansion Card &IDE VIA VT6421a chipset'. it's a fiver on the jungle place.
What size is the OS install?
Edit; search '4 Port SATA PCI Expansion Card &IDE VIA VT6421a chipset'. it's a fiver on the jungle place.
I think pci is limited to 33mbyte/s. That's much slower than a hard drive.
The pata flash thing is an elegant solution and probably windows friendly, otherwise a usb stick somewhere within the case is cheap. Windows on a usb stick is a pain in the arse though.
The pata flash thing is an elegant solution and probably windows friendly, otherwise a usb stick somewhere within the case is cheap. Windows on a usb stick is a pain in the arse though.
I haven't been able to find a PCI SATA card that supports SATA 2/3. Even though it says it in the spec of that one if you look at the reviews its only SATA 1. Apparently PCI doesn't support SATA 2 speeds as its an older bus.
I dont know how big Windows Server will be but I'm pretty sure it needs more than 4GB.
edit: Yea I'd much rather have a separate 2.5" SATA drive for the OS than run it off a USB/flash module.
Seems you can get IDE to SATA converters for ~£5 so may as well just get the gigabyte board and one of those.
I dont know how big Windows Server will be but I'm pretty sure it needs more than 4GB.
edit: Yea I'd much rather have a separate 2.5" SATA drive for the OS than run it off a USB/flash module.
Seems you can get IDE to SATA converters for ~£5 so may as well just get the gigabyte board and one of those.
Last edited:
33MB/s is fast enough for the OS. Use the onboard ports for the storage was what I was thinking.
Yeah, they do. The 2.5" form factor includes power, whereas the 3.5" version doesn't. The pin spacing is different as well. You can however get a cable with a 2.5" pata on one end and a 3.5" pata on the other.
33mb/s is indeed fast enough for an OS. It could explain why pci-sata cards are rare though, it isn't an obvious combination.
Windows server probably doesn't fit on 4gb
33mb/s is indeed fast enough for an OS. It could explain why pci-sata cards are rare though, it isn't an obvious combination.
Windows server probably doesn't fit on 4gb
IIRC it's 44 pin, as opposed to 40-pin for the desktop version, because the extra pins carry power. I suspect that an adapter will need the power connecting to it?
Windows server sounds like a bit of a hog for a small home server.
Windows server sounds like a bit of a hog for a small home server.
