# N/A



## JedixJarf

Wow nice, rack in a closet?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *JedixJarf;13077752*
> Wow nice, rack in a closet?


Yup, it's in a small closet that is attached to my home theater room.


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## JedixJarf

Nice. I'm going to be doing an unraid build come payday, need some more drives first


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## 8ight

That is pretty nice for just movies. Need some redundancy though, unless you are using RAID 1 or the like.


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## AyeYo

My mind is blown.

I'm not really up on this home theater stuff, so how exactly does this work? Does an HTPC access the server to stream the video to the TV or is the TV hooked up directly to the server?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *JedixJarf;13077789*
> Nice. I'm going to be doing an unraid build come payday, need some more drives first


I greatly prefer unRAID over any other RAID solution. The only downside is that the speed is only as fast as the slowest drive in the system. The reliability of unRAID is better than RAID (if you happen to have 2 drive failures at the same time, you'd lose only data on those 2 drives rather than ALL data).

I've had 1 drive failure over the past year, and unRAID built the data back correctly. Not worried at all about data loss. Highly recommend unRAID, but it does have a learning curve.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *8ight;13077804*
> That is pretty nice for just movies. Need some redundancy though, unless you are using RAID 1 or the like.


It has more redundancy than a normal RAID setup. One drive failure, and it rebuilds it. Two drives fail at the same time (insanely rare), I only lose data on those 2 drives rather than all data.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *AyeYo;13077806*
> My mind is blown.
> 
> I'm not really up on this home theater stuff, so how exactly does this work? Does an HTPC access the server to stream the video to the TV or is the TV hooked up directly to the server?


The server is connected to the home network via ethernet. Then the popcorn hour device (see link in original post) is also connected to the home network. The popcorn hour can access the server and play the files with one click. You pretty much have thousands of discs at the press of a button.

With YAMJ, I have poster/fan art for every movie too. This is the skin I currently use.


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## JedixJarf

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *8ight;13077804*
> That is pretty nice for just movies. Need some redundancy though, unless you are using RAID 1 or the like.


It is unraid, so it is a parity raid similar to raid 5 just software based. You can lose a maximum of 1 drive and be operational


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## LiLChris

I hate you.


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## Bonz(TM)

Now this is my kind of thread.

I'm working on doing the same thing, but I may go with WHS2011. I also am using SASLP-MV8's instead of SAT2's.

I'm archiving Blurays as well, but I gave up on doing straight ISO's. I just don't use the extra content like I thought I would. Instead I use MakeMKV and strip out Movie, HD audio and subtitles. Def no compression either, and TrueHD/DTSMA ftw.

Beautiful machine though.


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## homer98

looks good, quick question though, can you have more than 1 parity drive? I know some RAID setups can utilize more than one "extra" drive. Can unRAID do this?


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## JedixJarf

Pretty sure it's limited to 1 parity drive, if you want 2 you'll need to be on a raid 6


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## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonz™;13077891*
> Now this is my kind of thread.
> 
> I'm working on doing the same thing, but I may go with WHS2011. I also am using SASLP-MV8's instead of SAT2's.
> 
> I'm archiving Blurays as well, but I gave up on doing straight ISO's. I just don't use the extra content like I thought I would. Instead I use MakeMKV and strip out Movie, HD audio and subtitles. Def no compression either, and TrueHD/DTSMA ftw.
> 
> Beautiful machine though.


I did not go with the SASLP-MV8 after researching them. They perform worse than the SAT2s (due to their interface), but they do allow for straight SAS-SAS connection. So it comes down to opinion if they are worth it. I saw some people on the unRAID forums getting ~40% slower parity syncs/data rebuilds on the SASLP over the SAT2s, but the installation is cleaner on the SASLPs. I ended up choosing speed over looks though.

I also remove the menus and just keep the lossless audio track. Theres usually like 10-15GB of extras on each BD. My movies average about 17-35GB each. Main movie and audio is ripped 1:1 with DVDFab. I can't stand any compression, it's very noticable in scenes that require good bitrate... with as much as i've spent on my home theater to get the best possible quality, why would I want to lower the quality of my videos?








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *JedixJarf;13077988*
> Pretty sure it's limited to 1 parity drive, if you want 2 you'll need to be on a raid 6


unRAID will be adding support for 2 parity drives in the future. Right now there is a max of 20 data drives and 1 parity. After we get support for 2 parity drives, the data drive max will likely go to 40 drives. To bad cases that support that many drives are thousands of dollars.








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *homer98;13077930*
> looks good, quick question though, can you have more than 1 parity drive? I know some RAID setups can utilize more than one "extra" drive. Can unRAID do this?


1 Parity drive now, 2 probably within the next year.


----------



## JedixJarf

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;13078006*
> 
> unRAID will be adding support for 2 parity drives in the future. Right now there is a max of 20 data drives and 1 parity. After we get support for 2 parity drives, the data drive max will likely go to 40 drives. To bad cases that support that many drives are thousands of dollars.


Thats when you just daisy chain your case


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *JedixJarf;13078041*
> Thats when you just daisy chain your case


That's what I would probably do. However, with hard drives increasing in size as fast as they are. I dont see ever needing that many data drives, just more stuff to go wrong. When unRAID adds 3TB support, I don't see myself having any space issues in the near future.


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## DuckieHo

Does unRAID support hot spares?


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## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *DuckieHo;13078156*
> Does unRAID support hot spares?


No it does not, that's one of the downsides. It actually doesn't support hotswap bays either. You can use them but if you want to add, remove, or change a hard drive you have to power the system down and do it. It doesn't take that long so I don't mind. It's definitely not a solution for servers that require 100% uptime, but for home use I find it very good.


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## Lampen

Simply amazing!

Also I have a question. Clearly you've got a ton of data sitting in that server. What have you done in regard to backing it all up?


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## Denz

Subbed for awesomeness. Great job!


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## lilraver018

Unraid is good but the lack of support for your abiliy to pick and choose hardware kind of bites.

Flex raid is a good alternative.

I love server setups. stream-able to all pc's in the house and i can connect my patriot and seagate media box to the server no pc required.


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## lsudvm

So what happens if the parity drive is the one that fails?


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## spartacus

This is freaking awesome! [and a TON of money in drives!]
I need to go read about UnRAID.


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## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *lsudvm;13078339*
> So what happens if the parity drive is the one that fails?


Nothing, you just replace the parity drive and then re-sync. Takes about 12 hours to do a fresh re-sync, after the initial sync is done you are protected again. You should do refreshes every month or so to make sure everything is still in working order, those take about 6 hours and it basically just makes sure there's no parity errors. You can still access the server and do whatever you want during the processes. Your data is still protected during refreshes too, the only time your data wouldn't be protected is during the initial ~12 hour re-sync which would only happen when a drive dies.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Lampen;13078241*
> Simply amazing!
> 
> Also I have a question. Clearly you've got a ton of data sitting in that server. What have you done in regard to backing it all up?


It's backed up in real time, read the rest of the thread for more info.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *lilraver018;13078333*
> Unraid is good but the lack of support for your abiliy to pick and choose hardware kind of bites.


I never had any issues with that, but I know people who have. The unRAID FAQ lists the few motherboards/chipsets that it doesn't like. Compability has gotten better over the years, I'd probably say 90% of hardware would work without any major issues now. I know unRAID just flat out won't work with some older chipsets (nforce 4 i think?)


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## elcangri7328

drool!


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## rui-no-onna

Nice build.







I actually have an X7SBE and a couple of AOC-SAT2-MV8's that I was going to use for my revamped unRAID server. It's been a year now and I still haven't gotten around to building, though.









As for hot spares, while unRAID doesn't natively support hot spares, you could have a pre-cleared drive installed on the system but not part of the array so when a drive goes down, you could just stop the array, replace the failed drive in the disk management page, start the array and rebuild the failed drive.









The Q-Parity thing (2nd parity drive) has been on plan for a while now but I haven't seen any mention of progress in that vein.


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## KusH

Those raid controllers are quite impressive along with that backplane.









Reminds me of the SAN's I setup for my clients


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## DuckieHo

Quote:



Originally Posted by *rui-no-onna*


As for hot spares, while unRAID doesn't natively support hot spares, you could have a pre-cleared drive installed on the system but not part of the array so when a drive goes down, you could just stop the array, replace the failed drive in the disk management page, start the array and rebuild the failed drive.










That's not automated though, right?

Couldn't someone just write a script to initiate the rebuild incase of drive failure?


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## lilraver018

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Murlocke*


I never had any issues with that, but I know people who have. The unRAID FAQ lists the few motherboards/chipsets that it doesn't like. Compability has gotten better over the years, I'd probably say 90% of hardware would work without any major issues now. I know unRAID just flat out won't work with some older chipsets (nforce 4 i think?)



Yes i heard the same thing before i put together my lower power file server build. I bought compatible mobo with unraid and flex raid but have not set them up yet. Flex raid for me just seems like a more viable option due to it is free.

However i do love your build, really took the time to cable manage and use quality parts.

Hows the power usage on the file server?

HDD are timed to spin down during inactivity right?


----------



## midwaybluejay

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Murlocke*


Just upgraded my server last month and thought i'd post screenshots. Used for Blu-rays and DVDs in 1:1 uncompressed ISO format. I stream them to my popcorn hour, which supports ISO playback, DTS-HD, True-HD, etc, and is connected to my home theater. I currently have around 8TB free, and will be upgrading to 3TB drives (total of 60TB) when unRAID adds support for them.

Hope you enjoy.

Note: I'm not sure why my flash makes the case look like it has marks on it. Looks fine in real life.

*Closed Server*









*Opened Server*









*Hotswap Bays*









*Inside Overview*









*SAS Connectors*









*SATA Connectors*









*120mm Noctua Fans*









*80mm Noctua Fans*









*Server Specs*
*Case:* Norco 4224
*Data Drives:* 20x 2TB Western Digital Green (WD20EARS)
*Parity Drive:* 1x 2TB Western Digital Green (WD20EARS)
*Sata Cards:* 3x SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8
*CPU:* Intel E5200 (2.50GHz)
*Motherboard:* Supermicro MBD-X7SBE
*Memory:* 4GB G.Skill (DDR2-800 5-5-5-15)
*Power Supply:* 850W Corsair HX850W
*Operating System:* unRAID 5.0
*Fans:* 3x Noctua NF-P12, 2x Noctua NF-R8

*Home Theater* (Server is streamed to this)
*TV:* 55" Samsung D8000
*Receiver:* Denon 4311CI
*Speakers:* 2x Klipsch RF-82, 1x Klipsch RC-62, 4x Klipsch RS-52
*Subwoofer:* SVS 20-39PCi
*Other:* Xbox 360 Elite, Playstation 3, Popcorn Hour C-200

*Misc*
UPS: 3x CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD - So I can keep watching movies when the power goes out.










Nicely done!!! Was going this route, just didn't want to start over(budget). like you i use popcornhour







. 2 Popcornhour-a100, 3 Egreat-m34a,1 Istar mini 1.3 streaming to all bedrooms, home theater, and livingroom. BTW how you love that SVS Sub. I got the same one. The SVS Rep. talk me out of 2 of them. I have a 14 person HT


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## mbudden

Seriously... Had to quote the whole darn post?


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## i_hax

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *lilraver018;13084348*
> Hows the power usage on the file server?


I'm curious about this too.


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## mbudden

I'm curious what it sounds like when all those drives start up.


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## midwaybluejay

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *mbudden;13084459*
> Seriously... Had to quote the whole darn post?


Sorry just leaning how to post. I'm sure that I'm not the only one that quoted the whole post. BTW sorry is given to OC not you!!!!!!!!!!!


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## rui-no-onna

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *KusH;13084110*
> Those raid controllers are quite impressive along with that backplane.


Technically, that's not a RAID controller. It's just a simple SATA2 controller. Pretty inexpensive, too (~$100 or $12.50/port).
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *DuckieHo;13084275*
> That's not automated though, right?
> 
> Couldn't someone just write a script to initiate the rebuild incase of drive failure?


Nope. Not automated, but at least downtime is reduced since you only need to stop the array to replace the failed the drive. No need to wait for power down and power up. As soon as you start the array again, your data is accessible even during rebuild.









About the script, perhaps. Not sure I'd trust it, though, unless it's an official one from Tom. For me, a pre-cleared drive as warm spare is good enough.


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *i_hax;13084592*
> I'm curious about this too.


The drives can be powered down in idle - so aside from a burst at startup it should use less than 50W streaming a single file, and even less than that when fully idle.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *mbudden;13084607*
> I'm curious what it sounds like when all those drives start up.


I suspect he has the 'staggered spin up' option selected in his HBA - so the drives should power up in small groups. Again lower power draw & quieter (not to mention easier on the psu).


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## rui-no-onna

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *lilraver018;13084348*
> Hows the power usage on the file server?


+1. In particular, the following power consumption values:
Start-Up (probably the highest)
Idle, all drives spun-up
Idle, all drives spun-down
Parity Check

Thanks!


----------



## KusH

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *rui-no-onna;13085005*
> Technically, that's not a RAID controller. It's just a simple SATA2 controller. Pretty inexpensive, too (~$100 or $12.50/port).


I see, that makes more sense now since he is using software raid.

I was expecting those cards (if it was a raid controller) to be several thousand dollars each with all those ports.


----------



## rui-no-onna

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;13085062*
> I suspect he has the 'staggered spin up' option selected in his HBA - so the drives should power up in small groups. Again lower power draw & quieter (not to mention easier on the psu).


I don't think the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 has a staggered spin-up option. Or perhaps I just never noticed it on mine.


----------



## DuckieHo

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *rui-no-onna;13085005*
> Nope. Not automated, but at least downtime is reduced since you only need to stop the array to replace the failed the drive. No need to wait for power down and power up. As soon as you start the array again, your data is accessible even during rebuild.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> About the script, perhaps. Not sure I'd trust it, though, unless it's an official one from Tom. For me, a pre-cleared drive as cold spare is good enough.


Yeah, but what happens if he is away and a drive fails? Ask the wife/kids/neighbor to initate rebuild?









I am really surprised there is no option for a hotspare. This should be a relatively easy implementation.... much easier than a 2nd parity disk.


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## rui-no-onna

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *DuckieHo;13085464*
> Yeah, but what happens if he is away and a drive fails? Ask the wife/kids/neighbor to initate rebuild?


I can actually do it from my phone (or any web browser).


----------



## DuckieHo

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *rui-no-onna;13085516*
> I can actually do it from my phone (or any web browser).


...and if your router fails at the same time.... and DNS fails!









What are you using to remote connect to your server? How is the interface?


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## the_beast

Quote:



Originally Posted by *rui-no-onna*


I can actually do it from my phone (or any web browser).










The point isn't whether or not you can do it - it's that you shouldn't have to. Linux can handle automatic rebuilds - why can't unRAID?


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## fg2chase

wow this is nuts, I thought I had a lot with my 26TB server.


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## rui-no-onna

Quote:



Originally Posted by *DuckieHo*


...and if your router fails at the same time.... and DNS fails!










Then I'll probably have complaints from members of the household about the internet not working so barring ISP issues, that should get fixed during the 1-hour phone call where I walk them through troubleshooting steps.









Quote:



Originally Posted by *DuckieHo*


What are you using to remote connect to your server? How is the interface?


unRAID is controlled via a web admin interface. It's got its own HTTP server built-in (can't remember if it's lighttpd or Apache) so no need for special software to connect to it. Interface is quite simple and straightforward.

Quote:



Originally Posted by *the_beast*


The point isn't whether or not you can do it - it's that you shouldn't have to. Linux can handle automatic rebuilds - why can't unRAID?


Hmm, probably because there haven't been as many requests for it. There have been quite a number of requests for dual-parity, NTFS support, but I rarely see ones for hot spare support. I think most folks would rather see P+Q parity implemented more quickly than have to cut into development time by adding hot spare support.


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## JohnDProb

sick setup

and why is there always the one moron who quotes 50k images we've all already seen


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## DuckieHo

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *rui-no-onna;13086083*
> Hmm, probably because there haven't been as many requests for it. There have been quite a number of requests for dual-parity, NTFS support, but I rarely see ones for hot spare support. I think most folks would rather see P+Q parity implemented more quickly than have to cut into development time by adding hot spare support.


True that a dual-parity is much more reliable than hot spares.... but it should be *extremely* implement hot spares. All the functionality is already there.... error detection and rebuilding.


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## Anthony360

what would happen if the motherboard were to fail?


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## fg2chase

lol, my dad once told me that no matter what you do or what you have there will always be someone who has something better.. your 40Tb vs my 26TB proves that.


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## DuckieHo

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Anthony360*


what would happen if the motherboard were to fail?


Get another mobo and hook everything back up. Done.


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## fg2chase

Quote:



Originally Posted by *DuckieHo*


Get another mobo and hook everything back up. Done.


Yeah I had this happen with my p4 server, It was an msi motherboard but I just replaced it with an asrock one with the same chipset, it just turned right on like it had never been off.


----------



## rui-no-onna

Quote:



Originally Posted by *fg2chase*


Yeah I had this happen with my p4 server, It was an msi motherboard but I just replaced it with an asrock one with the same chipset, it just turned right on like it had never been off.


With unRAID, it doesn't even need to be the same chipset. unRAID works kinda like one of those Live USB sticks which scans the hardware and loads the full operating system to RAM at boot.


----------



## fg2chase

Quote:



Originally Posted by *rui-no-onna*


With unRAID, it doesn't even need to be the same chipset. unRAID works kinda like one of those Live USB sticks which scans the hardware and loads the full operating system to RAM at boot.










now that is cool, with WHS it would not be easy to change the motherboard and CPU...


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## Murlocke

Quote:



Originally Posted by *lilraver018*


Yes i heard the same thing before i put together my lower power file server build. I bought compatible mobo with unraid and flex raid but have not set them up yet. Flex raid for me just seems like a more viable option due to it is free.

However i do love your build, really took the time to cable manage and use quality parts.

Hows the power usage on the file server?

HDD are timed to spin down during inactivity right?


According to my UPS, I use 85-100W on idle with all drives spun down and 225-275W with all drives fully maxed out (parity sync). About a third of my gaming computer at full load. I have spin down set to 2hrs.

I've seen about 300W on a cold boot with all drives starting up at the same time.

Green drives don't use much power, and they are still pretty fast. If I watch a movie, unRAID will spin up 1 hard drive which will increase load by about 5-8W. So unless i'm doing parity sync, it uses only about 30% more than a normal 60W light bulb under normal use.

Quote:



Originally Posted by *mbudden*


I'm curious what it sounds like when all those drives start up.


Almost silent. Green drives make no sound, and with the Noctua fans, there is very little noise.

The stock fans that came with the Norco 4224 case were VERY loud though, all 80mm. I had to buy the 120mm fan bay seperately. With the mods, it's whisper silent and the drives are at the same temps.

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Anthony360*


what would happen if the motherboard were to fail?


unRAID allows you too to swap out hardware any time you want, if a motherboard dies you could swap it out with a totally different motherboard and it wouldn't care.


----------



## Anthony360

Almost 100% convinced. What if the flash drive failed can you redo that easily


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Anthony360*


Almost 100% convinced. What if the flash drive failed can you redo that easily


You would have to prepare another USB stick and re-config unRAID (not that hard) and then re-run parity check. Your data would still be there, you just wouldn't be protected from drive failure until parity was valid again.

So pretty much the same as a normal drive failure, the with exception of having to prepare another USB stick and then reconfigure any settings you changed.


----------



## the_beast

Quote:



Originally Posted by *fg2chase*


now that is cool, with WHS it would not be easy to change the motherboard and CPU...


WHS can change a mobo fine, just as you can with any Windows OS.

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Murlocke*


You would have to prepare another USB stick and re-config unRAID (not that hard) and then re-run parity check. Your data would still be there, you just wouldn't be protected from drive failure until parity was valid again.

So pretty much the same as a normal drive failure, the with exception of having to prepare another USB stick and then reconfigure any settings you changed.


You'd also have the licencing issues to sort out, as unRAID is tied to a specific USB stick.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:



Originally Posted by *the_beast*


You'd also have the licencing issues to sort out, as unRAID is tied to a specific USB stick.


I bought the 2 pack for this reason.


----------



## Bonz(TM)

With unRAID, do all drives have to be the same size? Or can they be of all sizes like FlexRAID.


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## the_beast

Any size. You just need the parity drive to be bigger (or the same size) as each of your other drives.


----------



## midwaybluejay

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *DuckieHo;13091734*
> Get another mobo and hook everything back up. Done.


Wow, I was misinformed, the main reason I didn't go with unraid about 2 year ago was that if you lose your MB you will lose all of your data/movies.







So i went with an Intel raid 5 for 8 hard drive. BTW how many NMT or computer will it stream to without shuttering


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *midwaybluejay;13096966*
> Wow, I was misinformed, the main reason I didn't go with unraid about 2 year ago was that if you lose your MB you will lose all of your data/movies.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> So i went with an Intel raid 5 for 8 hard drive. BTW how many NMT or computer will it stream to without shuttering


When testing, I've streamed around 10 uncompressed blu-rays at the same time to 2 different computers and there was no suttering... It's never going to be an issue.

The computer's processor that your streaming to is going to have issues before the server does. I get about 96MB/s reads, and thats from a single drive. There are 20 data drives each capable of 96MB/s by themselves. So even if you had 10-20 people from 10-20 different computers wanting to watch the same movie on the same hard drive, it wouldn't be an issue. The chances of that are also next to none, and when you have different people watching different stuff, they are probably reading from a totally seperate hard drive.

Assuming all computers can handle blu-ray content, your only limit is going to be your network. If you are on gigabit, then that's a lot of blu-rays at the same time. A blu-ray with lossless audio will pull like 30-50Mbps, gigabit is 1Gbps. So in the absolute worse case, you could have about 20 users watching blu-rays at the same time.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonz™;13095953*
> With unRAID, do all drives have to be the same size? Or can they be of all sizes like FlexRAID.


Any size, any model. Unlike normal raid, you can mix and match all you want. Parity just needs to be equal or bigger.


----------



## Bonz(TM)

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Murlocke*


Any size, any model. Unlike normal raid, you can mix and match all you want. Parity just needs to be equal or bigger.


Awesome. Is parity calculated on the fly or do you have to run it on a schedule? If it's scheduled, why choose unRAID over FlexRAID?


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## gildadan

Hmm ok am definitely intrigued. Been wanting to do something like this but have never put the research into this end of it. Great read of a thread. Now I have some ideas to work with.

Love the setup.


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## lsudvm

Quote:



Parity just needs to be equal or bigger.


So if you were to use the new 3tb drives, you would have to make the parity drive also 3tb, right?


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## midwaybluejay

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Murlocke*


When testing, I've streamed around 10 uncompressed blu-rays at the same time to 2 different computers and there was no suttering... It's never going to be an issue.

The computer's processor that your streaming to is going to have issues before the server does. I get about 96MB/s reads, and thats from a single drive. There are 20 data drives each capable of 96MB/s by themselves. So even if you had 10-20 people from 10-20 different computers wanting to watch the same movie on the same hard drive, it wouldn't be an issue. The chances of that are also next to none, and when you have different people watching different stuff, they are probably reading from a totally seperate hard drive.

Assuming all computers can handle blu-ray content, your only limit is going to be your network. If you are on gigabit, then that's a lot of blu-rays at the same time. A blu-ray with lossless audio will pull like 30-50Mbps, gigabit is 1Gbps. So in the absolute worse case, you could have about 20 users watching blu-rays at the same time.

Any size, any model. Unlike normal raid, you can mix and match all you want. Parity just needs to be equal or bigger.


Thanks Murlocke. I'm on a gigabyte network and will give the unraid a try if i have to rebuild or a new build for customer.


----------



## wcdolphin

Perhaps this has been explained, but why unRaid versus A typical raid setup? Whatever degree of parity your software raid uses, I could use the same setup on a good card, no? I plan on upgrading to a 10TB media server next year, so thanks for the post!


----------



## JedixJarf

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *lsudvm;13102596*
> So if you were to use the new 3tb drives, you would have to make the parity drive also 3tb, right?


No 3tb support yet







but yes you would need a 3tb parity drive.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonz™;13102100*
> Awesome. Is parity calculated on the fly or do you have to run it on a schedule? If it's scheduled, why choose unRAID over FlexRAID?


There is the initial parity sync. Then it is all real time. You can do optional parity checks to confirm there has been no SATA errors. I do them monthly, your data remains protected during a parity check. SATA interface can have random errors in a perfectly working server, so running checks every now and then is always a good idea.

You can also write/read from the server while doing a parity check and it will still update that in real time. I think unRAID marks it a low priority so it won't slow you down at all. So there's really no reason not to do them every now and then just to make sure everything is still perfectly synced.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *midwaybluejay;13102899*
> Thanks Murlocke. I'm on a gigabyte network and will give the unraid a try if i have to rebuild or a new build for customer.


I would not recommend unRAID for a customer, unless you know them and they are knowledgeable and will understand how to maintain it. After raid 5 is setup, it's done. There's 1 large drive and they just write to it like a normal drive. Anyone can use that. unRAID still allows you access to each drive indiviually and it doesn't split data over the drives, but you can also view them as 1 large drive. unRAID also requires it's own dedicated computer, since unRAID is technically it's own very simple OS that is managed via telnet or a web browser. It's designed to stream to Windows, Linux, etc.

Anyone without decent computer knowledge would be best sticking to normal raid since it can run in an existing windows computer.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *lsudvm;13102596*
> So if you were to use the new 3tb drives, you would have to make the parity drive also 3tb, right?


unRAID is technically based on a linux OS that is very dumbed down and basic, so its max supported drive size is 2TB. They are currently working on getting 3TB support added. After 3TB support is added, 4TB, 5TB, 6TB, etc support shouldn't be needed. It will just 'work' when they are released. It's just the jump from 2TB->3TB that is causing the issues. (For example, Windows XP doesn't support 3TB drives.)

But, yes, you are correct. You could not use a 2TB data drive, if you only had a 1TB parity drive.


----------



## pvp309rcp

That is very nice. Someday I'll do research on unRAID and a server build. In the meantime...I'll work with what I have now with my current funds.


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *cdolphin;13103892*
> Perhaps this has been explained, but why unRaid versus A typical raid setup? Whatever degree of parity your software raid uses, I could use the same setup on a good card, no? I plan on upgrading to a 10TB media server next year, so thanks for the post!


The advantage of an unRAID-type setup (including disParity, FlexRAID etc) is you are much less likely to lose all your data than when using striped RAID arrays. The benefit is especially apparent for media storage, where losing _some_ of your data is not a big deal (so full backups are not important, especially as they would be very expensive), but losing all of it would be a huge hassle.

If 2 drives die in RAID5, everything is lost. If you have media files (ie large files) there is no chance of recovery if 2 drives die (or 3 in RAID6) as at least some part of each file will be on each disk.

If 2 drives die when using unRAID, you lose your parity protection and the media that was on the failed drive(s). The rest of the data stays intact however. This means you might have to re-rip a TB or two of movies, but wouldn't have to re-rip your whole collection. This is a massive advantage, as few people can afford (or justify) the backups that would be required to keep a multi-terrabyte media array properly safe from data loss.


----------



## POONBERRY

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;13107570*
> This is a massive advantage, as few people can afford (or justify) the backups that would be required to keep a multi-terrabyte media array properly safe from data loss.


I agree with you but tape backup isn't obsolete yet







. It's very cheap and effective.


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *POONBERRY;13107687*
> I agree with you but tape backup isn't obsolete yet
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> . It's very cheap and effective.


Cheap? For multi-terrabyte arrays? For home use?

Either you're going to be using current or recent-gen tape drives (which are definitely not cheap, especially for home users), or older tech (which is much lower capacity, so barely better than BR for backup).

Not to mention the fact that few home users would bother with a backup for their media array anyway. Tape is still useful for corporate environments as an additional backup (I'd always have a drive-based backup as a first line though for speed reasons), but it really isn't suited to the home at all.


----------



## KusH

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;13107727*
> Cheap? For multi-terrabyte arrays? For home use?
> 
> Either you're going to be using current or recent-gen tape drives (which are definitely not cheap, especially for home users), or older tech (which is much lower capacity, so barely better than BR for backup).
> 
> Not to mention the fact that few home users would bother with a backup for their media array anyway. Tape is still useful for corporate environments as an additional backup (I'd always have a drive-based backup as a first line though for speed reasons), but it really isn't suited to the home at all.


I'll agree, tape backups are no where near cheap, especially for home users. A tape drive alone (depending on models) can range from 300-30,000$. As for the tapes themselves anywhere from 200-1,000$ a tape. Now times that by 5-9 depending on your backup rotation and you're looking at quite an expensive investment.


----------



## rui-no-onna

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;13106747*
> I would not recommend unRAID for a customer, unless you know them and they are knowledgeable and will understand how to maintain it. After raid 5 is setup, it's done. There's 1 large drive and they just write to it like a normal drive. Anyone can use that. unRAID still allows you access to each drive indiviually and it doesn't split data over the drives, but you can also view them as 1 large drive. unRAID also requires it's own dedicated computer, since unRAID is technically it's own very simple OS that is managed via telnet or a web browser. It's designed to stream to Windows, Linux, etc.
> 
> Anyone without decent computer knowledge would be best sticking to normal raid since it can run in an existing windows computer.


Depends on the customer's requirements. If the customer has minimal computer knowledge, I woudn't suggest RAID-5, either. If the customer just needs a gigantic NAS, unRAID can be a good fit. Yes, by default you can access each drive individually. However, it's possible to hide the disk shares and just show the one large pool so as to avoid confusing the customer. unRAID does have an algorithm (a couple actually) to split data over different drives, except it does it on a file level while RAID-5 usually does it on a block level.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;13106747*
> But, yes, you are correct. You could not use a 2TB data drive, if you only had a 1TB parity drive.


Technically, I believe you can, but you can only use 1TB of the 2TB drive. You need to replace the parity drive with 2TB in order to be able to access the full capacity.


----------



## fg2chase

Quote:



Originally Posted by *POONBERRY*


I agree with you but tape backup isn't obsolete yet







. It's very cheap and effective.


It seems that it would be more cost effective to just buy a bunch of cheap external hard drives or use carbonite.


----------



## midwaybluejay

Quote:



Originally Posted by *fg2chase*


It seems that it would be more cost effective to just buy a bunch of cheap external hard drives or use carbonite.


why buy external hard drive you just have extra case laying around. I have 1 case that is esata/usb that i use and I buy 1 TB internal Hard drive fill them up and stored them for back -up my raid 5 set-up..


----------



## juano

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;13077717*
> CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD - So I can keep watching movies when the power goes out.


You mean when _you_ knock the power out for your entire block right?









That thing is a monster!


----------



## rui-no-onna

Quote:



Originally Posted by *juano*


You mean when _you_ knock the power out for your entire block right?









That thing is a monster!


And yet it still uses less power than most dual-SLI rigs on this board.









Hard drives use around 10W tops (30W tops during start-up but that's momentary), 3~5W for green drives. A single GTX 580, uses, what? 250W by itself?


----------



## Icekilla

This could be a kinda noobish question but, how would the server perform if you installed Windows Home Server instead? What makes unRAID a better option over WHS for a home data center?


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla;13196452*
> This could be a kinda noobish question but, how would the server perform if you installed Windows Home Server instead? What makes unRAID a better option over WHS for a home data center?


Parity protection rather than duplication mainly.

20 x 2TB drives with redundancy in WHS = 20TB available
20 x 2TB drives with redundancy in unRAID = 38TB available


----------



## Lord Xeb

O-o Holy crap dude... what do you use that thing for?


----------



## kujon

jw, any particular reason you picked an 850w psu?


----------



## tryagainplss

Supermicro boards look very sexy with raid controllers attached to them


----------



## MCBrown.CA

Those backplanes are gnar.


----------



## fatmario

wow nice set up, some day i have to make one


----------



## Icekilla

Let's say I have my own WHS server, what if I don't use redundancy? It's not like I'm gonna store extremely important data (I'd keep those files inside an AES256 50-ish character encrypted 128GB Pen Drive).

IS it reallyl THAT important for a home server? How often do drives fail?


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla;13201111*
> How often do drives fail?


Usually just after you've put something important on them that you haven't saved anywhere else, as you don't expect data loss will happen to you...


----------



## hometoast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;13092786*
> Green drives don't use much power, and they are still pretty fast. If I watch a movie, unRAID will spin up 1 hard drive which will increase load by about 5-8W. So unless i'm doing parity sync, it uses only about 30% more than a normal 60W light bulb under normal use.


THIS is the amazing part to me.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla;13201111*
> IS it reallyl THAT important for a home server? How often do drives fail?


Since it's relatively easy to have some redundancy, it's worth it to not have to re-rip your BluRays or whatever to the server. If you've got a need to 20 HDD's, 1 (or 2) more to introduce redundancy is _nothing_.


----------



## Icekilla

I see, and does unRAID offers all the features offered by Windows Home Server?

BTW, OP take a look at this


----------



## rui-no-onna

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;13201167*
> Quote:
> 
> 
> 
> Originally Posted by *Icekilla;13201111*
> IS it reallyl THAT important for a home server? How often do drives fail?
> 
> 
> 
> Usually just after you've put something important on them that you haven't saved anywhere else, as you don't expect data loss will happen to you...
Click to expand...

So true. Murphy's Law at work.







That said, unRAID is not back-up. For truly important data, you'd best have multiple copies of files preferably with at least one copy offsite.

The main reason I use unRAID isn't to make sure data is protected, but to save myself some time. 2TB = 1860 GiB. That's big enough to store ~300 DVD's (~6GB/disc) or ~50 Blu-ray discs (~35GB/disc). It takes me around 3~6 months (usually a few hours during weekends) to rip that many discs. Yes, the data is replaceable but an extra $80 for the parity drive ($160 in the case of RAID-6) is easy enough on the pocket that I'm willing to just buy one to lessen my chances of needing to re-rip in case of drive failure. However, spending ~$1000+ for WHS redundancy (almost RAID-1) is a bit too steep.


----------



## Bonz(TM)

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *rui-no-onna;13202610*
> So true. Murphy's Law at work.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> That said, unRAID is not back-up. For truly important data, you'd best have multiple copies of files preferably with at least one copy offsite.
> 
> The main reason I use unRAID isn't to make sure data is protected, but to save myself some time. 2TB = 1860 GiB. That's big enough to store ~300 DVD's (~6GB/disc) or ~50 Blu-ray discs (~35GB/disc). It takes me around 3~6 months (usually a few hours during weekends) to rip that many discs. Yes, the data is replaceable but an extra $80 for the parity drive ($160 in the case of RAID-6) is easy enough on the pocket that I'm willing to just buy one to lessen my chances of needing to re-rip in case of drive failure. However, spending ~$1000+ for WHS redundancy (almost RAID-1) is a bit too steep.


+1 to this my friend.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla;13201392*
> I see, and does unRAID offers all the features offered by Windows Home Server?
> 
> BTW, OP take a look at this


I've had that feature disabled on the drives since day 1. I was aware of the issue before buying the drives, and it's not an issue after you disable that feature (which is useless feature IMO, my drives spin down after an hour anyway, I don't need my heads to park every 8 seconds).

Having your head park every 8 seconds is going to kill a drive WAY before running it 24/7. All that feature tries to do is save more power, but instead your just going to end up buying more hard drives because the feature is going to lower the lifetime of the drive.

Technically having the drive spin down every hour is also worse than 24/7, but i'm not having 21 drives running 24/7...
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kujon;13199353*
> jw, any particular reason you picked an 850w psu?


It's a quality PSU, room to expand, and its modular. With this much money in the server, i'd rather have a good overkill PSU than one that is just "ok". Not to mention the load on the server can peak for a few seconds if you happen to spin up all drives at the same time.


----------



## anthony92

Can you use this unraid system to host other files correctly alongside this setup? Say i want to use this as a nas for storing files, database and other things.

On the unRAID website it says it was built for media storage. I want to be able to also save cctv recordings to it. will it be possible or would it affect drive speeds when streaming.


----------



## kujon

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;13248607*
> I've had that feature disabled on the drives since day 1. I was aware of the issue before buying the drives, and it's not an issue after you disable that feature (which is useless feature IMO, my drives spin down after an hour anyway, I don't need my heads to park every 8 seconds).
> 
> Having your head park every 8 seconds is going to kill a drive WAY before running it 24/7. All that feature tries to do is save more power, but instead your just going to end up buying more hard drives because the feature is going to lower the lifetime of the drive.
> 
> Technically having the drive spin down every hour is also worse than 24/7, but i'm not having 21 drives running 24/7...
> 
> It's a quality PSU, room to expand, and its modular. With this much money in the server, i'd rather have a good overkill PSU than one that is just "ok". Not to mention the load on the server can peak for a few seconds if you happen to spin up all drives at the same time.


does your mb support staggered spin up of the hd?


----------



## Secretninja

Do want. I know what I am doing as soon as I find a job.

How simple is it to rip br/dvds? Just stick them into a computer on the network and let it do its thing?


----------



## Icekilla

I guess so, all he'd have to do is to rip the Blu Ray on his main rig and then send it to the server through his network.


----------



## cubanresourceful

I am subbing this, JUST because your case is such sheer awesomeness that just basking in the light of your glory has gifted me with powers way beyond the imagination of man.


----------



## oxymoron

Hello all.
Awesome build, i hope you don't mind but i am going to try and recreate it for myself

I just had a few questions..
Looking back is there anything you would change? Perhaps different hard drives ?

Other then the equipment listed in your original post, was there any additional parts or pieces required? You mentioned something about converting a bay for fans?

Any info would be great
Inspiring build, made me join forums lol


----------



## oxymoron

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;13248607*
> I've had that feature disabled on the drives since day 1. I was aware of the issue before buying the drives, and it's not an issue after you disable that feature (which is useless feature IMO, my drives spin down after an hour anyway, I don't need my heads to park every 8 seconds).


How is this accomplished?


----------



## valvehead

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *oxymoron;13387568*
> How is this accomplished?


Take a look here.

Also, to check the Load Cycle of your drives, you need HD Tune (or something similar).


----------



## oxymoron

Still hoping to have some confirmation before building this...

Are the caviar greens still the way to go (after the drives have been modded to fix their little problem?
Or should I consider using something else?


----------



## 1337LutZ

How do you keep watching when your TV isnt powered by a UPS xD


----------



## Secretninja

The caviar greens are more power efficient and the head parking feature can be changed to something reasonable, such as 10 minutes, afaik. But if you are over worried about it just get f4s.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:



Originally Posted by *1337LutZ*


How do you keep watching when your TV isnt powered by a UPS xD


My computer, server, and home theater all have their seperate UPS.

Quote:



Originally Posted by *oxymoron*


Still hoping to have some confirmation before building this...

Are the caviar greens still the way to go (after the drives have been modded to fix their little problem







?
Or should I consider using something else?


I would go with greens and just disable the feature.

Quote:



Originally Posted by *oxymoron*


Hello all. 
Awesome build, i hope you don't mind but i am going to try and recreate it for myself









I just had a few questions..
Looking back is there anything you would change? Perhaps different hard drives ?

Other then the equipment listed in your original post, was there any additional parts or pieces required? You mentioned something about converting a bay for fans?

Any info would be great








Inspiring build, made me join forums lol


If you want 120mm you need to buy the 120mm bay from Norco, it's like $20. The case comes with a bunch of very loud 80mm by default.

The only thing I would change is getting a high end SAS card instead of 3 SATA cards. However, a 24 drive SAS card is about $1,200. The SATA cards are $300 for all 3. It just didn't seem worth it to me for better cable management.

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Icekilla*


I guess so, all he'd have to do is to rip the Blu Ray on his main rig and then send it to the server through his network.


I rip directly to the server using AnyDVD. Then I use DVDFab to rip out the main movie with 1 audio/1 subtitle track with no compression. It takes 35-45GB movies to about 20-30GB, with 1:1 quality of the main movie. All my movies are stored as .iso.

Keep in mind AnyDVD and DVDFab are pretty expensive software. ClownBD will do pretty much everything DVDFab does but it's free. I just find it a little too buggy for my tastes.

Quote:



Originally Posted by *anthony92*


Can you use this unraid system to host other files correctly alongside this setup? Say i want to use this as a nas for storing files, database and other things.

On the unRAID website it says it was built for media storage. I want to be able to also save cctv recordings to it. will it be possible or would it affect drive speeds when streaming.


Writes will be reduced to about 15-20MB/s if you have parity. Reads will be pretty much unaffected. I get about 50-90MB/s reads depending on how full the drive is that i'm reading from. These are green drives so they aren't "fast", but they are plenty fast for storage.

I can't really recommend using it as recording storage in real time. I still have a 1TB Black in my computer for stuff like that. I don't install my games, etc on unRAID either... I store them on it and then transfer them over to Steam on my C: drive when I want to play them.


----------



## darknight670

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;13198286*
> Parity protection rather than duplication mainly.
> 
> 20 x 2TB drives with redundancy in WHS = 20TB available
> 20 x 2TB drives with redundancy in unRAID = 38TB available


Raid 1 is excessive but 19 disks + 1 Parity is asking for some trouble. Hopefully unRaid is not conventional raid so you will not lose EVERYTHING but still...


----------



## Secretninja

Unraid doesn't stripe, so worst case scenario (losing more than 1 drive) you lose the data on any drive that dies. You can lose any 1 drive and not lose anything, but lose 2 and you will lose the data on those 2 drives and everything else will be safe.


----------



## DuckieHo

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Secretninja*


Unraid doesn't stripe, so worst case scenario (losing more than 1 drive) you lose the data on any drive that dies. You can lose any 1 drive and not lose anything, but lose 2 and you will lose the data on those 2 drives and everything else will be safe.



UnRAID needs support for 2nd parity drive and hot spare...


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:



Originally Posted by *darknight670*


Raid 1 is excessive but 19 disks + 1 Parity is asking for some trouble. Hopefully unRaid is not conventional raid so you will not lose EVERYTHING but still...


1) Its 20 Disks + 1 Parity
2) Data isn't striped. In the extremely rare case of 2 drives failing, I lose data on only those 2 drives. Still way better protection than nothing. Movies aren't exactly cruical files that would bankrupt my company if I lost them.









Quote:



Originally Posted by *DuckieHo*


UnRAID needs support for 2nd parity drive and hot spare...


They are working on 2nd parity. Hot spare doesn't really interest me because it's just a home server, a few hours downtime isn't going to affect me.


----------



## darknight670

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;13543138*
> 1) Its 20 Disks + 1 Parity
> 2) Data isn't striped. In the extremely rare case of 2 drives failing, I lose data on only those 2 drives. Still way better protection than nothing. Movies aren't exactly cruical files that would bankrupt my company if I lost them.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> They are working on 2nd parity. Hot spare doesn't really interest me because it's just a home server, a few hours downtime isn't going to affect me.


Yes I know, unRAID is the best solution for media hoarding but losing 2Tb ... meh.

I would love to use unRAID for my server but it's not has feature complete as other OSes, I want Virtualbox on my NAS to be able to do other things with it and installing third party softwares on unRAID is just too much trouble. ( And I do not want to recompile all unRAID myself on a full Slackware distro with custom kernel, too much trouble )


----------



## cubanresourceful

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *darknight670;13570930*
> Yes I know, unRAID is the best solution for media hoarding but losing 2Tb ... meh.
> 
> I would love to use unRAID for my server but it's not has feature complete as other OSes, *I want Virtualbox on my NAS to be able to do other things with it* and installing third party softwares on unRAID is just too much trouble. ( And I do not want to recompile all unRAID myself on a full Slackware distro with custom kernel, too much trouble )


If you want something "Virtualbox-esque" you can always try VMware vSphere Hypervisor. It's 100% free and allows you to do so much.







Play with it in a VM, it's actually very nice.


----------



## RoddimusPrime

All I am going to say is..... dang.... nice setup. Props to you good sir. I will go cry in a corner now.


----------



## Aeropath

awesome, wish I could afford so many drives.


----------



## jigglywiggly

I'd use RAID 60 on that.


----------



## the_beast

Quote:



Originally Posted by *jigglywiggly*


I'd use RAID 60 on that.


I'd want dual parity (which is in the works for unRAID - although it's been in the works for a while), but there's no way I'd run a 40TB striped array regardless of the number of parity drives.


----------



## pepejovi

Nice RACK!

^^


----------



## Murlocke

As of today, the latest beta for unRAID supports larger than 2TB drives.

Incoming 63TB (21x3TB) server.









....Now if I can just find someone to buy my kidney.


----------



## kz26

How would this compare to a Linux software RAID 5/6?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kz26;13805040*
> How would this compare to a Linux software RAID 5/6?


It's pretty much the same, other than the fact you don't need to know Linux to do it.

Also, data isn't striped.. so if you lose 2 drives, you lose data on just those drives rather than all your data.


----------



## kujon

i dont have any experience with unraid. i was wondering if you could run programs such as air video or plex. i use my media server to stream to tablets quite often. sorry about the noobness of this question


----------



## fventura03

not sure if anyone asked this but how do you keep your closet cool? i'm sure this makes quite a bit of heat


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *fventura03;14079903*
> not sure if anyone asked this but how do you keep your closet cool? i'm sure this makes quite a bit of heat


Surprisely, it doesn't. The CPU downclocks when not in use, and the hard drives spin down after an hour. If I watch a movie, 1 hard drive spins up. They are all green drives so they don't put out much heat or consume much power.

I have to keep the closet door open a crack, but i'll be putting a vent in it soon so I won't have too. Drive's rarely exceed 40C.


----------



## Ellis

40TB









How come you store your movies as full ISOs, instead of remuxing them?


----------



## The_Rocker

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14137742*
> 40TB
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> How come you store your movies as full ISOs, instead of remuxing them?


Remuxing is a bit of a pain to be honest. A nice simple 1:1 ISO rip is what I used to do. The full DVD/Blu Ray experience, but much faster and more convinient.

I didn't have the cash for this sort of set up though so I stopped with the blu rays and now take MP4 rips of my DVD's @ 60% compression. About 1GB per film, great quality considering file size however if you are going to spend mega bucks on a home theatre then you may as well do it properly.

Murlocke, this unRAID... So are all the drives in a giant stripe or something? With the parity drive (like RAID5) or is it more similar to JBOD?

Im really interested to find out how it is that you only loose two drives worth of data if two drives go but you only have one for parity. That can't be a stripe then surely?

Enlighten me please


----------



## the_beast

you're right - there is no striping. Each data drive contains complete files, and the parity is calculated across the blocks of each data drive and stored on a single parity drive - like RAID4 but without the striping. 1 drive can be reconstructed using the remaining data drives coupled with the parity drive. If more than 1 drive fails you only lose what is on those drives as the files are all complete on the other drives.


----------



## The_Rocker

Oh, so its like the "drive pool" that WHS puts together for you. Its just like adding the total space of all the drives into one logical volume for ease of use and the redundancy you have thanks to the constant parity sync.

This sounds useful. Especially when dealing with this volume of data.

I have to give you this one Murlocke... Nice set up. To do better you'd need dual failover fibrechannel SAS arrays.

And thats not cheap.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:



Originally Posted by *The_Rocker*


Remuxing is a bit of a pain to be honest. A nice simple 1:1 ISO rip is what I used to do. The full DVD/Blu Ray experience, but much faster and more convinient.

I didn't have the cash for this sort of set up though so I stopped with the blu rays and now take MP4 rips of my DVD's @ 60% compression. About 1GB per film, great quality considering file size however if you are going to spend mega bucks on a home theatre then you may as well do it properly.

Murlocke, this unRAID... So are all the drives in a giant stripe or something? With the parity drive (like RAID5) or is it more similar to JBOD?

Im really interested to find out how it is that you only loose two drives worth of data if two drives go but you only have one for parity. That can't be a stripe then surely?

Enlighten me please 


I guess it really depends how many Blu-rays you're ripping. With 40TB of storage the answer will obviously be "lots"









I don't find remuxing a pain when it comes to single movies, but I've never had to deal with such a large volume as that. I dread to think what kind of hardware you would want if you were to do x264 encodes of all the films...

Quote:



Originally Posted by *The_Rocker*


dual failover fibrechannel SAS arrays.


No idea what that means, but


----------



## The_Rocker

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14140589*
> No idea what that means, but


Thats what happens to you when you work in Infrastructure support.

And its also what happens when a mummy and a daddy love each other very much....


----------



## kujon

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Murlocke*


Surprisely, it doesn't. The CPU downclocks when not in use, and the hard drives spin down after an hour. If I watch a movie, 1 hard drive spins up. They are all green drives so they don't put out much heat or consume much power.

I have to keep the closet door open a crack, but i'll be putting a vent in it soon so I won't have too. Drive's rarely exceed 40C.


do your drives suffer from excessive heard parking since they're the wd20ears or have you found a fix?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kujon;14184321*
> do your drives suffer from excessive heard parking since they're the wd20ears or have you found a fix?


Use Wdidle3 and set them all to /d to set the head parking to 63 minutes. Pretty much fixes that problem.

It's not exactly a userfriendly program, and you need to put it on a disc or USB and boot to it. There are guides out there.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14137742*
> 40TB
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> How come you store your movies as full ISOs, instead of remuxing them?


I rip all the menus and extras out, so i'm left with 1 lossless audio track, and 1 subtitle track. The main movie is still a 1:1 rip and in ISO format. DVDFab will do all this. I then use my popcorn hour to play them. Don't need to mount the ISO or anything, it plays them just fine just like an MKV or AVI - over the local network. The BD Structure is more compatible with devices, especially for lossless audio.

Remuxing can reduce quality and have other issues. Some hardware will simply refuse to play lossless audio if it isn't in a BD Structure ISO. If you are remuxing to MKV and keeping the original bitrate, the quality loss is arguable. However you still run into issues with downsampling lossless audio, some forced subtitle issues, etc. If you own a device that can just play ISO files without hassel, it's just the way to go.

If you remux down to a 2-3GB MKV, the quality difference is massive during high bitrate scenes. While if you are on a smaller screen, you likely won't notice it as much.. but on 55"+ it's easily noticable. I spent a good 20 grand on my home theater, I can't accept using less than 1:1 sources after spending that much.

Currently I have 708 Blu-rays (not including TV shows), with an average 23.6GB per movie.


----------



## L D4WG

Yep, lots of porn on there...


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *L D4WG;14267404*
> Yep, lots of porn on there...


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;14267342*
> Use Wdidle3 and set them all to /d to set the head parking to 63 minutes. Pretty much fixes that problem.
> 
> It's not exactly a userfriendly program, and you need to put it on a disc or USB and boot to it. There are guides out there.
> 
> I rip all the menus and extras out, so i'm left with 1 lossless audio track, and 1 subtitle track. The main movie is still a 1:1 rip and in ISO format. DVDFab will do all this. I then use my popcorn hour to play them. Don't need to mount the ISO or anything, it plays them just fine just like an MKV or AVI - over the local network. The BD Structure is more compatible with devices, especially for lossless audio.
> 
> Remuxing can reduce quality and have other issues. Some hardware will simply refuse to play lossless audio if it isn't in a BD Structure ISO. If you are remuxing to MKV and keeping the original bitrate, the quality loss is arguable. However you still run into issues with downsampling lossless audio, some forced subtitle issues, etc. If you own a device that can just play ISO files without hassel, it's just the way to go.
> 
> If you remux down to a 2-3GB MKV, the quality difference is massive during high bitrate scenes. While if you are on a smaller screen, you likely won't notice it as much.. but on 55"+ it's easily noticable. I spent a good 20 grand on my home theater, I can't accept using less than 1:1 sources after spending that much.
> 
> Currently I have 823 Blu-rays (not including TV shows), with an average 23.6GB per movie.


Ah, fair enough.

But when I meant remuxing, I meant leaving the video and audio tracks untouched - just removing the bits you don't want. But it sounds like you've done that anyway, just in a way that's more compatible with your setup.


----------



## Fr0sty

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;14267410*


i think he meant hardware porn


----------



## LXXIII

Funny... I was just thinking about how I'm running out of slots in my PC to add extra hard drives for my BluRay collection.

I'm not yet at the point where I can afford to buy a whole dedicated server for my 150 movies, but something in your post did catch my eye - YAMJ Movie Jukebox. After googling, I found this guide: http://code.google.com/p/moviejukebox/wiki/StepByStepInstall. Now I'm wondering, can I still use this even though I'm not running any sort of RAID and my movies are on separate drives?


----------



## nawon72

Just out of curiosity, how much of the 40TB is being used?


----------



## un-nefer

I'm trying to understand how you play the bluray iso's, and have a few questions for you - please forgive my noobness









Are using AnyDVD HD to make 1:1 ISOs of your blurays or are you using the DVDFab "blu-ray copy" option?
Once you have the bluray ISOs, you save them to your server - but how are those files accessed and played by the popcorn device? Is it just a mapped drive and the files ISO files are played by the popcorn device's software? Or are you using the popcorn myihome media server software on your server and streaming the files to your popcorn device directly from your server?
In another post you said you use DVDFab to make uncompressed audio and video copies of your bluray - do you just use the bluray-to-mkv option or do you use some other rip format and somehow use that to make the ISO?
I only ask because I am looking for the cleanest option for my theatre room.
I have just purchased a blu-ray player and a few blu-ray discs and want to add them to my HTPC.

My HTPC is running MediaPortal and has a directory that is mapped to my server and I have all my DVD 1:1 rips on there.

For the 1:1 rips, I also use DVDFab (version 8) and I use the "DVD to mkv" ripping option with the "mkv.remux" passthrough setting for 1:1 video and audio rips.

I was going to do the same with my blu-ray movies until I saw this thread and now I am wondering if the mkv option would be the best option or if there would be any difference between the ISO copy or the mkv rip anyway?


----------



## Anthony360

Bump! i also want to know un-nefer's question


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *LXXIII;14267970*
> Funny... I was just thinking about how I'm running out of slots in my PC to add extra hard drives for my BluRay collection.
> 
> I'm not yet at the point where I can afford to buy a whole dedicated server for my 150 movies, but something in your post did catch my eye - YAMJ Movie Jukebox. After googling, I found this guide: http://code.google.com/p/moviejukebox/wiki/StepByStepInstall. Now I'm wondering, can I still use this even though I'm not running any sort of RAID and my movies are on separate drives?


I'm not sure. I point YAMJ to my network drive, which is seen as 1 large drive. It's probably possible but would be more complex.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *nawon72;14268307*
> Just out of curiosity, how much of the 40TB is being used?


33.7TB. I'm nearly out of space because 40TB isn't actually 40TB usable, you lose ~130GB or so per drive just as you would from any 2TB drive.

Just bought my first 3TB drive for testing, which worked fine, and will be upgrading a few drives soon.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *un-nefer;14268913*
> I'm trying to understand how you play the bluray iso's, and have a few questions for you - please forgive my noobness
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Are using AnyDVD HD to make 1:1 ISOs of your blurays or are you using the DVDFab "blu-ray copy" option?
> Once you have the bluray ISOs, you save them to your server - but how are those files accessed and played by the popcorn device? Is it just a mapped drive and the files ISO files are played by the popcorn device's software? Or are you using the popcorn myihome media server software on your server and streaming the files to your popcorn device directly from your server?
> In another post you said you use DVDFab to make uncompressed audio and video copies of your bluray - do you just use the bluray-to-mkv option or do you use some other rip format and somehow use that to make the ISO?
> I only ask because I am looking for the cleanest option for my theatre room.
> I have just purchased a blu-ray player and a few blu-ray discs and want to add them to my HTPC.
> 
> My HTPC is running MediaPortal and has a directory that is mapped to my server and I have all my DVD 1:1 rips on there.
> 
> For the 1:1 rips, I also use DVDFab (version 8) and I use the "DVD to mkv" ripping option with the "mkv.remux" passthrough setting for 1:1 video and audio rips.
> 
> I was going to do the same with my blu-ray movies until I saw this thread and now I am wondering if the mkv option would be the best option or if there would be any difference between the ISO copy or the mkv rip anyway?


* I rip 1:1 ISOs with AnyDVD HD, then use DVDFab's "BD Copy" and select the "Main Movie" option. Make sure BD50 is selected. DVDFab can do it all, but I just prefer doing it this way since I don't always get around to ripping out the menus and extras right away.

*The popcorn hour is connected via ethernet and accesses the home network just like any Windows PC would. You just browse your network, find the server, and then tell the device to save that path. No software of any kind is needed to access it. However I still use YAMJ software with Eversion Skin for fanart/poster art. End result looks like this: 1 2 3

*The popcorn hour plays ISOs with no issues, just like a computer players MKVs. No mounting required. Just click it in the skin and it loads.

*I don't do any type of BD to MKV conversions or transcoding. DVDFab takes the m2ts files for the main movie, takes out extra audio/subtitles, then rebuilds the m2ts file into a new ISO with BD structure included.

If you don't have a device that natively plays ISOs, they can be annoying. You would have to mount them and watch them in a program like PowerDVD. Popcorn hours aren't exactly cheap either. With MKVs you can watch them with pretty much any program.. however lossless audio tends to be buggy with the MKV container, your results may vary. 1:1 MKV rips should technically be the same quality, however i'm still skeptical.. there are conversions going on and the closest 1:1 "main movie only" option you can get is to use the standard m2ts files inside an ISO that has BD structure folders.

I think I answered all your questions, lemme know if I missed something.


----------



## cyclist14

Pretty awesome setup, too bad I can't see the pic's from work









unRaid seems pretty simmilar to NetApp's flavor of RAID called RAID-DP except that RAID-DP supports hot spares. I manage about 30 TB of storage on NetApp devices at work, most of the storage is on a SAN and shared to VMware ESXi hosts with NFS exports. Very reliable only one disk failure and a random controller failover so far this year (*knocks on a massive block of wood)


----------



## rdr09

Will this work on a smaller scale such as a desktop with six sata ports?

If so, where can I find more infor to go about it?


----------



## Anthony360

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *rdr09;14326827*
> Will this work on a smaller scale such as a desktop with six sata ports?
> 
> If so, where can I find more infor to go about it?


yes the free unraid os can use 3 disks, plus is up to 6 disks for 70 bucks and pro is 20 disks for 120 dollars.
kinda expensive but for the home user it seems easy and pretty secure.

would it be possible to set up VM's to run several versions of the free copy?
that would make a 6 disk array allot more affordable.


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Anthony360;14327206*
> yes the free unraid os can use 3 disks, plus is up to 6 disks for 70 bucks and pro is 20 disks for 120 dollars.
> kinda expensive but for the home user it seems easy and pretty secure.
> 
> would it be possible to set up VM's to run several versions of the free copy?
> that would make a 6 disk array allot more affordable.


running unRAID in a VM is possible, but takes a bit of messing about. By the time you factor in the time it takes plus the extra drive cost (you lose 1/3 of all your drive space if you run multiple copies of the free version) you might as well just buy Pro.


----------



## Anthony360

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;14328076*
> running unRAID in a VM is possible, but takes a bit of messing about. By the time you factor in the time it takes plus the extra drive cost (you lose 1/3 of all your drive space if you run multiple copies of the free version) you might as well just buy Pro.


I forgot about the parity







Might as well run raid 5


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Anthony360;14329876*
> I forgot about the parity
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Might as well run raid 5


but RAID5 is striped - which is less than ideal for media storage (as 2 failed drives = total loss)


----------



## ebolamonkey3

For those of your interested in building one yourself, here's a nice guide on making your own server box.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

*Edit:

Hmm... updated blog post here.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *ebolamonkey3;14342846*
> For those of your interested in building one yourself, here's a nice guide on making your own server box.
> 
> http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/


NO!

Backblaze make some horrible design choices in their systems...


----------



## ebolamonkey3

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;14342873*
> NO!
> 
> Backblaze make some horrible design choices in their systems...


Like? I thought the pod looks very well laid out and neat. Is it just the component choices in back panes and sata cards?


----------



## the_beast

yep - the use of port multipliers and the crappy SATA cards mainly. But also the multple power adapter cables. They could have had passive backplanes made up and used SAS expanders for a much more robust system that had more expandability for lower cost.

Not to mention their system design uses the backplanes as the support for the HDDs - which the connectors aren't designed for. Running a vibrating HDD that is only supported by the SMT-mounted SATA connectors is a recipe for hardware failure.

And they hung 4 fast SATA drives off a consumer PCI bus - which give terrible performance, especially as the drives are in RAID6 and thus would need to be accessed simultaneously.

Any other reasons?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Anthony360;14327206*
> yes the free unraid os can use 3 disks, plus is up to 6 disks for 70 bucks and pro is 20 disks for 120 dollars.
> kinda expensive but for the home user it seems easy and pretty secure.
> 
> would it be possible to set up VM's to run several versions of the free copy?
> that would make a 6 disk array allot more affordable.


If they still have the 2 pack deals going on they are are way better deal. My friend and I both got unRAID at the same time, I think it was ~$150 for 2 copies of pro.

I'd recommend giving the free version a spin though, as it has a learning curve and it's quite a bit a money if you don't like it.

unRAID also only needs SATA cards, which are cheap. $100 for 8 port SATA cards. RAID cards cost way more, so you save your money right there.

I just added 3x 3TB drives to the server. So i'm at 42TB now.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;14329950*
> but RAID5 is striped - which is less than ideal for media storage (as 2 failed drives = total loss)


Yup, striping this much data is just asking for trouble. Two drive failures, or a drive failure during a data rebuild would result in COMPLETE loss of all 40TB on RAID5.

I feel much safer using unRAID, i've heard/seen so many horror RAID5 stories. The only way to have a complete data loss on unRAID is user error, extremely faulty PSU, or a huge surge.

RAID5 has it's benefits to though.


----------



## ebolamonkey3

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;14343646*
> yep - the use of port multipliers and the crappy SATA cards mainly. But also the multple power adapter cables. They could have had passive backplanes made up and used SAS expanders for a much more robust system that had more expandability for lower cost.
> 
> Not to mention their system design uses the backplanes as the support for the HDDs - which the connectors aren't designed for. Running a vibrating HDD that is only supported by the SMT-mounted SATA connectors is a recipe for hardware failure.
> 
> And they hung 4 fast SATA drives off a consumer PCI bus - which give terrible performance, especially as the drives are in RAID6 and thus would need to be accessed simultaneously.
> 
> Any other reasons?


Oh, that blog was written in 2009, so I'd expect to use different hard drives and sata cards for whoever's going to try to build one









I mean the way they packed 45 drives into a pod was pretty neat.


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *ebolamonkey3;14351505*
> I mean the way they packed 45 drives into a pod was pretty neat.


Aside from the fact that they're using the SATA ports as structural elements to support the drives you mean?

Arranging the drives as they did is a reasonable idea, but they should have put a little more effort into the retention mechanism for each. For an extra few hundred dollars (which is negligible when you look at the overall cost including drives) they have set themselves up for an awful lot of issues down the line with random hardware failures.

Since that blog Supermicro have also release a few 36-drive 4U cases, complete with all the backplanes, fans & power supplies etc, all for around $1600. I know which way I'd rather go if I was in the market for high density storage...


----------



## claymanhb

How do you like your SVS 20-39PCi? I'm looking to upgrade and have heard nothing but good things about them.


----------



## rmp459

I've been meaning to ask, is unRAID hardware reliant? I realize it is locked to a specific usb flash drive based on serial/license, but in the event of a hardware failure such as a motherboard/sata controller/etc.

Can you just move the drives onto a new pci/pci-e controller or motherboard and boot from the flash drive ?

I currently run a 8 drive (x 2TB) raid 6 on an hp smart array in a 4U server in my basement rack. The throughput is excellent and I have had no issues, but I am worried about the controller or the motherboard dying on me one day. Within the next month, I am going to pick up 3x 3TB drives to backup my data do monthly and then put in a safe, but I want to keep an alternative in mind. 21 drive license for $120 seems very reasonable if it will allow you to migrate between compatible hardware.


----------



## Murlocke

I updated the main post.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *claymanhb;14351728*
> How do you like your SVS 20-39PCi? I'm looking to upgrade and have heard nothing but good things about them.


It's amazing, however I believe discontinued. I think they have a newer version that is the same price as this one, but slightly better. They produce fast and accurate bass, great for movies. Some music listeners may prefer a more "muddy bass" sound, especially hiphop/rap listeners.

A quality sub definitely takes a bit to get use to. Most people are use to muddy/loud bass which doesn't blend in with the music/movie very well. I've had one person tell me my subwoofer is faulty because he wasn't use to "accurate" bass. He brought his sub over and the bass was very muddy/loud however he wouldn't admit that it was "wrong". Bass should never overpower the music. My other friend bought this sub after hearing mine, we are both happy with them.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *rmp459;14352460*
> I've been meaning to ask, is unRAID hardware reliant? I realize it is locked to a specific usb flash drive based on serial/license, but in the event of a hardware failure such as a motherboard/sata controller/etc.
> 
> Can you just move the drives onto a new pci/pci-e controller or motherboard and boot from the flash drive ?
> 
> I currently run a 8 drive (x 2TB) raid 6 on an hp smart array in a 4U server in my basement rack. The throughput is excellent and I have had no issues, but I am worried about the controller or the motherboard dying on me one day. Within the next month, I am going to pick up 3x 3TB drives to backup my data do monthly and then put in a safe, but I want to keep an alternative in mind. 21 drive license for $120 seems very reasonable if it will allow you to migrate between compatible hardware.


You can swap out any piece of hardware, at any time, and it won't affect unRAID. This includes motherboard. Just make sure you assign the drives back into the correct parity/data slots, that way parity is still valid. UnRAID remembers your serial numbers and where they were, I still keep a screenshot backup though.


----------



## gorb

I definitely need to build something like this. I'd love to rip all my blurays/dvds/cds and have them all in once place.


----------



## kilobit

This might be a ******ed question, but shouldnt you run the parity drive off the motherboard. I see your using 64bit cards but they still share the same pci data bus unlike the onboard







Unless I'm wrong. Its too bad supermicro doesnt deck out their server boards







they should gold plate them for the price you pay!

Nice setup!


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kilobit;14371268*
> This might be a ******ed question, but shouldnt you run the parity drive off the motherboard. I see your using 64bit cards but they still share the same pci data bus unlike the onboard
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Unless I'm wrong. Its too bad supermicro doesnt deck out their server boards
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> they should gold plate them for the price you pay!
> 
> Nice setup!


I tested both ways when I installed it, it was the same speed during Parity syncs/check which is the most load I can put on the system.

The PCI-X bus seems to have enough bandwidth and then some. The 2 top PCI-X slots are on the same bus, the bottom 2 are on another bus. My Parity drive is connected to the 3rd card which is on a seperate bus than the other 2 cards. I originally had 1 card on each bus, but had to expand to 3 cards when I needed more drives.

Also, I don't think these BIOS actually detect 3TB drives (many motherboards don't, they even include a PCI-E card with every 3TB drive because of this), so i'm forced to use the SATA cards.


----------



## Ellis

A few questions based on your first post:

How much standard definition content do you have on the server?
Do you have any pics of your Blu-rays?

I noticed your note on piracy, and it made me wonder - are there any ways to legally download 1080p movies on the Internet? I mean, I know there are things like iTunes, but that's only 720p and it's packed with DRM which means you can't play it back how you want, like using a Popcorn Hour or something.


----------



## un-nefer

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;14321668*
> * I rip 1:1 ISOs with AnyDVD HD, then use DVDFab's "BD Copy" and select the "Main Movie" option. Make sure BD50 is selected. DVDFab can do it all, but I just prefer doing it this way since I don't always get around to ripping out the menus and extras right away.


Ahh, now it's making sense. So you still use AnyDVD HD to make your original ISO copy, but then you open that ISO with DVDFab and use the "BD Copy" and remove the extras you don't need. Got it now, cheers








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;14321668*
> *The popcorn hour is connected via ethernet and accesses the home network just like any Windows PC would. You just browse your network, find the server, and then tell the device to save that path. No software of any kind is needed to access it. However I still use YAMJ software with Eversion Skin for fanart/poster art. End result looks like this: 1 2 3


Cool, so basically just find the network share with all the BD ISO's and once the PCH device has added them to it's library and you get YAMJ to download the fanart and info you're good to go?
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;14321668*
> *The popcorn hour plays ISOs with no issues, just like a computer players MKVs. No mounting required. Just click it in the skin and it loads.


Sweet, yeah I wasn't sure if the ISO had to be mounted first (like powerdvd) or if they could be played directly.

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;14321668*
> *I don't do any type of BD to MKV conversions or transcoding. DVDFab takes the m2ts files for the main movie, takes out extra audio/subtitles, then rebuilds the m2ts file into a new ISO with BD structure included.


Makes sense too, if the PCH device can play ISOs, then I wouldn't bother with MKV either









Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke;14321668*
> I think I answered all your questions, lemme know if I missed something.


All good mate. Much appreciated.

Just one other question though - have you used a Boxee Box before? I read that it also plays BD ISOs directly. How does it compare to a PCH device?

I ask because I really want to have Netflix and Hulu, and I just found out that the PCH device will never support Netflix


----------



## raisethe3

I know I am late, but OMG. Very nice server Murlocke!!!


----------



## gorb

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14382281*
> I noticed your note on piracy, and it made me wonder - are there any ways to legally download 1080p movies on the Internet? I mean, I know there are things like iTunes, but that's only 720p and it's packed with DRM which means you can't play it back how you want, like using a Popcorn Hour or something.


I haven't seen anywhere to legally download 1080p versions of films...even if they were offered, they'd probably have too low of a bitrate to be acceptable.

A ton of blurays are ridiculously cheap at amazon UK - I've imported a number of them that were far cheaper than what I could get here, even after shipping.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *gorb;14391758*
> I haven't seen anywhere to legally download 1080p versions of films...even if they were offered, they'd probably have too low of a bitrate to be acceptable.
> 
> A ton of blurays are ridiculously cheap at amazon UK - I've imported a number of them that were far cheaper than what I could get here, even after shipping.


Interesting. Also surprising.


----------



## Icekilla

So far, how much has it costed?


----------



## Ellis

I don't really know much about RAID, the only RAID versions (not really the right word there, but oh well) I understand fully are 1, 0 and 10, and I'm not sure I understand 1 and 0 properly with more than two drives.

Anyway, how does unRAID actually organise the drives? Does it essentially just sort the drives into one big "pool" (I remember WHS being mentioned earlier) and then present you with 40TB of usable space?


----------



## DIABLOS

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14416402*
> I don't really know much about RAID, the only RAID versions (not really the right word there, but oh well) I understand fully are 1, 0 and 10, and I'm not sure I understand 1 and 0 properly with more than two drives.
> 
> Anyway, how does unRAID actually organise the drives? Does it essentially just sort the drives into one big "pool" (I remember WHS being mentioned earlier) and then present you with 40TB of usable space?


Obvilously you'd lose some space to overhead but essentially yes.


----------



## Icekilla

I was wondering, could it be possible to add an SSD and use that as the OS drive?

Does unRAID supports 3TB drives? If not, what other alternatives are available?


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla;14416933*
> I was wondering, could it be possible to add an SSD and use that as the OS drive?
> 
> Does unRAID supports 3TB drives? If not, what other alternatives are available?


He's already added a couple of 3TB drives, so it must support them.


----------



## Icekilla

lol ok then









OP, How much has it costed so far?


----------



## cubanresourceful

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14382281*
> A few questions based on your first post:
> 
> How much standard definition content do you have on the server?
> Do you have any pics of your Blu-rays?
> 
> I noticed your note on piracy, and it made me wonder - are there any ways to legally download 1080p movies on the Internet? I mean, I know there are things like iTunes, but that's only 720p and it's packed with DRM which means you can't play it back how you want, like using a Popcorn Hour or something.


He rips blurays, I think it was mentioned in one of hi posts.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14417087*
> He's already added a couple of 3TB drives, so it must support them.


5.0b10 supports 3TB drives and I think even apple protocols.


----------



## dklimitless

45tb??
HOW DID I MISS THIS THREAD!?!??!!


----------



## 0bit

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla;14416933*
> I was wondering, could it be possible to add an SSD and use that as the OS drive?
> 
> Does unRAID supports 3TB drives? If not, what other alternatives are available?


The unraid os runs off a flash drive, ssd is not needed and would count as one hd. The max number of drives supported is 22.


----------



## kujon

murlock, could you post a pic of your home theater set up? that setup makes me drool as much as the server


----------



## this n00b again

how is the building/replacing of a disk or two in case of disk failure using unraid?


----------



## downlinx

i just upgraded mine but i only have a 20tb system, by far very impressive, if you want give those drives a run for there money, you should look into some adaptec cards. I love mine and have always treated me right


----------



## cubanresourceful

Just a quick question, are you afraid of bit rot or file corruption when restoring/writing a lot of data? Have you encountered such a problem yet?


----------



## JedixJarf

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *cubanresourceful;14495723*
> Just a quick question, are you afraid of bit rot or file corruption when restoring/writing a lot of data? Have you encountered such a problem yet?


Well that's why you have a parity drive.

---
- Sent from my iPhone


----------



## cubanresourceful

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *JedixJarf;14499138*
> Well that's why you have a parity drive.
> 
> ---
> - Sent from my iPhone


This is counter the parity drive.

Here's an example: You write a file to the server that gets silently corrupted (as you write it). The OS knows no difference (I'm pretty sure you've had a corrupted file written before) and neither does the parity drive (it created the parity based off of the corrupted file). Now the corrupted file is not because of an interrupted download, it's due to bit rot (this is the example for that of course). Bit rot is silent and indistinguishable to the OS or parity drive.

I dunno if that's a good example, but it was all that I was able to come up with.


----------



## parityboy

As far as I am aware, bit rot happens to data that's already sitting on the platters, due to a deteriorating platter surface. Data corrupted in flight to the hard disk can be caught via CRC errors, but if the data was bad in the first place (i.e a perfectly good file structure with corrupted data inside it), there's nothing the system can do.

Systems like ZFS can catch bit rot because they use checksums at multiple levels, but this depends on the original data being good. A checksum of bad data is just as valid as a checksum of good data, if the system has no other reference.


----------



## fventura03

i'm considering unRAID for my server, if i expand over time (currently 10tb) how hard is it to add new drives to the server and add them to the "pool" or whatever the terminology is...?

i am thinking of adding 4 more drives at the end of the month to my server so I was thinking of going from WHS v1 to something a little better.


----------



## levontraut

Quote:



Originally Posted by *fventura03*


i'm considering unRAID for my server, if i expand over time (currently 10tb) how hard is it to add new drives to the server and add them to the "pool" or whatever the terminology is...?

i am thinking of adding 4 more drives at the end of the month to my server so I was thinking of going from WHS v1 to something a little better.



just add and mount.


----------



## fg2chase

Still sitting on my 30TB WHS, only using 1/3 of it right now so I have plenty of cushion left.


----------



## Ellis

My recent upgrade to 3TB of total storage looks measly when I come in this thread.


----------



## cubanresourceful

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14631011*
> My recent upgrade to 3TB of total storage looks measly when I come in this thread.


Still more than my server, I am sitting on 1.25TB lol.







I currently quickly whipped up my unRAID server as I get my CentOS 6 with LVM + RAID to my liking.







unRAID is GREAT for starting out and it's extremely quick to restore in case of USB failure, especially once you get used to it!


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla;14406283*
> So far, how much has it costed?


Honestly, A complete guess in the dark would probably be about 4 grand (over 2 years, it's not as bad as it seems). That's just the server, not the home theater and other devices. Initial server cost is the hardest part, it was about $1,300 to build the actual server with no drives and then a few hundred more for some drives to get me started. Motherboard is expensive, case is expensive. It would be made MUCH cheaper now since 2TBs are only $80, I was paying $120 for mine.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14416402*
> I don't really know much about RAID, the only RAID versions (not really the right word there, but oh well) I understand fully are 1, 0 and 10, and I'm not sure I understand 1 and 0 properly with more than two drives.
> 
> Anyway, how does unRAID actually organise the drives? Does it essentially just sort the drives into one big "pool" (I remember WHS being mentioned earlier) and then present you with 40TB of usable space?


All the drives are still seperate and you can access them seperately if you wish. unRAID will create shares that pool the drives together based on the settings you use - so it seems like one large single hard drive.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla;14416933*
> I was wondering, could it be possible to add an SSD and use that as the OS drive?
> 
> unRAID uses a flash USB for it's OS drive. No way around this.
> 
> Does unRAID supports 3TB drives? If not, what other alternatives are available?


Latest unRAID beta supports this. The beta is perfectly stable in my opinion. The release is probably not to far off.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *this n00b again;14469795*
> how is the building/replacing of a disk or two in case of disk failure using unraid?


Turn server off, pull out dead drive, put in new drive with equal or larger drive, start server. After that you just "replace" the bad drive in the unRAID UI (via your browser on your windows PC). Start the array, and it rebuilds. You can access your data while rebuilding, even the data it's rebuilding.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *cubanresourceful;14495723*
> Just a quick question, are you afraid of bit rot or file corruption when restoring/writing a lot of data? Have you encountered such a problem yet?


I've never had this problem, and I am not worried about it. unRAID has a parity sync feature that they recommend you run monthly. It does exactly what calculating parity does, but it only "reads" all the drives. It does bit-by-bit comparisons of everything on the server to make sure parity is still 100% correct. Any errors will be reported, however it can be tough to find out what actually caused the error(s).

I haven't had any errors for over a year, and the early errors were due to bad sata cables. Do not use those cheapo SATA cables, they will cause headaches. Anyone over at unRAID forums will tell you it's the #1 cause of problems. Ever since I got the SAS case and started using higher end SATA to SAS cables, i've had no issues.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *cubanresourceful;14499526*
> This is counter the parity drive.
> 
> Here's an example: You write a file to the server that gets silently corrupted (as you write it). The OS knows no difference (I'm pretty sure you've had a corrupted file written before) and neither does the parity drive (it created the parity based off of the corrupted file). Now the corrupted file is not because of an interrupted download, it's due to bit rot (this is the example for that of course). Bit rot is silent and indistinguishable to the OS or parity drive.
> 
> I dunno if that's a good example, but it was all that I was able to come up with.


You can get a motherboard that supports ECC RAM, and then get ECC RAM. This will greatly reduce this however it's really not needed. The SATA interface will have normal errors, like you said, however it's rare enough and the errors are so small that it likely won't cause any noticable corruption. When you are dealing with 30GB files (or even 1GB files), and 1 byte of that file gets corrupted during a transfer, chances are it won't actually be noticable. I don't really do mass transfers, everything is transferred to my server once and then just sits there only to be read from then on. Any corruption after that point will be detected by parity syncs (to my knowledge).
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *fventura03;14542294*
> i'm considering unRAID for my server, if i expand over time (currently 10tb) how hard is it to add new drives to the server and add them to the "pool" or whatever the terminology is...?
> 
> i am thinking of adding 4 more drives at the end of the month to my server so I was thinking of going from WHS v1 to something a little better.


I recommend using a 3rd party unRAID addon called preclear_disk, and using that to "stability" test and create the unRAID partition afterwards. This ensures you are adding in a good drive with no problems. Basically what it does is reads the entire drive, then writes 0s to the entire drive, then reads it again. Afterwards it makes sure there is no SMART errors, then creates the unRAID partition. It takes over a day to do for every drive, but highly recommended. Out of ~30 or so drives i've caught 6 bad drives before adding them to my server.

If you don't want to do that it's as simple as hooking the drive up, selecting it as a disk in unRAID's UI, then starting the array. It will take <30 minutes for unRAID to prepare the drive itself (instant if you used preclear_disk).
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *un-nefer;14386520*
> Just one other question though - have you used a Boxee Box before? I read that it also plays BD ISOs directly. How does it compare to a PCH device?
> 
> I ask because I really want to have Netflix and Hulu, and I just found out that the PCH device will never support Netflix


I have not tried a boxee, netflix streaming isn't a huge deal to me. If I want to stream netflix I just use my PS3.








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14382281*
> A few questions based on your first post:
> 
> How much standard definition content do you have on the server?
> Do you have any pics of your Blu-rays?
> 
> I noticed your note on piracy, and it made me wonder - are there any ways to legally download 1080p movies on the Internet? I mean, I know there are things like iTunes, but that's only 720p and it's packed with DRM which means you can't play it back how you want, like using a Popcorn Hour or something.


I have probably 5TB of standard definition. Mostly things like Family Guy, Simpsons, King of the Hill, Futurama, etc. Stuff that hasn't came out on blu-ray yet. These are all DVD rips with the same process as my blu-rays. I have no standard definition movies, as pretty much every movie is now on blu-ray at this point.

All my blu-rays are in boxes in another closet, I have no need to keep them out in the open collecting dust. I also have so many that it'd likely take an entire wall and then some to actually store them in the open.









I don't know of any place other than netflix that allows you to legally watch 1080p movies/tv shows. Amazon does now I believe. However all those services offer 1080p with subpar bitrate to keep bandwidth low, there's really no way to stream a "true" blu-ray. Both video/audio bitrate on an actual blu-ray is going to be incredibly higher than any 1080p streaming service. Not to mention you get 5.1/7.1 lossless audio on blu-ray if your home theater supports it. It's really up to the user if they care about this, most people just go with 1080p streaming because it's much cheaper.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kujon;14458949*
> murlock, could you post a pic of your home theater set up? that setup makes me drool as much as the server


It's not much, it's only a 3 person home theater. It's smaller than most people's living rooms. One sofa, nothing like the ones you see over on AVSforum that seat ~20 people. The only reason I call it a home theater room is because it was a room I built in the basement for only this purpose. I can't afford spending $150,000 on building a huge room and putting top of the line chairs/sofas/equipment in it like some of the people over at AVS. So I choose equipment over a larger room. I rarely have more than 2 friends over at a time anyway.


----------



## kujon

PICS!!!! i just wanted to see it all in action haha. you have some high quality equipment indeed. reason why i wanted to see was because i was trying to figure out one of my smaller office rooms into a ht room as well


----------



## SI51

Do you really need all 850W? or would a smaller PSU handle 24 3TB HDDs adequately?


----------



## faMine

holy hot swap


----------



## wumpus

hey, nice rack!


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *SI51;14767806*
> Do you really need all 850W? or would a smaller PSU handle 24 3TB HDDs adequately?


without staggered spin up, 24 drives will use 550-700W when starting.

But often a bigger limiting factor for PSUs that aren't designed for cases with large numbers of drives is the 5V rail - each drive needs about half an amp there, or 12A total. This is a significant proportion of the 5V rail output on many modern PSUs.


----------



## Maximillian-E

Is it strange that I am turned on?


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Maximillian-E;14769818*
> Is it strange that I am turned on?


Yes. Very.

_*backs slowly towards the door then runs away*_


----------



## SI51

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast;14769660*
> without staggered spin up, 24 drives will use 550-700W when starting.
> 
> But often a bigger limiting factor for PSUs that aren't designed for cases with large numbers of drives is the 5V rail - each drive needs about half an amp there, or 12A total. This is a significant proportion of the 5V rail output on many modern PSUs.


OK, so you do need it. Thank you kindly.


----------



## fg2chase

lol man, still love checking out this thread, I currently am using 11TB of 30TB and I need to go in and delete a lot of HD TV that I already watched.


----------



## Bonz(TM)

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *fg2chase;14813173*
> lol man, still love checking out this thread, I currently am using 11TB of 30TB and I need to go in and delete a lot of HD TV that I already watched.


Why delete it if you have so much space? I only have 15TB for my media drive, and I never delete anything. Granted, I only have about 2TB free now.

@Murlocke,
I still love coming in and checking this thread out. The server is such a beauty.


----------



## Blindsay

Just saw this thread, working on something myself but a bit smaller scale lol. Very nice setup


----------



## evermooingcow

This is one of my favorite builds on this site. It's unique and just well done.

I'm also working on a smaller scale version of this in 2U. 2Us are hard to work with. It has been a struggle of trial and error to balance noise and airflow.


----------



## nukefission

My epeen is tiny now ._.
You have 11x my space >_>


----------



## cubanresourceful

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *nukefission;14844762*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> My epeen is tiny now ._.
> You have 11x my space >_>


So you have ~4.09TBs?


----------



## L D4WG

Ive seen this before but..... Wow, just had to comment again, I read through all the posts so far, such an epic setup!!

Seriously considering starting one of these, dont know where to buy the parts in Australia :S


----------



## Murlocke

I upgraded the server to 49TB since 3TB drives are down to $123 a piece, and it's my birthday. I regret buying 3x 3TB drives for $140 a piece ~2 months ago.

If I would of built my server now it would of been half of the price and a higher capacity. For the same price I could have 63TB now. Technology advancements suck sometimes but it's always going to work out like that.









I can imagine in 10 years that many people will have ~50TB servers for only a few hundred dollars or less.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *SI51;14767806*
> Do you really need all 850W? or would a smaller PSU handle 24 3TB HDDs adequately?


It's better to have the higher amps on the 12v rail. In the cases where you are spinning up all the drives, the amps can spike. When you are talking about this much money, it's not wise to skimp on the PSU. I could of got away with a 750W, but saving $30 when you are talking thousands for a more "risky" and less "future-proof" setup did not seem worth it to me.


----------



## Ellis

In 10 years time, 50TB will probably not even count as a server. People will probably even have 50TB on their phones.


----------



## yorkshire.lad

Thats sexy.


----------



## evermooingcow

Could I get a few numbers from you? I've read through this thread and I don't think I saw specific mention of these:

Do you have average drive temps for when the entire array is spinning and has been spinning for a few hours? I'd like to know.
Also could I get the RPM of your rear fans?

Thanks.


----------



## breadcrums

this is soo cool!!


----------



## fg2chase

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14975721*
> In 10 years time, 50TB will probably not even count as a server. People will probably even have 50TB on their phones.


yeah, My hard drive 10 years ago was 20GB I think.. and that was HUGE! I remember thinking,"dang, I could never fill this up" and I had been collecting Mp3's since the late 90's!


----------



## fg2chase

Quote:



Originally Posted by *Ellis*


My recent upgrade to 3TB of total storage looks measly when I come in this thread.










My 30TB feels measly... And it defintely goes for what my dad always used to tell me. "No matter how much you have, or what you do... There is always someone who has more or does it a little better"..

lol 2nd place is the first loser, good thing this isnt a competition. lol


----------



## Ellis

Quote:



Originally Posted by *fg2chase*


yeah, My hard drive 10 years ago was 20GB I think.. and that was HUGE! I remember thinking,"dang, I could never fill this up" and I had been collecting Mp3's since the late 90's!












Quote:



Originally Posted by *fg2chase*


My 30TB feels measly... And it defintely goes for what my dad always used to tell me. "No matter how much you have, or what you do... There is always someone who has more or does it a little better"..

lol 2nd place is the first loser, good thing this isnt a competition. lol


That's pretty true actually.


----------



## aerieth

Now that is a nice setup. Any particular reason why you picked the 929 over a D8000 or C9000? Aside from cheaper price. I have never seen one of these Sony's in action and I am curious about their performance.


----------



## cubanresourceful

Happy birthday and congrats on the expansion!


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis;14975721*
> In 10 years time, 50TB will probably not even count as a server. People will probably even have 50TB on their phones.


You might be right, too early to tell. Mechanical hard drives will reach their limit, and it may be a very long time until SSDs become that affordable.

From what i've heard, a server that has high writes is a bad idea for SSDs. If you add 20 something SSDs of the same model, at the same time, chances are all 20 will all die at roughly the same time (meaning you lose your data) due to reaching the maximum writes on the SSDs. I'm sure this will improve overtime but it is a very scary thing.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *evermooingcow;14977747*
> Could I get a few numbers from you? I've read through this thread and I don't think I saw specific mention of these:
> 
> Do you have average drive temps for when the entire array is spinning and has been spinning for a few hours? I'd like to know.
> Also could I get the RPM of your rear fans?
> 
> Thanks.


Fan links are at the bottom, should be able to find the RPM from those links or the model numbers. They are ran at 100%, and still quiet.

Hottest drive is 42C with all drives spun up for a long time, the next hottest is 37C. That single drive has always been hotter then the others, and it's on my to-do list to replace it.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *aerieth;14981792*
> Now that is a nice setup. Any particular reason why you picked the 929 over a D8000 or C9000? Aside from cheaper price. I have never seen one of these Sony's in action and I am curious about their performance.


I actually got the D8000, and it was terrible. So terrible that I exchanged it and got the same results with the replacement. Many different issues, light leakage, banding, very uneven backlight. You will see over on the AVSforums that many users experience the same, many of them went to the HX929 and claim the D8000 isn't even in the same league. The HX929 is vastly superior to the D8000, the only downside is blooming (which EVERY local dimming set has) but it's a fair trade over the many issues I had with my D8000.

You can also check CNETs reviews on these TVs. They pretty much say the HX929 is the best TV this year for videophiles, while the D8000 has supbar video quality but has good gadgets. I buy a TV for video quality, not gadgets. Samsung has been focusing more and more on software rather than the actual hardware.









I can also say that if you plan on using the TV as a monitor, the D8000 completely fails at it. It doesn't allow local dimming when using a PC, drastically lowering the quality. It doesn't correctly switch to certain resolutions when playing older games. I constantly had to mess with it when trying to play certain games because it didn't look right. The HX929 just works, and has scenes that automatically detect when you are on the desktop or when you are in a game.

Samsung last TV that was truely great was their B8500, which was only on the market for a few months before they got sued for some technology used in it. Ever since they've used edgelitting instead of backlighting, and if you want quality that is the worse possible thing to get. The fact Samsung is charging as much as they do for edgelit TVs sickens me. Don't get me wrong Samsung makes some great products, however their TV department has lacked the last few years. I've demoed every flagship TV they've put on the market for the last 4 year, and have not even been remotely impressed by any of them. Infact I consider my rather old Sony XBR4 to be better than the D8000.

Where are you seeing the HX929 being cheaper than the D8000? The HX929 should be more expensive than the D8000. It tends to be $400-$600 more. I just rechecked and the TVs are about $500-$600 less than I paid ~6 month ago, but the gap is still about the same. The HX929 has full-array local dimming, this will make the TV more expensive and also give it far superior blacks and contrast ratio over the D8000. It cost *much* more for the company to make over Samsung's edgelitting and this is why only a couple TVs this year feature full-array local dimming. The HX929 must be on sale if you are seeing it cheaper then the D8000. It is without a doubt the better TV if you can afford the extra ~$600. If you can't, I still can't recommend the D8000.


----------



## Ellis

I hadn't realised it was your birthday yesterday.

Happy birthday for yesterday!


----------



## shetu

This is a lot of space. May I know Why do you use Intel E5200 (2.50GHz)? Why not server grade CPU?


----------



## fg2chase

Likely because it is sufficient... ^


----------



## Ellis

Yeah, server grade CPUs like Xeons are usually hella expensive, and you don't need much power at all for a file server.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:



Originally Posted by *shetu*


This is a lot of space. May I know Why do you use Intel E5200 (2.50GHz)? Why not server grade CPU?


What's the point on spending hundreds more? unRAID uses virutally no CPU, the E5200 is absolute overkill for it. Server CPUs also aren't designed for a simple file server.


----------



## shetu

I understood. I have one E5200, so in future I try to build a filer server.


----------



## timdsilva

I want to build one of these... Are there any changes you would make if you were building this today? Is any of your hardware outdated at this point? Any upgrades you would suggest to make?


----------



## d--

What kind of noise does this server output? I live in a relatively small place, and currently stream media from my desktop pc to my media center. Looking for a solution that doesn't require my desktop to be on, but don't want to fill my apartment with the soothing sounds of hard drive

also, what kind of power consumption does the server have?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:



Originally Posted by *timdsilva*


I want to build one of these... Are there any changes you would make if you were building this today? Is any of your hardware outdated at this point? Any upgrades you would suggest to make?


I might of went with the "SALSP" version of the SATA cards. They now have SATA3 versions, so I would of been able to use SAS to SAS cables for the hotswap bays. However, the latest unRAID beta has been having problems with SALSP cards so i'm kind of glad I didn't. You need the beta for 3TB support.

If I get extra money i'll prob buy 3x of the SALSP SATA 3 cards and a motherboard with 3x PCI-E slots for them. However, i'll likely upgrade to 8GB of RAM and a new processor when I do that just because DDR2 prices are incredibly higher, and faster processors can be gotten for cheap.

As of right now, almost all my money goes into upgrading the hard drives though. With the flood causing HDD prices to skyrocket i'm in a tough spot. I have 4.8TB free right now, and with 2TB and 3TB drives in every hotswap bay, my only option is to wait or spend a ton of money to upgrade some 2TB drives to 3TB. I expect I will be out of space in about 3 months or so, hopefully 4TB drives will be out by then.

Quote:



Originally Posted by *d--*


What kind of noise does this server output? I live in a relatively small place, and currently stream media from my desktop pc to my media center. Looking for a solution that doesn't require my desktop to be on, but don't want to fill my apartment with the soothing sounds of hard drive

also, what kind of power consumption does the server have?


Assuming you pay the $120 or so for the noctua fans and the 120mm fan bay... You can barely hear it from a few feet away. It's on 24/7 about 25 feet from my bed at the moment.

The stock case fans are incredibly loud, and only 80mm. The hard drives aren't loud, but they are all green. Can't say it would be the same if you went with 7200RPM drives.

Power consumption was only about 100-120W with all drives spun down, however recently I set my spin down timer to 6 hours instead of 1 hour. I felt I was spinning them up/down too much. With all drives spun up and idling it uses 216W. I'd say it's about $25 every 3 months, however our power costs are a little lower in IA than most places.


----------



## Icekilla

Question... let's say you use one of these two motherboards for the server. Do you have to use ECC memory?


----------



## Icekilla

* Video (Movies, TV shows and what not)
* Music?
* Pictures?
* Other kind of files?

Can those last 3 be stored in your array?


----------



## Anthony360

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla*
> 
> Question... let's say you use one of these two motherboards for the server. Do you have to use ECC memory?


Bump to his question. i would also like to know.


----------



## mak1skav

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Anthony360*
> 
> Bump to his question. i would also like to know.


If you click on the details of the 1st motherboard you will see that it says next to ECC Support "Only" so you can assume that it needs ECC memory to work but i haven't used that specific motherboard in the past.


----------



## Grim

Beautiful, Just Beautiful.

For the sake of space though, I would do at least light transcoding with the BluRays. 23GB is a bit much to just rip eh?







.
You could create a really beautiful movie archive with this rig. Really nice thing u have going there


----------



## pLuhhmm

I. Am. So. JELLY! What does that cost in electricity?!


----------



## Icekilla

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *pLuhhmm*
> 
> I. Am. So. JELLY! What does that cost in electricity?!


According to Murlocke, it consumes around 400W or less at full load. You can find it around this thread.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla*
> 
> * Video (Movies, TV shows and what not)
> * Music?
> * Pictures?
> * Other kind of files such as installers and backups from computers?
> 
> Can those last 3 be stored in your array?


Bumping my question again. I SO want to know!


----------



## eroz

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla*
> 
> * Video (Movies, TV shows and what not)
> * Music?
> * Pictures?
> * Other kind of files?
> Can those last 3 be stored in your array?


Yes. All those files can be saved to the server.

I also have an unRaid server....not as big. I only have 14TB.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla*
> 
> Question... let's say you use one of these two motherboards for the server. Do you have to use ECC memory?


I'm not using ECC in my motherboard, even though it says ECC. Though, i'm not sure if thats the case with other motherboards.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Icekilla*
> 
> * Video (Movies, TV shows and what not)
> * Music?
> * Pictures?
> * Other kind of files?
> Can those last 3 be stored in your array?


It can store anything and everything, assuming you don't need to "install" and "run" it. Anything that is standalone will work fine. I wouldn't install programs/games to it though.. you can store the files on there though. I store music and pictures on it.. Winamp plays them fine over the network.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *pLuhhmm*
> 
> I. Am. So. JELLY! What does that cost in electricity?!


107-117W idle. Each drive in use is about +4W. I rarely have more than 3-4 drives spun up.


----------



## Ellis

51TB now? How can you afford to expand this thing with the current hard drive prices?!

Sent from my HTC HD2


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> 51TB now? How can you afford to expand this thing with the current hard drive prices?!
> Sent from my HTC HD2


Already had spares. No way i'd buy hard drives right now.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Quote:
> 
> 
> 
> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> 51TB now? How can you afford to expand this thing with the current hard drive prices?!
> Sent from my HTC HD2
> 
> 
> 
> Already had spares. No way i'd buy hard drives right now.
Click to expand...

Ah, fair enough. I was thinking, buying a 2TB drive right now would kinda be a silly idea, although apparently it won't be until mid-late 2012 until the prices go back to the way they were before the floods.


----------



## Murlocke

Just got done installing my AX850. What a difference, 99W during idle and 189W during load, and this is WITH the new 2TB black for a cache drive. Previous idle was 117W with a HX850 and that was without the 2TB black in there. So i'm looking at a ~20W difference in idle, quite large for 24/7.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Just got done installing my AX850. What a difference, 99W during idle and 189W during load, and this is WITH the new 2TB black for a cache drive. Previous idle was 117W with a HX850 and that was without the 2TB black in there. So i'm looking at a ~20W difference in idle, quite large for 24/7.


That's a huge difference actually. I'd love an AX, although mainly for the fully modular-ness and the quietness over the efficiency.

Sent from my HTC HD2


----------



## Murlocke

Updated all pictures and added home theater pictures.


----------



## Abula

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Updated all pictures and added home theater pictures.


Pretty impressive server n HT room =). unRaid is very tempting, if next iteration of WHS doesnt come with DE, ill probably move to unRaid.


----------



## Xyxox

Subbed.


----------



## vikingsteve

This might be the coolest thing I've ever seen. Cedar Falls eh? That's like only an hour away from me! (Dubuque)


----------



## RussianGrimmReaper

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> I'm not using ECC in my motherboard, even though it says ECC. Though, i'm not sure if thats the case with other motherboards.


You do not need to run ECC on the board for it to work, but it is always recommended. You can never have enough error checking!

To use ECC, all you need is a memory controller that supports it.


----------



## Masterchief3k

Linus from linustechtips built something like this.


----------



## sepheroth003

All this HD goodness for a 55" TV









Do you have any pics of the GUI, how the coverart/fanart works? Also could you run the GUI off the server as well?

Any possibility you can run a short guide or explain how you save the 1:1 Blu Rays?

I am going to be building an HTPC/Server when I get home. I only have ~90 BDs right now, at 23gb a piece would take just over 2TB of space. I'm planning on starting with 3 or 4 2TB drives on Raid 5. I have an i7 920, 6GB Ram, 4890, Corsair HX520 I plan to start with. The major difference in my setup than yours will be I want it to be in my equipment rack next to my receiver/xbox/etc and use it as my main playing device. I am also planning on going Windows Home Server so I can use it for backups of my PCs. I have a truly dedicated room. Black ceiling, black front wall, dark red side walls, 110" screen, 1080p projector, two rows of seating with the back row on a riser. If the setup works out similar to yours, I wouldn't mind getting a set top box for the living room upstairs as well.

Any suggestions you have would be great.


----------



## Blindsay

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *sepheroth003*
> 
> All this HD goodness for a 55" TV
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Do you have any pics of the GUI, how the coverart/fanart works? Also could you run the GUI off the server as well?
> Any possibility you can run a short guide or explain how you save the 1:1 Blu Rays?
> I am going to be building an HTPC/Server when I get home. I only have ~90 BDs right now, at 23gb a piece would take just over 2TB of space. I'm planning on starting with 3 or 4 2TB drives on Raid 5. I have an i7 920, 6GB Ram, 4890, Corsair HX520 I plan to start with. The major difference in my setup than yours will be I want it to be in my equipment rack next to my receiver/xbox/etc and use it as my main playing device. I am also planning on going Windows Home Server so I can use it for backups of my PCs. I have a truly dedicated room. Black ceiling, black front wall, dark red side walls, 110" screen, 1080p projector, two rows of seating with the back row on a riser. If the setup works out similar to yours, I wouldn't mind getting a set top box for the living room upstairs as well.
> Any suggestions you have would be great.


nothing wrong with a 55" TV lol


----------



## sepheroth003

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blindsay*
> 
> nothing wrong with a 55" TV lol


My buddy has a 65" Pioneer Kuro Elite Plasma. Basically best TV you could ever buy. I prefer my projector over it









/edit Off topic, I'm curious about the interface between theater/server.


----------



## Blindsay

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *sepheroth003*
> 
> My buddy has a 65" Pioneer Kuro Elite Plasma. Basically best TV you could ever buy. I prefer my projector over it
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> /edit Off topic, I'm curious about the interface between theater/server.


I am quite familiar with the kuro, and i have a projector myself and i would take a kuro any day of the week.


----------



## sepheroth003

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blindsay*
> 
> I am quite familiar with the kuro, and i have a projector myself and i would take a kuro any day of the week.


This really is off topic and I hate if we are thread jacking this, but its good discussion anyways.

What type of projector do you have? Do you havea dedicated room? Obviously it comes down to personal preference.


----------



## Pip Boy

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Power consumption was only about 100-120W with all drives spun down, however recently I set my spin down timer to 6 hours instead of 1 hour. I felt I was spinning them up/down too much. With all drives spun up and idling it uses 216W. I'd say it's about $25 every 3 months, however our power costs are a little lower in IA than most places.


isnt that quite high? i know its a big mean machine but as an alternative couldn't you build a machine with a 25-35w idle with driver spun down?


----------



## Pip Boy

how come the idle power is so high with the drives spun down?


----------



## JedixJarf

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *phill1978*
> 
> how come the idle power is so high with the drives spun down?


100w? thats not very high at all.


----------



## ALpHaMoNk

I didn't get to read through the whole thing but i did want to say very nice server....did you ever consider moving over to flexraid?


----------



## Bonz(TM)

Still keep coming back to look at this thread








So beautiful.

But you can't really count your parity drive and cache drive toward your total usable space. Also you aren't accounting for the actual TiB size of the drives.

I lose a lot of space in my server due to parity, so I don't call it a 50TB server. More along the lines of 35TB usable. I do however love the high availability and the GB/s sequential reads.


----------



## TurboTurtle

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonz(TM)*
> 
> But you can't really count your parity drive and cache drive toward your total usable space. Also you aren't accounting for the actual TiB size of the drives.


That's because the *iB denominations are fracking stupid







.

Computers are base 8, not base 10. As such, using base 10 denominations is useless at best.

Back on topic: I agree on the parity drives, but I would think the cache should count. You still have active data stored on the cache drives. Regardless, this thread could be re-named "Absurd-TB unRAID Server".


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *TurboTurtle*
> 
> Quote:
> 
> 
> 
> Originally Posted by *Bonz(TM)*
> 
> But you can't really count your parity drive and cache drive toward your total usable space. Also you aren't accounting for the actual TiB size of the drives.
> 
> 
> 
> That's because the *iB denominations are fracking stupid
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> .
> 
> Computers are base 8, not base 10. As such, using base 10 denominations is useless at best.
> 
> Back on topic: I agree on the parity drives, but I would think the cache should count. You still have active data stored on the cache drives. Regardless, this thread could be re-named "Absurd-TB unRAID Server".
Click to expand...

Computers aren't base-8, binary is base-2!

But yeah, it doesn't make sense to use base-10 (decimal) denominations on computers really, they should use the binary prefixes.


----------



## TurboTurtle

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> Computers aren't base-8, binary is base-2!
> But yeah, it doesn't make sense to use base-10 (decimal) denominations on computers really, they should use the binary prefixes.


Sorry, should have said "Computer storage is base-8". By which I mean any storage sector or data write is going to be in the form of bytes, which are base-8. Yes, technically base-2 in the sense bits make up bytes, but you can't write just six bits for example. Bytes are base-8, so I should have clarified more specifically.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *TurboTurtle*
> 
> Quote:
> 
> 
> 
> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> Computers aren't base-8, binary is base-2!
> But yeah, it doesn't make sense to use base-10 (decimal) denominations on computers really, they should use the binary prefixes.
> 
> 
> 
> Sorry, should have said "Computer storage is base-8". By which I mean any storage sector or data write is going to be in the form of bytes, which are base-8. Yes, technically base-2 in the sense bits make up bytes, but you can't write just six bits for example. Bytes are base-8, so I should have clarified more specifically.
Click to expand...

Ah yeah fair enough, I should have seen that's what you meant.


----------



## Plan9

All of that is moot as the original statement about *iB denominations was incorrect.

Ti/Gi/Mi/Ki are base 2 not 8 (though I agree it can be argued otherwise) and certainly *not* base 10 (as was stated).

Giga, mega, kilo, and so on, are all base 10 but were incorrectly used in IT for 1024 denominations. As this was used by everyone, it became the _de facto_ standard usage in technology. However HDD manufacturers got greedy and started using the mathematically correct standard (10^(n*3)) to release disks with higher advertised capacity than the actual storage medium could handle. This is what lead to the binary multiples (2^(n*10)) known as MiB, GiB, TiB, and so on.


----------



## Murlocke

Just upgraded a 2TB to 3TB. Was completely out of space... 1TB more space now. Bring on affordable 4TB drives!









Quote:


> Originally Posted by *phill1978*
> 
> isnt that quite high? i know its a big mean machine but as an alternative couldn't you build a machine with a 25-35w idle with driver spun down?


Impossible, sorry. Might be possible if you spend more money than what it's worth. The fans alone use that. I don't see anyone getting much lower than 99W with this much stuff.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *ALpHaMoNk*
> 
> I didn't get to read through the whole thing but i did want to say very nice server....did you ever consider moving over to flexraid?


IMO unRAID is superior and has far better community/addons. I see no reason to switch, it would be a huge headache. Totally different filesystems to my knowledge. Nothing against Flexraid though.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonz(TM)*
> 
> Still keep coming back to look at this thread
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> So beautiful.
> But you can't really count your parity drive and cache drive toward your total usable space. Also you aren't accounting for the actual TiB size of the drives.
> I lose a lot of space in my server due to parity, so I don't call it a 50TB server. More along the lines of 35TB usable. I do however love the high availability and the GB/s sequential reads.


44.8TB 100% usable. Cache drive is 100% usable space, it's just not protected from drive failure (and has faster writes than the other drives)... that's pretty much the only difference. Drives are advertised at those sizes, so that's the easiest way to show the server.


----------



## bruflot

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Just upgraded a 2TB to 3TB. Was completely out of space... 1TB more space now. Bring on affordable 4TB drives!




Seriously, I have problems filling up my 120GB ssd








And that's my only storage drive too!


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bruflot*
> 
> 
> Seriously, I have problems filling up my 120GB ssd
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> And that's my only storage drive too!


A single blu-ray movie is about 30-46GB. You could fit maybe 4 movies on there at this quality...


----------



## TurboTurtle

Question, Murlocke.

With unRAID - are you able to run anything else on the server, or is it pretty much a dedicated SAN deployment at that point? For example, are you able to run say Apache on top of everything else?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *TurboTurtle*
> 
> Question, Murlocke.
> With unRAID - are you able to run anything else on the server, or is it pretty much a dedicated SAN deployment at that point? For example, are you able to run say Apache on top of everything else?


It's limited, but I don't think you can run Apache. I have SABnzbd and Sickbeard installed with 3rd party plugins, the Web UI I linked above is also 100% different than default.

Unraid 5.0 is making all of this easier, but it's still in RC2, so most plugin authors are waiting for it to finally release. Prior to plugins, it was much more complicated. I don't really expect unRAID to ever support lots of programs, it's generally designed just for storage. Technically, if the program runs on Linux you can run it on unRAID.. but it's not user friendly and that's where plugins come in. If you don't know how to do it yourself, you have to hope someone releases a plugin for it.


----------



## TurboTurtle

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> It's limited, but I don't think you can run Apache. I have SABnzbd and Sickbeard installed with 3rd party plugins, the Web UI I linked above is also 100% different than default.
> Unraid 5.0 is making all of this easier, but it's still in RC2, so most plugin authors are waiting for it to finally release. Prior to plugins, it was much more complicated. I don't really expect unRAID to ever support lots of programs, it's generally designed just for storage. Technically, if the program runs on Linux you can run it on unRAID.. but it's not user friendly and that's where plugins come in. If you don't know how to do it yourself, you have to hope someone releases a plugin for it.


I see. Good to know SABnzbd works on it though - I was wondering about that and then also Ampache, which also runs on Apache.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *TurboTurtle*
> 
> Quote:
> 
> 
> 
> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> It's limited, but I don't think you can run Apache. I have SABnzbd and Sickbeard installed with 3rd party plugins, the Web UI I linked above is also 100% different than default.
> Unraid 5.0 is making all of this easier, but it's still in RC2, so most plugin authors are waiting for it to finally release. Prior to plugins, it was much more complicated. I don't really expect unRAID to ever support lots of programs, it's generally designed just for storage. Technically, if the program runs on Linux you can run it on unRAID.. but it's not user friendly and that's where plugins come in. If you don't know how to do it yourself, you have to hope someone releases a plugin for it.
> 
> 
> 
> I see. Good to know SABnzbd works on it though - I was wondering about that and then also Ampache, which also runs on Apache.
Click to expand...

Ampache ftw









But surely if you say any Linux program would work then Apache would be able to work?


----------



## ALpHaMoNk

wow you filled the server lol how many movies are stored on there? I thought i was pushing when i filled my 12.7TB raid5 (before expanding to 30TB raid6) I was asking before about flexraid because of the ability to you it with an OS ie windows home server or something. with that much space i assumed your setup was more than just media storage which unraid is great for. Does unraid allow you to have as many parity drives as you like ? I am leaning on moving from hw raid to something like flexraid on my next build whenever that will be.


----------



## Murlocke

Going to be upgrading my server hardware in about a month, so i'll be selling most of the current hardware as a bundle for anyone wanting a server (minus the drives,case,PSU, etc). I haven't figured a total price out.

*New parts*
Motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182235

Processor:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115065

RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139262

SAS Card (x3):
http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-aoc-sas2lp-mv8~7SUP92PM.htm

SAS Cable (x6):
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10254&cs_id=1025406&p_id=8186&seq=1&format=2

This allows me take my parity syncs up to about 105MB/s, compared to the current 65MB/s. Full SAS to SAS. Much higher bandwidth than PCI-X. 8GB RAM vs 4GB RAM, and much faster processor.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> But surely if you say any Linux program would work then Apache would be able to work?


I would check with the unraid forums, they are pretty active now. I've never personally tried.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *ALpHaMoNk*
> 
> wow you filled the server lol how many movies are stored on there? I thought i was pushing when i filled my 12.7TB raid5 (before expanding to 30TB raid6) I was asking before about flexraid because of the ability to you it with an OS ie windows home server or something. with that much space i assumed your setup was more than just media storage which unraid is great for. Does unraid allow you to have as many parity drives as you like ? I am leaning on moving from hw raid to something like flexraid on my next build whenever that will be.


Probably less than you, my movies take up about 25GB each on average.

Currently unRAID only supports 1 parity drive. However we will soon see the ability to use 22 data drives (up from 20), and 2 parity drives. This allows for 2 drives to fail at once, and if 3 drives somehow fail at the same time you only lose data on those 3 drives. I really can't wait for 22 data drives though, being able to throw 2 more 3TB drives in there for 6TB more space will be a lifesaver. I have 2 empty hotswap bays.


----------



## TurboTurtle

Murlocke, given the cost of this monster I have one thing to say to you:

*What do you do and how can I do it, too?*


----------



## Crazy9000

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *TurboTurtle*
> 
> Murlocke, given the cost of this monster I have one thing to say to you:
> *What do you do and how can I do it, too?*


Depending on how you spend your money, most people could afford this type of thing if they wanted to. Don't get a nice car, don't go out drinking often, ect.


----------



## TurboTurtle

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Crazy9000*
> 
> Depending on how you spend your money, most people could afford this type of thing if they wanted to. Don't get a nice car, don't go out drinking often, ect.


I was quoting Will Smith jokingly


----------



## ALpHaMoNk

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Going to be upgrading my server hardware in about a month, so i'll be selling most of the current hardware as a bundle for anyone wanting a server (minus the drives,case,PSU, etc). I haven't figured a total price out.
> *New parts*
> Motherboard:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182235
> Processor:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115065
> RAM:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231440
> SAS Card (x3):
> http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-aoc-sas2lp-mv8~7SUP92PM.htm
> SAS Cable (x6):
> http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10254&cs_id=1025406&p_id=8186&seq=1&format=2
> This allows me take my parity syncs up to about 105MB/s, compared to the current 65MB/s. Full SAS to SAS. Much higher bandwidth than PCI-X. 8GB RAM vs 4GB RAM, and much faster processor.
> I would check with the unraid forums, they are pretty active now. I've never personally tried.
> Probably less than you, my movies take up about 25GB each on average.
> Currently unRAID only supports 1 parity drive. However we will soon see the ability to use 22 data drives (up from 20), and 2 parity drives. This allows for 2 drives to fail at once, and if 3 drives somehow fail at the same time you only lose data on those 3 drives. I really can't wait for 22 data drives though, being able to throw 2 more 3TB drives in there for 6TB more space will be a lifesaver. I have 2 empty hotswap bays.


that is a big update for unraid. with 24bay cases out and that many discs having 2 parity drives is a huge plus. You are right my movies are HD but no where near as big in file size


----------



## Abula

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Going to be upgrading my server hardware in about a month, so i'll be selling most of the current hardware as a bundle for anyone wanting a server (minus the drives,case,PSU, etc). I haven't figured a total price out.
> *New parts*
> Motherboard:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182235
> Processor:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115065
> RAM:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231440
> SAS Card (x3):
> http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-aoc-sas2lp-mv8~7SUP92PM.htm
> SAS Cable (x6):
> http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10254&cs_id=1025406&p_id=8186&seq=1&format=2
> This allows me take my parity syncs up to about 105MB/s, compared to the current 65MB/s. Full SAS to SAS. Much higher bandwidth than PCI-X. 8GB RAM vs 4GB RAM, and much faster processor.
> I would check with the unraid forums, they are pretty active now. I've never personally tried.
> Probably less than you, my movies take up about 25GB each on average.
> Currently unRAID only supports 1 parity drive. However we will soon see the ability to use 22 data drives (up from 20), and 2 parity drives. This allows for 2 drives to fail at once, and if 3 drives somehow fail at the same time you only lose data on those 3 drives. I really can't wait for 22 data drives though, being able to throw 2 more 3TB drives in there for 6TB more space will be a lifesaver. I have 2 empty hotswap bays.


Just wondering why not go with 1155 Sandy Bridge (or Ivy Bridge), the cpu will be more efficient. There are very nice supermicro mobos for sandy bridge like SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C204 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard, that its even cheaper than 1156 board you are considering.... i have mine with xeon e3-1230, but i believe you can run an i3 2100 or Celeron/Pentium.. Btw this mobo comes with 4x PCIe 8x (two are 8x and two are 4x) enough to run 4xHBAs/Raid cards, you probably could run only 2x8 + 6 mobo sata ports should net you the 22 drives, also has internal USB2 port for your unraid os. Might be worth checking the unraid forums to see if its compatible with it.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Abula*
> 
> Just wondering why not go with 1155 Sandy Bridge (or Ivy Bridge), the cpu will be more efficient. There are very nice supermicro mobos for sandy bridge like SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C204 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard, that its even cheaper than 1156 board you are considering.... i have mine with xeon e3-1230, but i believe you can run an i3 2100 or Celeron/Pentium.. Btw this mobo comes with 4x PCIe 8x (two are 8x and two are 4x) enough to run 4xHBAs/Raid cards, you probably could run only 2x8 + 6 mobo sata ports should net you the 22 drives, also has internal USB2 port for your unraid os. Might be worth checking the unraid forums to see if its compatible with it.


2 of that board's x8 slots run at x4 which could possibly slow down my entire system since parity sync will go as fast as the slowest bandwidth. I'm not really sure if it will or not, and I do prefer the micro board. It will also lower the cost of the build, i'll have to research it some more.

EDIT: I think i'm going to with that board, and a i3-2120 sandy instead of my original plan. PCI-E 2.0 x4 seems to have 2000MB/s bandwidth if i'm correct. 8x green drives will only use ~900MB/s.


----------



## axipher

Wow, this build is amazing to say the least


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Quote:
> 
> 
> 
> Originally Posted by *Abula*
> 
> Just wondering why not go with 1155 Sandy Bridge (or Ivy Bridge), the cpu will be more efficient. There are very nice supermicro mobos for sandy bridge like SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O LGA 1155 Intel C204 Micro ATX Intel Xeon E3 Server Motherboard, that its even cheaper than 1156 board you are considering.... i have mine with xeon e3-1230, but i believe you can run an i3 2100 or Celeron/Pentium.. Btw this mobo comes with 4x PCIe 8x (two are 8x and two are 4x) enough to run 4xHBAs/Raid cards, you probably could run only 2x8 + 6 mobo sata ports should net you the 22 drives, also has internal USB2 port for your unraid os. Might be worth checking the unraid forums to see if its compatible with it.
> 
> 
> 
> 2 of that board's x8 slots run at x4 which could possibly slow down my entire system since parity sync will go as fast as the slowest bandwidth. I'm not really sure if it will or not, and I do prefer the micro board. It will also lower the cost of the build, i'll have to research it some more.
> 
> EDIT: I think i'm going to with that board, and a i3-2120 sandy instead of my original plan. PCI-E 2.0 x4 seems to have 2000MB/s bandwidth if i'm correct. 8x green drives will only use ~900MB/s.
Click to expand...

Yeah - each lane of PCIe 2.0 provides 500MBps of bandwidth, so x4 would indeed be 2GBps.

I would definitely go with Sandy to be honest, if not Ivy. Personally I'd say it's worth spending a bit extra now to give you more time before you need to replace it.


----------



## Raptor_Jesus

Good work. I am presently running 3x1.5TB in RAID 5 on my linux server. I plan on adding a second 4x3TB RAID 6 (I need the dual parity for important data), and using the old 3x1.5TB array for backups. I like the way unRAID handles drive failures (except for the missing dual-parity and hotspare features). However, I needed the functionality of a full Linux build for my house. I would definitely not run a 40TB RAID 6 array. I would probably split that into 2 subarrays, and LVM them together. I can't even imagine how bad a rebuild of a RAID 6 array on 20 drives would be.

Could you see what the actual throughput of this is? I.E., copy a blu-ray from your server to a desktop on the network to see what your real-world transfer speeds are.

Subbing to this thread to see the upgrade to 3TB.


----------



## herkalurk

At work we have a large-ish SAN, 96 drives, and I believe when it auto creates it's raid 5,6 and 10 arrays, it won't use more than 6 or 7 disks for any 1 array for the rebuild reason. Just too much.

Raptor, if you can ever get your hands on something a little more enterprise, you can do raid 5 arrays with all the same size drives, but have universal hot spares.

We have a disk shelf that has 16 1 TB sata drives in it. I configured it with 4 raid 5 arrays, 2 arrays with 4 disks, and 2 arrays with 3, and 2 extra disks. Those disks are hot spares to any failing disk, essentially giving me raid the capabilities of raid 6 on any array there, it will be a harder rebuild of the array since the hot spares are blank, but at least my array will re build automatically and I can replace the disk without having the fear of using data.

Yay for old Sun equipment...


----------



## Matt-Matt

Holy crap that must have been heaps! Nice build though!









Did you end up overclocking the CPU though?









Also, I hate to be rude.. But what did all the drives cost you in total? That's an insane amount of HDD's.. When you ordered them all (If you got them all at once). They must have been like "There must be a mistake here"

EDIT: Someone likes his WDD HDD's...


----------



## edGe06

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> 2 of that board's x8 slots run at x4 which could possibly slow down my entire system since parity sync will go as fast as the slowest bandwidth. I'm not really sure if it will or not, and I do prefer the micro board. It will also lower the cost of the build, i'll have to research it some more.
> EDIT: I think i'm going to with that board, and a i3-2120 sandy instead of my original plan. PCI-E 2.0 x4 seems to have 2000MB/s bandwidth if i'm correct. 8x green drives will only use ~900MB/s.


Hey man, just read through your entire thread and I loved it.

I've been doing some research, and the board you're looking to upgrade to looks perfect, just a heads up though. I found this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182254 which is exactly the same, except doesnt have the "Integrated IPMI 2.0".. so you save $30 without it.

I'm going to be using that board when I upgrade my file server as well.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *edGe06*
> 
> Hey man, just read through your entire thread and I loved it.
> I've been doing some research, and the board you're looking to upgrade to looks perfect, just a heads up though. I found this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182254 which is exactly the same, except doesnt have the "Integrated IPMI 2.0".. so you save $30 without it.
> I'm going to be using that board when I upgrade my file server as well.


Too late, already ordered it. The other board had free shipping so it was really only a $22 difference.








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Raptor_Jesus*
> 
> Good work. I am presently running 3x1.5TB in RAID 5 on my linux server. I plan on adding a second 4x3TB RAID 6 (I need the dual parity for important data), and using the old 3x1.5TB array for backups. I like the way unRAID handles drive failures (except for the missing dual-parity and hotspare features). However, I needed the functionality of a full Linux build for my house. I would definitely not run a 40TB RAID 6 array. I would probably split that into 2 subarrays, and LVM them together. I can't even imagine how bad a rebuild of a RAID 6 array on 20 drives would be.
> Could you see what the actual throughput of this is? I.E., copy a blu-ray from your server to a desktop on the network to see what your real-world transfer speeds are.
> Subbing to this thread to see the upgrade to 3TB.


unRAID doesn't stripe, so my read speed is the same as it would be from a single drive. Writes are slower, but that's what the cache drive is for.








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Matt-Matt*
> 
> Holy crap that must have been heaps! Nice build though!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Did you end up overclocking the CPU though?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Also, I hate to be rude.. But what did all the drives cost you in total? That's an insane amount of HDD's.. When you ordered them all (If you got them all at once). They must have been like "There must be a mistake here"
> EDIT: Someone likes his WDD HDD's...


I wait for sales and order 2-5 at a time. This server use to be full 1TB/1.5TBs. I upgrade as I need too, and at this point it's usually 1-2 drives at a time. After selling the old drives, it's not too bad. If I was to build the server right now (with pre-flood HD prices), it would cost about 4 grand. I definitely wouldn't of bought every single hard drive right off the bat though. I've been upgrading this server for about 4 years now, I definitely couldn't afford to build in a single purchase.

When 4TB drives go under $200 each, I will likely buy around 10 of them and then sell a bunch of 2TBs, but that's just because my server is VERY full right now. I'm by no means rich, i'm currently saving for that purchase.


----------



## Bonn93

How are all these "Movies" obtained?


----------



## Tongan

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonn93*
> 
> How are all these "Movies" obtained?


HAHAHAHA


----------



## Blindsay

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Tongan*
> 
> HAHAHAHA


Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonn93*
> 
> How are all these "Movies" obtained?


not sure why its funny, but its in the first post. they are blu-ray rips. ive been thinking about doing that myself


----------



## Abula

Just wondering.... since i see you change your sig, how did the transcition go to the new mobo, how did you like it? personally i think the mobo offers a lot for the money, but interested on you experience.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Abula*
> 
> Just wondering.... since i see you change your sig, how did the transcition go to the new mobo, how did you like it? personally i think the mobo offers a lot for the money, but interested on you experience.


I updated it before receiving, I ordered a few days ago and it could take up to 15 days for the SAS cards to ship.








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonn93*
> 
> How are all these "Movies" obtained?


From the discs.


----------



## Tongan

I was laughing due to piracy.


----------



## edGe06

Really looking forward to how you like the new mobo. Please post up a quick review of it once you get it all up and running!


----------



## Bonn93

I was laughing at the piracy too, also the "Genre" of the movies.

We all brag about our pc storage, but we all know what its for.

Pictures of cats...


----------



## 3930K

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonn93*
> 
> I was laughing at the piracy too, also the "Genre" of the movies.
> We all brag about our pc storage, but we all know what its for.
> Pictures of cats...


----------



## Onions

man i love this... my next pc to build is gonna be somehting liek this too no where near as extreme as yours but me and my gf's dvd/blueray collection is getting to big to sort through all the disks. ill be looking at starting with a few 4 tb drives adn a 120 ssd for the cache drive. you think that would be enough? or even worth it. I have to due a lot of research first but just so i can start accuring the parts and as i have an extra 120gb ssd kicking around i was thinking of maybe selling it but if i have a use for it


----------



## Boyboyd

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blindsay*
> 
> not sure why its funny, but its in the first post. they are blu-ray rips. ive been thinking about doing that myself


You should. I've stared ripping movies and TV series. Perfectly legal in most countries, faster, and much much more convenient.


----------



## ndoggfromhell

I've started ripping my collection just because it keeps friends from permanently burrowing my movies/music/tveps.

I think I've got 7 of my 9 Tb full... when are the hard drive prices going to drop again?


----------



## Abula

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *ndoggfromhell*
> 
> I've started ripping my collection just because it keeps friends from permanently burrowing my movies/music/tveps.
> I think I've got 7 of my 9 Tb full... when are the hard drive prices going to drop again?


It should in time, but i doubt we will see as cheap as it was pre-flood, specially now that the mergers are in place, so 2 big companies controlling the market. My guess is until we se 4tb more regualarly... we wont see $80 2tb.


----------



## 3930K

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Abula*
> 
> It should in time, but i doubt we will see as cheap as it was pre-flood, specially now that the mergers are in place, so 2 big companies controlling the market. My guess is until we se 4tb more regualarly... we wont see $80 2tb.


Or until SSDs catch up.


----------



## void

Love the build









I'm getting more into these server builds. Seriously considering one myself.


----------



## lolllll117

wow nice build. how close have you gotten to filling up all 53 TB?


----------



## Crazy9000

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *lolllll117*
> 
> wow nice build. how close have you gotten to filling up all 53 TB?


It's probably a few pages back now, but he posted a screenshot of pretty much filling up the 52, and had to get another drive to make it 53.


----------



## Murlocke

I have all my new parts, minus the SAS cards. Provantage says they take around 15 days to process and it's been about 10. I hope they hurry up... After I get the new parts, the old parts will be listed as a bundle in the marketplace.

The old parts:
- Intel E5200 CPU
- Supermicro MBD-X7SBE Motherboard
- 4GB G.Skill (DDR2-800 5-5-5-15) Memory
- 3x Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 SATA Cards (Includes 24 SATA to SATA cables)
- 6x SAS to 24x SATA Cables

I'm thinking about $450 shipped for all of it, if someone didn't need the SAS cables i'd go down to $425. I'm just not listing it yet because I don't know if i'll have any issues with the new parts. If you are interested and want these parts, let me know, and I can PM you when the other build is up and running.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *lolllll117*
> 
> wow nice build. how close have you gotten to filling up all 53 TB?


Here's an updated one... I'm pretty much full. Saving up for some 4TBs, when they drop to reasonable prices i'm going to buy a couple....dozen.


----------



## Boyboyd

is your chassis fully populated yet?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Boyboyd*
> 
> is your chassis fully populated yet?


It's been full for awhile, i've been stuck upgrading 1.5TB drives to 3TB drives. Now i'm stuck upgrading 2TB drives to 3TB drives, and I don't feel it's worth it. I really was expecting under $150 4TB drives by this time, but the flood made that impossible.

I only have 2 empty slots, because unRAID supports a max of 20 data drives, 1 cache, and 1 parity. They will likely be expanding to 22 data drives within the next few months, so that'll get me another ~6TB or so. 6TB should last me about half a year since I already have ~95% of the stuff I want, and by then hopefully 4TBs will be around $150.

I've been actually debating deleting some movies/TV shows that I feel I will never watch again... but I just can't bring myself to do it. I like having a big collection.


----------



## Onions

you can always build a second rig









ps i pmd you


----------



## Boyboyd

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> It's been full for awhile, i've been stuck upgrading 1.5TB drives to 3TB drives. Now i'm stuck upgrading 2TB drives to 3TB drives, and I don't feel it's worth it. I really was expecting under $150 4TB drives by this time, but the flood made that impossible.
> I only have 2 empty slots, because unRAID supports a max of 20 data drives, 1 cache, and 1 parity. They will likely be expanding to 22 data drives within the next few months, so that'll get me another ~6TB or so. 6TB should last me about half a year since I already have ~95% of the stuff I want, and by then hopefully 4TBs will be around $150.
> I've been actually debating deleting some movies/TV shows that I feel I will never watch again... but I just can't bring myself to do it. I like having a big collection.


Is that 20 drive limitation per-pool or for the whole OS? I wouldn't bother upgrading 2TB to 3TB either if i had that many.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Boyboyd*
> 
> Is that 20 drive limitation per-pool or for the whole OS? I wouldn't bother upgrading 2TB to 3TB either if i had that many.


It's a limitation of the OS.

If I wanted more, I would need to buy another unRAID license and build a 2nd server. Then I would have to manage two servers, and separate my data. Since I stream all my movies/TV shows to my home theater (and to another room in the house), I like to have it all in one server because YAMJ can't scan two separate network directories. unRAID may add the ability to "daisy chain" 2 servers together, which would allow me to expand up to 100+ TB and still see it as 1 server. It will be awhile until that is supported though, and i'm not sure I want ~250W running 24/7.









After they get 5.0 stable out (it's on RC4 currently), I believe they will start working on 22 data drives, 1 cache, 1 parity. There is some demand for it because many unRAID users have upgraded to the Norco 4224 case and want to use all 24 drive slots.


----------



## Boyboyd

Daisy chaining them together would be best if they ever add that. I believe they do it with SAS expanders in enterprise environments but i'm not 100% sure.

I know you know, but you're really close to the 20 x 4TB limit already.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Boyboyd*
> 
> Daisy chaining them together would be best if they ever add that. I believe they do it with SAS expanders in enterprise environments but i'm not 100% sure.
> I know you know, but you're really close to the 20 x 4TB limit already.


If I bought 21 x 4TB (parity + 20 data) right now it would cost $7,350 and give me 34TB more "data" space. I believe, that would last me a good 3-4 years because I already have pretty much have all movies/TV shows I want. I would surely hope that we'd have 6+ TB drives by then.







Right now i'm using 46TB of 48TB usable.

I simply can't afford purchasing 4TB drives at their current prices. I will wait for more reasonable prices. I think I will be fine when they add 2 more data drives.


----------



## Methos07

You had said the average size of your rips is 23gb? I've been ripping to iso and getting 40+ nearly every time. It's eating my hard drive space alive.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Methos07*
> 
> You had said the average size of your rips is 23gb? I've been ripping to iso and getting 40+ nearly every time. It's eating my hard drive space alive.


It's exactly 23GB. I add all my movies up, then divide by how many movies I have. I remove menus, extras, and all but one lossless audio track with DVDFab. Most dual layer movies go from 40-45 GB to about 25GB, they store a lot of extra stuff on them.

I was keeping everything on there until I reached about 600 movies, then realized I could save like 15TB by getting rid of things I don't even care about. You don't even want to know how many hours it took to rip out all that extra crap from 600 movies. This is a big reason why i've never bothered with converting to MKV, it's a much lengthier process than just taking the main movie out of the ISO and putting it back into another ISO.


----------



## Crazy9000

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Methos07*
> 
> You had said the average size of your rips is 23gb? I've been ripping to iso and getting 40+ nearly every time. It's eating my hard drive space alive.


Isn't a single layer disc 25GB? I thought that's what most were.


----------



## Ironman517

Man, I wanted to do something about 1/100 of the size of this but my GF would kill me....









Very nice server though


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Crazy9000*
> 
> Isn't a single layer disc 25GB? I thought that's what most were.


That was true a few years ago. Most new movies are about 40-46GB if you leave everything on there. They feel the need to put about 10GB of optional audio tracks, and 10GB of special features on each disc.








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ironman517*
> 
> Man, I wanted to do something about 1/100 of the size of this but my GF would kill me....
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Very nice server though


It's not nearly as pricey as you think. Well, at least before the flood it wasn't. I was grabbing 3TB drives at $120 a pop, and 2TB drives at $70 a pop. unRAID free version supports 3 data drives and 1 parity. It would of been $480 for 9TB usable, and the ability to have 1 drive failure and rebuild. It'd probably be like $150 to build the rest of the server. No need for an expensive server motherboard, server case, or even SATA cards with 4 drives. Then if you filled that 9TB in a few years, you could upgrade unRAID for around $50 and buy a cheap SATA card ($80), and be able to do 12-14 drives for only about $130 more.

It really doesn't get that expensive until you max out your slots, and have to start upgrading drives instead of just adding new drives.


----------



## Boyboyd

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> If I bought 21 x 4TB (parity + 20 data) right now it would cost $7,350 and give me 34TB more "data" space. I believe, that would last me a good 3-4 years because I already have pretty much have all movies/TV shows I want. I would surely hope that we'd have 6+ TB drives by then.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Right now i'm using 46TB of 48TB usable.
> I simply can't afford purchasing 4TB drives at their current prices. I will wait for more reasonable prices. I think I will be fine when they add 2 more data drives.


You could probably recover some of those costs by selling the 1.5, 2, and 3TB drives you no longer need though, but it's still very expensive. I make that to be $216 / TB.

I reckon before long unRaid will support daisy chaining over iSCSI or SAS.


----------



## Crazy9000

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> That was true a few years ago. Most new movies are about 40-46GB if you leave everything on there. They feel the need to put about 10GB of optional audio tracks, and 10GB of special features on each disc.


You never know when you'll get that urge to watch "Road Warrior" with directors commentary in Spanish!


----------



## Methos07

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> It's exactly 23GB. I add all my movies up, then divide by how many movies I have. I remove menus, extras, and all but one lossless audio track with DVDFab. Most dual layer movies go from 40-45 GB to about 25GB, they store a lot of extra stuff on them.
> I was keeping everything on there until I reached about 600 movies, then realized I could save like 15TB by getting rid of things I don't even care about. You don't even want to know how many hours it took to rip out all that extra crap from 600 movies. This is a big reason why i've never bothered with converting to MKV, it's a much lengthier process than just taking the main movie out of the ISO and putting it back into another ISO.


But they remain in ISO? I've been ripping to ISO to avoid hassles with forced subtitles. Some movies have them burned in, others don't.

What's your process now? I've been using AnyDVD HD to rip directly to ISO, but if I can rip out all the extra stuff then I will do that. (I try to play all movies with XBMC so anything but the movie is skipped over anyways.)


----------



## Ironman517

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> 
> 
> Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!
> 
> 
> 
> That was true a few years ago. Most new movies are about 40-46GB if you leave everything on there. They feel the need to put about 10GB of optional audio tracks, and 10GB of special features on each disc.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> It's not nearly as pricey as you think. Well, at least before the flood it wasn't. I was grabbing 3TB drives at $120 a pop, and 2TB drives at $70 a pop. unRAID free version supports 3 data drives and 1 parity. It would of been $480 for 9TB usable, and the ability to have 1 drive failure and rebuild. It'd probably be like $150 to build the rest of the server. No need for an expensive server motherboard, server case, or even SATA cards with 4 drives. Then if you filled that 9TB in a few years, you could upgrade unRAID for around $50 and buy a cheap SATA card ($80), and be able to do 12-14 drives for only about $130 more.
> It really doesn't get that expensive until you max out your slots, and have to start upgrading drives instead of just adding new drives.


Yeah Driver are starting to come back down too,








but I think her biggest issue is that she doesnt want another computer in the house. And she would rather take a vacation


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Methos07*
> 
> But they remain in ISO? I've been ripping to ISO to avoid hassles with forced subtitles. Some movies have them burned in, others don't.
> What's your process now? I've been using AnyDVD HD to rip directly to ISO, but if I can rip out all the extra stuff then I will do that. (I try to play all movies with XBMC so anything but the movie is skipped over anyways.)


- Rip as a full ISO using AnyDVD (You technically don't even need to do this, DVDFab will do it, but I trust AnyDVD more with encryption)
- Load ISO in PowerDVD, and see whats going on with the audio/subtitle tracks. Look for "extended editions", etc.
- Use DVDFab's Blu-ray Copy to rip out main movie then automatically create a new ISO with only the main movie. This is not always an easy process, as there is sometimes many different types of the movie (especially on Disney movies).

Sadly, forced subtitles are the biggest headache in the world. There are 3 kinds:
1) Forced subtitles built into normal subtitles. 99.9% of the time they are track 1. If you keep all english subtitles, it *SHOULD* in 99% of cases, find these forced subs and automatically play them even after running it through DVDFab. I still randomly come across movies I need to re-rip and fix because of these though, maybe 1 in 100 movies.
2) A completely separate subtitle track that is enabled by default when you play the movie. You must manually check for these and if it exists, you must tell DVDFab to enable the subtitle track by default. Mild annoyance, hard to mess up as long as you check the full ISO.
3) Hardcoded into the movie. These are easy and can be ignored.

I use PowerDVD to launch the full ISO to see what's going on before I tell DVDFab what I want to leave, and what I want to remove. For some movies, it takes 30 seconds to figure out. For others, it can take 5+ minutes to figure it all out. It's still a heck of a lot simpler than converting them to MKV though. I'm OCD, so I remove all but 1 english subtitle track and that's what usually takes the longest to verify. I leave 2 subtitle tracks on there if forced subtitles are totally separate, like in example 2. However, by removing english subtitles tracks, there is a chance you will remove a track that has built-in forced subtitles, like in example 1.

The only way to be 100% sure is just to watch the movie after you remove all the extras. The easiest way, is to just not remove any english subtitle tracks, and only check the full ISO for example 2 subtitles. That should work for 100% of movies. Some movies have like 10 subtitle tracks though, and it can be pretty annoying when you actually want to enable the real subtitles.


----------



## Crazy9000

I just saw this thread about HDD prices in the news section







. Prices might not be good until 2014.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1269087/dt-hdd-prices-not-predicted-to-return-to-normal-until-2014


----------



## Bonz(TM)

Oh Murlocke, don't know how much you paid for SAS cables but I bought mine on eBay. I've had great luck with this seller (boots2sunshine)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-SAS-36-Pin-to-Mini-SAS-36-Pin-SFF-8087-Data-Cable/220964190145?ssPageName=WDVW&rd=1&ih=012&category=74941&cmd=ViewItem#ht_1538wt_1343


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonz(TM)*
> 
> Oh Murlocke, don't know how much you paid for SAS cables but I bought mine on eBay. I've had great luck with this seller (boots2sunshine)
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-SAS-36-Pin-to-Mini-SAS-36-Pin-SFF-8087-Data-Cable/220964190145?ssPageName=WDVW&rd=1&ih=012&category=74941&cmd=ViewItem#ht_1538wt_1343


I paid about twice that from Norco Direct.









Nice server you have there, about 50TB? Seems lots are starting to build them. The norco cases make it so easy, such a good value for how much they cost.


----------



## Onions

so scince i most likely will be purchasing your old parts what case would you recomend for me?

edit: in canada btw


----------



## bengal

Doesn't the case come with four 80mm fans? How did you change the panel to install three 120mm fans?


----------



## Methos07

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> - Rip as a full ISO using AnyDVD (You technically don't even need to do this, DVDFab will do it, but I trust AnyDVD more with encryption)
> - Load ISO in PowerDVD, and see whats going on with the audio/subtitle tracks. Look for "extended editions", etc.
> - Use DVDFab's Blu-ray Copy to rip out main movie then automatically create a new ISO with only the main movie. This is not always an easy process, as there is sometimes many different types of the movie (especially on Disney movies).
> Sadly, forced subtitles are the biggest headache in the world. There are 3 kinds:
> 1) Forced subtitles built into normal subtitles. 99.9% of the time they are track 1. If you keep all english subtitles, it *SHOULD* in 99% of cases, find these forced subs and automatically play them even after running it through DVDFab. I still randomly come across movies I need to re-rip and fix because of these though, maybe 1 in 100 movies.
> 2) A completely separate subtitle track that is enabled by default when you play the movie. You must manually check for these and if it exists, you must tell DVDFab to enable the subtitle track by default. Mild annoyance, hard to mess up as long as you check the full ISO.
> 3) Hardcoded into the movie. These are easy and can be ignored.
> I use PowerDVD to launch the full ISO to see what's going on before I tell DVDFab what I want to leave, and what I want to remove. For some movies, it takes 30 seconds to figure out. For others, it can take 5+ minutes to figure it all out. It's still a heck of a lot simpler than converting them to MKV though. I'm OCD, so I remove all but 1 english subtitle track and that's what usually takes the longest to verify. I leave 2 subtitle tracks on there if forced subtitles are totally separate, like in example 2. However, by removing english subtitles tracks, there is a chance you will remove a track that has built-in forced subtitles, like in example 1.
> The only way to be 100% sure is just to watch the movie after you remove all the extras. The easiest way, is to just not remove any english subtitle tracks, and only check the full ISO for example 2 subtitles. That should work for 100% of movies. Some movies have like 10 subtitle tracks though, and it can be pretty annoying when you actually want to enable the real subtitles.


Thank you for this. This is going to save me some serious space. I'd rather fix my problem now than later; I'm only at 67 movies.


----------



## Bonz(TM)

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> I paid about twice that from Norco Direct.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Nice server you have there, about 50TB? Seems lots are starting to build them. The norco cases make it so easy, such a good value for how much they cost.


Ahh.

Thanks, and yes 50TB total. 35TB useable due to 2xRAIDZ2. (RAID60 in ZFS) I take it to LANs and such so speed is key. Not to mention the countless times I've lost data to a single drive or single RAID5.

The case is low in quality in comparison to other $1k+ cases, but for the price it can't be beat. Would've went with the 4224, but a deal came up for $299.99 + free shipping + free 1.5TB drive and I couldn't pass it up.

I also used to do BD ISO rips of my stuff as well, but I found it to be slightly harder to do anything with the files. (ie. open them in any player, show family how to open them). So now I rip them using MakeMKV. I strip out the full movie track, all English Audio tracks, and all English subtitle tracks into an uncompressed .mkv. Makes trying new media players easier as well. Right now I'm stuck on Plex. I love the "On Deck" feature.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Onions*
> 
> so scince i most likely will be purchasing your old parts what case would you recomend for me?
> edit: in canada btw


http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038

Norco 4224. Yes, it's expensive, but it allows you to use SATA to SAS cables and up to 24 drives. I think you can get it cheaper elsewhere, not sure what canadian stores sell them. Also, check your PM. I'm unable to ship to Canada.








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> Doesn't the case come with four 80mm fans? How did you change the panel to install three 120mm fans?


http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=258

100% recommended. The stock 80mm fans are loud, the first thing I did was buy this and 3x Noctua 120mm, 2x Noctua 80mm. Went from a jet engine to silent, and temps are better.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Methos07*
> 
> Thank you for this. This is going to save me some serious space. I'd rather fix my problem now than later; I'm only at 67 movies.


I still have a couple movies that the popcorn hour refuses to use forced subtitles, it's very rare though, but still incredibly annoying. PowerDVD shows them correctly, so I believe it's just an issue with the popcorn hour. Some movies are just headaches, but it's worth the headaches to save all that space.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Bonz(TM)*
> 
> Ahh.
> Thanks, and yes 50TB total. 35TB useable due to 2xRAIDZ2. (RAID60 in ZFS) I take it to LANs and such so speed is key. Not to mention the countless times I've lost data to a single drive or single RAID5.
> The case is low in quality in comparison to other $1k+ cases, but for the price it can't be beat. Would've went with the 4224, but a deal came up for $299.99 + free shipping + free 1.5TB drive and I couldn't pass it up.
> I also used to do BD ISO rips of my stuff as well, but I found it to be slightly harder to do anything with the files. (ie. open them in any player, show family how to open them). So now I rip them using MakeMKV. I strip out the full movie track, all English Audio tracks, and all English subtitle tracks into an uncompressed .mkv. Makes trying new media players easier as well. Right now I'm stuck on Plex. I love the "On Deck" feature.


I've had bad luck with MakeMKV on some movies, and the popcorn hour will never support high res subtitles inside a MKV container (legal issues to my understanding, so I have to convert them to use MKV). With ISO, I don't have the mess with any of that. As for the family members, I have a popcorn hour hooked up to every TV in the house, which makes using ISO files just as easy as MKV. Without that though, ISO would be pretty annoying.


----------



## Murlocke

After a couple weeks of debating it over in my head, I think i've decided that if my new build goes well I will be buying all the same parts again and making a second server. It will be about $1800 after all is said and done, and that's without hard drives. I would move half of the drives from my current server to the new one, and then put a empty 3TB in both (and upgrade as needed).

After the initial cost, this would allow me to expand up to 120TB at $160/3TB, when it currently cost me $160/1TB ($80 after resale). In the long run it is *MUCH* cheaper than upgrading 2TB drives to 3TB drives, and then 3TB drives to 4TB drives.

Going to think it over for a few more weeks, as it's a huge purchase, I simply don't see myself having the free space i'd like anytime in the near future. I have about 3TB of stuff i'd like to put on there already.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> After a couple weeks of debating it over in my head, I think i've decided that if my new build goes well I will be buying all the same parts again and making a second server. It will be about $1800 after all is said and done, and that's without hard drives. I would move half of the drives from my current server to the new one, and then put a empty 3TB in both (and upgrade as needed).
> After the initial cost, this would allow me to expand up to 120TB at $160/3TB, when it currently cost me $160/1TB ($80 after resale). In the long run it is *MUCH* cheaper than upgrading 2TB drives to 3TB drives, then 3TB drives to 4TB drives.
> Going to think it over for a few more weeks, as it's a huge purchase, I simply don't see myself having the free space i'd like anytime in the near future. I have about 3TB of stuff i'd like to put on there already.


I'm pretty sure that you mentioned it in here recently but I can't be bothered to go back and find it (







) - how would it change the way things work with streaming to your Popcorn Hours? Will they just be able to list all the movies stored across multiple servers?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> I'm pretty sure that you mentioned it in here recently but I can't be bothered to go back and find it (
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ) - how would it change the way things work with streaming to your Popcorn Hours? Will they just be able to list all the movies stored across multiple servers?


I did mention it earlier, and wasn't considering it.. but it got me thinking.









I would put Movies on Server 1, TV Shows on Server 2. Then I would create 2 shares on the popcorn hour, one for each. My Movies and TV Shows would be separate shares, but honestly that's fine, it takes 2 seconds to exit and go to the other share. You usually know if you want to watch a TV Show or a Movie anyway.

After crunching some more numbers, it is going to be insanely cheaper for me build another server for about $1800 instead of upgrading my current server. I could build my second server for much cheaper, but I prefer to keep the parts identical. I guess it's time to blow the money I had saved for 4TB drives and just build a second server.









For now, i'm going to just buy a second Norco 4224 (and 120mm bracket), AX850 PSU, and 5x Noctua fans which is about $700. I'm going to leave my old server as-is and put the new parts into the new case. When I get a little more saved up, i'll upgrade the old server to match the parts of my new server. This setup should allow me to affordably expand to ~120TB (purchasing 1 hard drive a month or so) which should last me a good 3-4 years if not more. By then, I suspect we will have 6+ TB drives.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> I did mention it earlier, and wasn't considering it.. but it got me thinking.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I would put Movies on Server 1, TV Shows on Server 2. Then I would create 2 shares on the popcorn hour, one for each. My Movies and TV Shows would be separate shares, but honestly that's fine, it takes 2 seconds to exit and go to the other share. You usually know if you want to watch a TV Show or a Movie anyway.
> After crunching some more numbers, it is going to be insanely cheaper for me build another server for about $1800 instead of upgrading my current server. I could build my second server for much cheaper, but I prefer to keep the parts identical. I guess it's time to blow the money I had saved for 4TB drives and just build a second server.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> For now, i'm going to just buy a second Norco 4224 (and 120mm bracket), AX850 PSU, and 5x Noctua fans which is about $700. I'm going to leave my old server as-is and put the new parts into the new case. When I get a little more saved up, i'll upgrade the old server to match the parts of my new server. This setup should allow me to affordably expand to ~120TB (purchasing 1 hard drive a month or so) which should last me a good 3-4 years if not more. By then, I suspect we will have 6+ TB drives.


Nice, I like the plan. What components are you going to start with in your new server? You mention upgrading S1 in the future to match the components in S2, how come you don't just start S2 with the same i3 etc. that you use in S1 currently?

It sounds like you've got it all figured out long term anyway. 120 TB is a lot of data storage









When you say you'd purchase 1 drive a month, what size would those be?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> Nice, I like the plan. What components are you going to start with in your new server? You mention upgrading S1 in the future to match the components in S2, how come you don't just start S2 with the same i3 etc. that you use in S1 currently?
> It sounds like you've got it all figured out long term anyway. 120 TB is a lot of data storage
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> When you say you'd purchase 1 drive a month, what size would those be?


The parts listed in first post are the new parts. I updated them a few weeks back, but it took a week for me to finally order them and the SAS2LP cards take a good 15-30 days to ship, so the new parts have been sitting around. Those would be the parts that both servers would run.









Honestly it'll probably be more like 2 3TBs the first month to get 3TB free on each server, then 1 3TB every other month or so until I get everything I want on the servers. I will probably be able to stop buying drives for awhile after I reach 60TB or so. 2TB drives are the best price/gig ratio, however 3TB drives are more future proof and help avoid filling up the bays too fast. 4TB are just flat out too expensive. Ideally, by the time i'm actually filling up the last bays I hope to be using 4TB drives (or even 5TB drives) because it's going to be a *long* time until I need anywhere near 80TB, let alone 120TB.

Hard drive prices are finally coming down too, so I will only buy drives when I need too. I would like to see 3TBs at $120 each again, but right now the best you can really do is $160. I'm by no means rich, and I have to save to be able to afford this stuff.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> The parts listed in first post are the new parts. I updated them a few weeks back, but it took a week for me to finally order them and the SAS2LP cards take a good 15-30 days to ship, so the new parts have been sitting around. Those would be the parts that both servers would run.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Honestly it'll probably be more like 2 3TBs the first month to get 3TB free on each server, then 1 3TB every other month or so until I get everything I want on the servers. I will probably be able to stop buying drives for awhile after I reach 60TB or so. 2TB drives are the best price/gig ratio, however 3TB drives are more future proof and help avoid filling up the bays too fast. 4TB are just flat out too expensive. Ideally, by the time i'm actually filling up the last bays I hope to be using 4TB drives (or even 5TB drives) because it's going to be a *long* time until I need anywhere near 80TB, let alone 120TB.
> Hard drive prices are finally coming down too, so I will only buy drives when I need too. I would like to see 3TBs at $120 each again, but right now the best you can really do is $160. I'm by no means rich, and I have to save to be able to afford this stuff.


Ah, that's fair enough. I thought that the components were already running in your current server because I looked in your signature and saw them there.


----------



## Boyboyd

2 TB drives are the best value there? That's funny, over here 3TB drives are slightly better value.

It was £85 for 2TB drives and £120 for 3TB drives last month when i bought some.

Edit: just checked and they've come down to £105 now.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Boyboyd*
> 
> 2 TB drives are the best value there? That's funny, over here 3TB drives are slightly better value.
> It was £85 for 2TB drives and £120 for 3TB drives last month when i bought some.
> Edit: just checked and they've come down to £105 now.


Prices here:
$118 for 2TB green
$166 for 3TB green

So 3TBs drives need to drop $11 to be "equal" in $-per-gig ratio, but since 3TB is more future proof, I'd rather just use them.


----------



## Boyboyd

Yeah I don't blame you, especially seeing as how you have a limit of 21 drives per server. I should have bought 4 3TB drives instead, no idea why I didn't.


----------



## Ironman517

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Prices here:
> $118 for 2TB green
> $166 for 3TB green
> So 3TBs drives need to drop $11 to be "equal" in $-per-gig ratio, but since 3TB is more future proof, I'd rather just use them.


$155 3TB Barracudas if you need them








http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=66009&vpn=ST3000DM001&manufacture=Seagate&promoid=1027

I'm pretty sure you can get a 2TB for ~$100 though...







So it would be slightly more cost efficient to go 2TB still:doh:


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ironman517*
> 
> $155 3TB Barracudas if you need them
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=66009&vpn=ST3000DM001&manufacture=Seagate&promoid=1027
> I'm pretty sure you can get a 2TB for ~$100 though...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> So it would be slightly more cost efficient to go 2TB still:doh:


I tend to order WD only:
- Free cross ship during RMAs. No other HD company has this, they get a new drive to my house a day after creating RMA.
- 2+ year warranty on it's drives. Almost all (if not all) others are now doing 1 year.


----------



## Murlocke

My SAS cards and 2nd Nocro 4224 are arriving today, so i'll be able to rebuild the old server using the new parts.

Still have to buy these parts to finish the second server:
*Motherboard:* Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O
*CPU:* Intel i3-2120 (3.3GHz)
*Memory:* 8GB Kingston (DDR3 1333)
*SAS Cards:* 3x Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 (After ordering these will take a good 15-30 days to ship







)

CPU was $105 the other day, knew I should of grabbed it. SAS cards also increased about $10 per card because they are constantly on backorder. Will have to wait for next paycheck before I can afford to buy the rest of the parts. Pretty excited to get one server done though.


----------



## Boyboyd

Those supermicro SAS cards are great value. I never realised they were so cheap before.


----------



## tycoonbob

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> I tend to order WD only:
> - Free cross ship during RMAs. No other HD company has this, they get a new drive to my house a day after creating RMA.
> - 2+ year warranty on it's drives. Almost all (if not all) others are now doing 1 year.


Hitachi's Deskstar series drives come with a 3 year warranty. They don't have cross-shipping with RMA, but now that WD bought them...maybe they will start eventually? I love the Deskstart 7K3000 drives (2TB and 3TB), and can't wait until the 7K4000 4TB come down to a reasonable price. The 7K4000 4TB are around $289 now, which is not horrible for the size, but I see you also prefer green drives. I like my 7200RPM, 64MB Cache for some reason.


----------



## utnorris

Any advantage of Unraid over say Server 2008 or WHS besides cost? I have a small server currently with about 12TB of space. I am using the onboard RAID controller and a PERC 5i card currently, but the PERC does not support 3TB drives, so I am debating on getting an IBM M1015 controller, but I would still be limited to 8 drives on it and at 3TB each it would only be 12TB for that controller. What I would like is to be able to see one drive pool, but have redundancy. I looked at Unraid before, but because I have a Tech Net account already I went W7, plus I wanted to be able to crunch on the box and run my conversions from it without having to use a second box. I have room for 22 drives in my Lian Li case, so I am debating on how I am going to do this. I am not in a hurry as I only have about 150 movies so far and have only used about 2TB worth of space. I only do the main movie and not the whole thing, I don't care for all the extra's and the kids just want to see the movie.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *utnorris*
> 
> Any advantage of Unraid over say Server 2008 or WHS besides cost? I have a small server currently with about 12TB of space. I am using the onboard RAID controller and a PERC 5i card currently, but the PERC does not support 3TB drives, so I am debating on getting an IBM M1015 controller, but I would still be limited to 8 drives on it and at 3TB each it would only be 12TB for that controller. What I would like is to be able to see one drive pool, but have redundancy. I looked at Unraid before, but because I have a Tech Net account already I went W7, plus I wanted to be able to crunch on the box and run my conversions from it without having to use a second box. I have room for 22 drives in my Lian Li case, so I am debating on how I am going to do this. I am not in a hurry as I only have about 150 movies so far and have only used about 2TB worth of space. I only do the main movie and not the whole thing, I don't care for all the extra's and the kids just want to see the movie.


I think the advantage would be the fact that the RAID is all managed by the software so it's a lot easier to have a huge pool of drives. Plus it might be lighter with resource usage than Windows. Not too sure on that though.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *utnorris*
> 
> Any advantage of Unraid over say Server 2008 or WHS besides cost? I have a small server currently with about 12TB of space. I am using the onboard RAID controller and a PERC 5i card currently, but the PERC does not support 3TB drives, so I am debating on getting an IBM M1015 controller, but I would still be limited to 8 drives on it and at 3TB each it would only be 12TB for that controller. What I would like is to be able to see one drive pool, but have redundancy. I looked at Unraid before, but because I have a Tech Net account already I went W7, plus I wanted to be able to crunch on the box and run my conversions from it without having to use a second box. I have room for 22 drives in my Lian Li case, so I am debating on how I am going to do this. I am not in a hurry as I only have about 150 movies so far and have only used about 2TB worth of space. I only do the main movie and not the whole thing, I don't care for all the extra's and the kids just want to see the movie.


unRAID doesn't stripe data, and 1 parity drive can support 20 data discs. If one drive fails you rebuild it. If two drives fail, you lose data on those 2 drives only. With 3TB drives, you can have real time back up of 60TB using only 3TB. If your motherboard, RAID/SATA card, etc dies, you can replace it with virtually anything on the market and you still have your data. You are not locked into hardware, and can even mix/match drives as much as you want. There are a few parts, mostly older chipsets and RAID cards, that won't work with unRAID. unRAID only needs SATA cards which are cheaper, infact I would avoid RAID cards because unRAID sometimes has issues with them.

You can give unRAID free a try, it supports parity + 3 data drives. So with 3TB drives, you could get 9TB with real time backup. If you like what you see by the time you fill that 9TB up, you can buy the pro version and start expanding. You won't need to wipe your data to expand, which is another great thing about unRAID. Keep in mind unRAID does use a different filesystem (won't mater for transferring files to other computers), but you can't just take a drive out and put it into a non-unRAID PC. You can't do that with RAID either, so I wouldn't really called that a "con". unRAID also is pretty much 100% over the network, I don't even have a monitor/keyboard connected to my server. You type in your server's local IP in your web browser and it takes you to the web GUI. The only time I had to hook up a monitor is to access the BIOs, however my new motherboard supports IPMI so I can access the server's BIOs via my normal computer. Anytime I need to send it a more advanced command, I can just telnet into the server and send it. The forums are pretty active for new users that need help.

unRAID will be slower than normal raid though, but if you are like me that doesn't matter. I get about 95MB/s reads and 30MB/s writes. The reads are independent with each disk (If one user is transferring files off disk 1 at 95MB/s, you can transfer files off disk 2 at 95MB/s at the same time). With a cache drive it's about 80MB/s writes. What the cache drive does is acts as a "middle man", it's a drive outside the unraid array and is not protected. When you transfer to the server, it transfers it to this drive and then unRAID will send the data to the array in the background (you can set up how often you want it to do this). I have mine move over once a week, I would consider this drive a must because unRAID is designed around having one. Without it, I tend to get wierd time out issues with Windows 7. With it, there are none.

The fact unRAID does not stripe data is the deal breaker for me. With almost all other solutions you risk complete data loss, with unRAID (exception of fires, etc) it is impossible. The speed is plenty for streaming dozens of uncompressed BD at the same time.
Quote:


> 150 movies so far and have only used about 2TB worth of space.


Those can't be blu-ray in full quality.









150 movies is 3.75TB at 25GB/movie, that's with all audio removed (minus 1 lossless track) and all menus/extras removed. You might of got lucky with some smaller movies or possibly remove the lossless audio? I'm averaging 23GB/movie with a rather large sample, it adds up FAST!
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> I think the advantage would be the fact that the RAID is all managed by the software so it's a lot easier to have a huge pool of drives. Plus it might be lighter with resource usage than Windows. Not too sure on that though.


unRAID hardware requirements are definitely lower. I suggest 4-8GB ram so you can use the cache_dir user addon to keep things cache in the RAM (avoids spin ups) but other than that i've seem people use incredibly out dated parts with good results. I prefer having modern and faster parts, but it's definitely not needed.

Speaking of unRAID addons, I consider this one a must-have:
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12698.0

It redoes the entire GUI, and adds some very nice features. It's updated quite a bit too.


----------



## tycoonbob

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *utnorris*
> 
> Any advantage of Unraid over say Server 2008 or WHS besides cost? I have a small server currently with about 12TB of space. I am using the onboard RAID controller and a PERC 5i card currently, but the PERC does not support 3TB drives, so I am debating on getting an IBM M1015 controller, but I would still be limited to 8 drives on it and at 3TB each it would only be 12TB for that controller. What I would like is to be able to see one drive pool, but have redundancy. I looked at Unraid before, but because I have a Tech Net account already I went W7, plus I wanted to be able to crunch on the box and run my conversions from it without having to use a second box. I have room for 22 drives in my Lian Li case, so I am debating on how I am going to do this. I am not in a hurry as I only have about 150 movies so far and have only used about 2TB worth of space. I only do the main movie and not the whole thing, I don't care for all the extra's and the kids just want to see the movie.


UnRaid is pretty cool, but I prefer hardware raid. I like the performance, since I will be using my storage server more as a SAN, with iSCSI Targets for 15-24 Virtual Machines. 7200 RPM drives with a true hardware Raid 5 can net writes over 200MB/s, with reads closer to 400MB/s. Granted, I will be using a Raid 50, or multiple Raid 6's or something...but I still prefer hardware raid.

Your issue about only having 2 SFF-8087 ports (8 SATA drives) can be solved in one of two ways. Either buy a bigger raid card, with more SFF-8087 ports (some Raid controllers have 6 SFF-8087, allowing 24 drives)...or get a SAS Expander card, such as the HP SAS Expander Card. You can connect a two SFF-8087 raid controller to two of these cards (one SFF-8087 to each) which would allow or a total of 64 drives directly, or up to your controllers limits if you utilize SAS Expander boxes, and chain them together. In my build over here, I plan to use the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9261-8i Raid Controller, with the HP SAS Expander Card, to run 24 drives. I will be dual linking between the controller and the expander card, for increased bandwidth. The SAS Expander cards can be bought for $200-400 depending on location, and supply. A decent 2 SFF-8087 Raid Controller can be bought for $400-500, so while not cheap...it would definitely allow for better performance than UnRaid...as well as Raid 6, 50, 60, 10, etc...Unraid is definitely cheaper, and perfectly okay for file storage/media streaming.

Also, Windows Server 2012 has a new feature called Storage Spaces, which is somewhat like UnRaid. Allows for software raid (stripe, mirror, or parity)...as well as storage pools across multiple physical boxes. Only sucks that if you cluster two (or more) Server 2012 boxes for Storage Spaces, you can't run parity raid.


----------



## Murlocke

Just finished building the first of two servers. Will post more pictures when both servers are done, will probably be 15-25 days.


----------



## Ellis

Looks awesome, if anything it's neater than my PC and I only have four drives in there









Through seeing your experience with unRAID and reading your latest post I'm pretty sure that it's what I'd use if I were ever to build a file server. I'm sure I will some day but it will probably be a good few years, so things might have changed by then anyway.

utnorris, it definitely sounds to me like you're encoding the movies before storing them if you've managed to fit that many in 2 TB.


----------



## Onions

wow thats so cool man


----------



## utnorris

I guess I should have clarified I am doing regular DVD's and only a few BR's so far. Eventually I will start to do more BR's, but right now I am copying my DVD collection and so they are averaging around 4.2Gb per disk for the main movie without any extras. I am currently streaming to a Apple TV2 hacked with XBMC on it and it works great, but it's limited in the fact it does not have all the extra buttons like FF, skip chapter, etc. So just copying the movie allows me to start the movie right away and I don't have to mess with CC or anything else. For me, it's a great way to maximize my space and keep it simple for the family. Since the Apple V2 is only 720p, the quality is fine for now. Once they get XMBC ported to the Apple TV3 I will start to do BR ISO's. I like the ISO's because if I need to convert it to something smaller for say the Ipad DVD Fab can do it easily.

I like the idea of UnRaid, however, I want the machine to do more than just stream, such as crunch/fold or do my video conversions. I guess I could setup a VM and run UnRaid on that, but I wanted to keep it simple. As far as using the higher port card, I am trying to keep the costs down which is why I am looking at the M1015 card since it will do 8 x 3TB drives and does RAID 10 which is great for the green drives. I guess I can always run a couple of them, although I do not think MegaRaid software will combine them as one pool, but having two 12TB folders will be fine. However, having 45TB of space is nice too. Things to think about.


----------



## Murlocke

Pretty sure one of my Noctua fans are on the way out. Making a clicking sound.









I had some other minor hiccups with the build, had to disable PCI boot because it wasn't detecting one of the SAS cards and gave me quite a scare when I started unRAID. Everything is working now.

Current parity checking speed:
Estimated speed: 94.1 MB/sec
Estimated finish: 8 hours, 47 minutes

Up from 48MB/s (which took about a day, and it's recommended to parity check once a month).


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *utnorris*
> 
> I guess I should have clarified I am doing regular DVD's and only a few BR's so far. Eventually I will start to do more BR's, but right now I am copying my DVD collection and so they are averaging around 4.2Gb per disk for the main movie without any extras. I am currently streaming to a Apple TV2 hacked with XBMC on it and it works great, but it's limited in the fact it does not have all the extra buttons like FF, skip chapter, etc. So just copying the movie allows me to start the movie right away and I don't have to mess with CC or anything else. For me, it's a great way to maximize my space and keep it simple for the family. Since the Apple V2 is only 720p, the quality is fine for now. Once they get XMBC ported to the Apple TV3 I will start to do BR ISO's. I like the ISO's because if I need to convert it to something smaller for say the Ipad DVD Fab can do it easily.
> I like the idea of UnRaid, however, I want the machine to do more than just stream, such as crunch/fold or do my video conversions. I guess I could setup a VM and run UnRaid on that, but I wanted to keep it simple. As far as using the higher port card, I am trying to keep the costs down which is why I am looking at the M1015 card since it will do 8 x 3TB drives and does RAID 10 which is great for the green drives. I guess I can always run a couple of them, although I do not think MegaRaid software will combine them as one pool, but having two 12TB folders will be fine. However, having 45TB of space is nice too. Things to think about.


If you're only going to put XBMC on anyway, how come you want an Apple TV for it?

Also, wouldn't Folding have negative effects on performance as a server?


----------



## Murlocke

Just got the other Norco 4224. They made some pretty big changes since V2, they are constantly updating these things it seems. Every single piece of electronic, hotswap bays, and fans is different in the case. I knew the case would be improved, but it's almost like a completely different case!

Left is V2, Right is V3:


----------



## utnorris

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> If you're only going to put XBMC on anyway, how come you want an Apple TV for it?
> 
> Also, wouldn't Folding have negative effects on performance as a server?


The Apple TV2 has more than just XBMC on it, but that's the main part I use to stream videos to the tv. It's small, compact and just works. I needed something that was wife friendly and this is.

Folding does not have any affect on the streaming that I can tell, of course it's a 6-core 960t AMD chip with 16Gb of Ram, so it has plenty of power, but since I am not streaming constantly I wanted the computer to be able do other things instead of just looking pretty. I also use it to directly rip files, although I can do that from my gaming machine just the same, but still. Anyway, I am going to think about UnRaid for a bit. THere is not a whole lot of info on the website, any good reviews out there?

Also, if I understand correctly, I can have 21 data drives + 1 cache drive + 1 parity drive, for a total of 23 drives, is this correct?

For the cache drive, does it have to be a big drive like the parity drive? And can I use a 60Gb SSD I have for the cache drive? Any benefit to do that?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *utnorris*
> 
> Also, if I understand correctly, I can have 21 data drives + 1 cache drive + 1 parity drive, for a total of 23 drives, is this correct?
> For the cache drive, does it have to be a big drive like the parity drive? And can I use a 60Gb SSD I have for the cache drive? Any benefit to do that?


20 data drives + 1 cache + 1 parity. Even without parity/cache it's still 20 data drives.

Cache drive can be any size, i've seen people use SSDs... however your going to be limited to 100MB/s unless your using dual gigabit or something. 60GB is really small if you plan on using big files. If you transferred a 30GB movie to unRAID, that file would sit on your cache drive until you tell it to move it off or until your specified move time happens. You can set it to daily, weekly, or monthly with some customization on each (such as time).

I use a 1TB Black, and i've had it fill up if I transfer over 1TB of data in one week. I have it set to move it over weekly and that's because it spins up every drive in the system when the mover starts. I don't feel spinning up every drive every single day just so it can move over 2-3 files is worth it.

You can set minimum free space for your cache drive (mine is set to 50GB), and after it reaches that point it starts copying directly to the array, so it goes down to about 25-30MB/s. With 25GB movies that takes awhile, and if your hard drives are near full i've had some network issues pop up where the server would become unresponsive and the transfer would abort. With the cache drive this has never happened, as the transfer from the cache drive to the array is internal. I make sure I never reach that limit, and if i'm nearing it I manually start the mover earlier.

It seems like you want it to do other things. unRAID is really only designed as a file server and nothing more. There are some users mods that allow you to run programs like Transmission, SABnzbd, SickBeard, and a few other things but it's not very user friendly and nothing like what you seem to want it to do.

May I suggest two servers like my friend is currently doing? One unRAID server for media, then a smaller WHS-type server that has more options, like folding. His setup is:
51TB unRAID server (almost same parts as my old server)
9TB Windows server


----------



## utnorris

What about running a dual NIC card? I have an Intel dual NIC card I use now in the system, mainly to ensure I have enough bandwidth between my gaming PC and server since I was transferring about 2tb of info to the server. It allowed me to stay above the 100Mbs mark which was nice. As far as using the machine for other things, I guess I could make it a dedicated media server, ripping from my gaming machine seems to be just as good as doing it on the machine itself. As far as folding goes, it's not necessary, but I thought since the box was just sitting there, why not? Of course, if I can setup WOL on it, then the box could go into sleep saving me electricity, not that's my concern, but I guess it's a benefit. Anyways, you have me thinking, especially since it would allow me to maximize my space. I currently have the following drives:

4 x 3TB Green drives in RAID 10
2 x 3TB Green Drives in RAID 1
4 x 1TB Hitachi SATA2 drives in RAID5
Soon to add 4 Hitachi SATA3 2TB drives in a RAID5 setup

So basically I am loosing a lot of space due to the Green Drives not playing well with RAID5. If I built an UnRaid box I would get a lot of that space back. Can I create one folder for movies that spans all the drives without having the data sit on two of those drives? I think I can, but I got confused reading the Bit-tech review, so I want to make sure. Also, any benefit to using PCIe x8 SATA cards versus PCIe x1 or x4 cards?

I appreciate all the answers to what may seem like basic questions, but obviously you know a lot about it. And to be clear, what i can live with is a box I can stream from easily to my Apple TV, W7 PC, Xbox 360 or just about any other device and get redundancy for my pics, docs and other critical data.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *utnorris*
> 
> What about running a dual NIC card? I have an Intel dual NIC card I use now in the system, mainly to ensure I have enough bandwidth between my gaming PC and server since I was transferring about 2tb of info to the server. It allowed me to stay above the 100Mbs mark which was nice. As far as using the machine for other things, I guess I could make it a dedicated media server, ripping from my gaming machine seems to be just as good as doing it on the machine itself. As far as folding goes, it's not necessary, but I thought since the box was just sitting there, why not? Of course, if I can setup WOL on it, then the box could go into sleep saving me electricity, not that's my concern, but I guess it's a benefit. Anyways, you have me thinking, especially since it would allow me to maximize my space. I currently have the following drives:
> 4 x 3TB Green drives in RAID 10
> 2 x 3TB Green Drives in RAID 1
> 4 x 1TB Hitachi SATA2 drives in RAID5
> Soon to add 4 Hitachi SATA3 2TB drives in a RAID5 setup
> So basically I am loosing a lot of space due to the Green Drives not playing well with RAID5. If I built an UnRaid box I would get a lot of that space back. Can I create one folder for movies that spans all the drives without having the data sit on two of those drives? I think I can, but I got confused reading the Bit-tech review, so I want to make sure. Also, any benefit to using PCIe x8 SATA cards versus PCIe x1 or x4 cards?
> I appreciate all the answers to what may seem like basic questions, but obviously you know a lot about it. And to be clear, what i can live with is a box I can stream from easily to my Apple TV, W7 PC, Xbox 360 or just about any other device and get redundancy for my pics, docs and other critical data.


If you put all those on unRAID you'd have 27TB of space (before formatting, with parity drive enabled) if my math is correct. By the way, I tend to set the spin down timer on green drives to 300 seconds (max) using wdidle3, that feature lowers the lifetime of the drives because it parks the head every 8 seconds which is complete overkill. You just put wdidle on a bootable USB, boot to it, type "wdidle3.exe /s300" and it does the rest. I've never tried doing it when the drive currently exists in a raid array though, I assume it would be fine but i'd make sure. Google about LLC counts and green drives for more information, it's pretty scary.

You can create a user share called "Movies" and set include/exclude any drives you want. There are tons of different types of ways to customize how you want things stored, there's a learning curve but unRAID has a wiki and a forum. You can map your share in Windows, and it will just act like a single drive.

You want your SATA cards to have the bandwidth to handle all drives at max at the same time. For green drives, I would go no less than x4 PCIe, or your parity syncs will slow down. You want to run a parity sync every month to ensure everything is still working and correct, and with 3TB drives that will take about 10 hours (My old PCI-X cards took about 24 hours to parity sync, hence why I upgraded!). Your server will still be usable during this time, but you may get a chop or two if your watching some very high bitrate blu-ray. I have mine scheduled to run at midnight, so it doesn't really bother me.

I really suggest giving the free version a try before buying, you can upgrade to pro and not wipe your data. I don't like recommending unRAID (though I do recommend it, if that makes sense) because I know some people won't understand it and I personally had very bad experiences with it until I figured it all out (I'm 80% sure my issues were faulty SATA cables though). After you figure it all out, and start branching over to some of the good user addons and stuff, it really starts to shine and I wouldn't trade it for anything at this point. Also, you need to run unRAID 5.0, which is currently in Beta/RC, for 3TB support. The final 5.0 should be out very soon... but i've had no problems with it. You can update unRAID to the final release without wiping your data, so it's no biggy.


----------



## HardwareDecoder

just started reading this thread a bit. wow murlocke thats a crazy setup for sure. what the heck do you do with 53tb of storage?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *HardwareDecoder*
> 
> just started reading this thread a bit. wow murlocke thats a crazy setup for sure. what the heck do you do with 53tb of storage?


It's going to be 120TB or so soon. I'm not really sure if I should make a new thread or not, since my server(s) have changed completely and the first ~300 comments are confusing now.

I may just get this thread closed and make a new one after both servers are up and running.


----------



## HardwareDecoder

haha I dont even have a blu-ray player/drive since i got rid of my ps3 a year ago. what does the avg blu-ray movie cost anyway?


----------



## utnorris

Awesome, thank you so much for the help. Yeah, I know about the LLC, which is why I am running them in RAID10 which WD suggests, but it's such a waste of space. I am actually pretty excited about the prospect of having that much storage, not that I need it right now, but still. Anyway, going to mull it over for a bit, I appreciate the help. Decisions, decisions.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *utnorris*
> 
> Awesome, thank you so much for the help. Yeah, I know about the LLC, which is why I am running them in RAID10 which WD suggests, but it's such a waste of space. I am actually pretty excited about the prospect of having that much storage, not that I need it right now, but still. Anyway, going to mull it over for a bit, I appreciate the help. Decisions, decisions.


I wouldn't do it in one go, really really suggest doing the free version with 4x 3TB drives and getting use to it before making the choice completely. unRAID is not cheap, and you will need to either wipe your existing data or store it somewhere else as you format the drives for unRAID. Hopefully you have enough space to wipe that many drives and store the data elsewhere.


----------



## Boyboyd

Sorry if you've already answered this, but how many drives have you lost (and successfully rebuilt) so far?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Boyboyd*
> 
> Sorry if you've already answered this, but how many drives have you lost (and successfully rebuilt) so far?


I've only had to rebuild once because of a dying hard drive. I have rebuilded over a dozen time though successfully because when you upgrade a hard drive (from say 1.5TB to 3TB), the process is shutting the server off, taking the 1.5TB drive out and putting the 3TB drive in. Then you assign the new drive and data rebuild the old data onto the new disk.

I've never had any problems with it.


----------



## bengal

Does unRaid have features to backup every computer in the network automatically like WHS?


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> Does unRaid have features to backup every computer in the network automatically like WHS?


Surely this could just be achieved by using the Windows Backup feature and selecting the unRAID share as the backup location? I don't think it would have features like being able to wake up the computer from sleep in order to perform the backup, though.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> Does unRaid have features to backup every computer in the network automatically like WHS?


No, but as Ellis says, you could manually do it and store the backups on unRAID. unRAID is designed to store media files and other similar types, those types of features are more designed for a different type of server. unRAID is for getting the highest possible usable space, while still having real time protection against hard drive failure.

I don't believe WHS supports backing up 60TB of data onto 3TB, in real time (or even close). I may be wrong, I haven't used it for awhile.


----------



## bengal

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> Surely this could just be achieved by using the Windows Backup feature and selecting the unRAID share as the backup location? I don't think it would have features like being able to wake up the computer from sleep in order to perform the backup, though.


Oo good idea, why didn't I think of that 
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> No, but as Ellis says, you could manually do it and store the backups on unRAID. unRAID is designed to store media files and other similar types, those types of features are more designed for a different type of server. unRAID is for getting the highest possible usable space, while still having real time protection against hard drive failure.
> I don't believe WHS supports backing up 60TB of data onto 3TB, in real time (or even close). I may be wrong, I haven't used it for awhile.


What if I used a RAID card with WHS to make a home server?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> Oo good idea, why didn't I think of that
> What if I used a RAID card with WHS to make a home server?


I don't think any form of RAID allows you to backup 20 data drives onto 1 drive like unRAID does. Most people using WHS are losing ~30% or more of their space. To my understanding, you also cannot add discs to an existing RAID, or remove discs without wiping the entire array. They also usually recommend (or require) the same drives in the array, so if you have a failure you need to have the exact same model to replace it with. Sometimes those models don't exist anymore, so you can't rebuild.

unRAID can do all these things and doesn't suffer from the problems of normal RAID. The downside is, it's not going to be fast like RAID and you aren't going to have many features other than a simple storage server.









For things like Movies/TV Shows, I feel unRAID is greatly superior than WHS. For things that require lots of speed or features (such as automatic backup of tons of computers, data being accessed by dozens of people, etc) then WHS would be superior. I still trust unRAID with my data more than any striped RAID array. I've seen plenty of people have a hardware RAID card fail, or another RAID issue, and lose all their data.

With the exception of user error, I haven't seen anyone lose data on unRAID unless 2 drives fail at the same time (and even then it's only data loss on those 2 drives, not all your data like RAID).


----------



## bengal

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> I don't think any form of RAID allows you to backup 20 data drives onto 1 drive like unRAID does. Most people using WHS are losing ~30% or more of their space. To my understanding, you also cannot add discs to an existing RAID, or remove discs without wiping the entire array. They also usually recommend (or require) the same drives in the array, so if you have a failure you need to have the exact same model to replace it with. Sometimes those models don't exist anymore, so you can't rebuild.
> unRAID can do all these things and doesn't suffer from the problems of normal RAID. The downside is, it's not going to be fast like RAID and you aren't going to have many features other than a simple storage server.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> For things like Movies/TV Shows, I feel unRAID is greatly superior than WHS. For things that require lots of speed or features (such as automatic backup of tons of computers, data being accessed by dozens of people, etc) then WHS would be superior. I still trust unRAID with my data more than any striped RAID array. I've seen plenty of people have a hardware RAID card fail, or another RAID issue, and lose all their data.
> With the exception of user error, I haven't seen anyone lose data on unRAID unless 2 drives fail at the same time (and even then it's only data loss on those 2 drives, not all your data like RAID).


I was thinking of doing RAID 6 or dual RAID 6 with a RAID card. Aren't there cards that, even if it dies, the RAID still remains intact and there's no loss of data? Just replacing the RAID card with a new one solves the problem. I am looking for a solution for both backing up all of my computers in my network automatically and media serving. What will you recommend?


----------



## Murlocke

Figures.. a day after I order my parts, much of it goes on sale. Could of saved $110 if I waited. Newegg gave me $30 back, and $25 credit... but I'm still out $55.








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> I was thinking of doing RAID 6 or dual RAID 6 with a RAID card. Aren't there cards that, even if it dies, the RAID still remains intact and there's no loss of data? Just replacing the RAID card with a new one solves the problem. I am looking for a solution for both backing up all of my computers in my network automatically and media serving. What will you recommend?


Wish I could help but i'm not very up to date on RAID/WHS, I haven't used them for awhile. I've never needed those features.


----------



## Boyboyd

I have a question, if you have 22 drives and 1 fails you have to replace it.

When your server is powered off how do you know which physical drive has failed? Did you label them or am I missing something massive here?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Boyboyd*
> 
> I have a question, if you have 22 drives and 1 fails you have to replace it.
> When your server is powered off how do you know which physical drive has failed? Did you label them or am I missing something massive here?


You could label them on the case or write down which serial number is in each drive bay. unRAID shows the serial number you can just make a mental note of the last 4-5 digits of the serial number, and then pull drives out until you find it or have your drives organized so you just have to count the bays.

For me:
Hotswap 1: Parity
Hotswap 2: Cache
Hotswap 3+: Data

So if data drive 7 failed for me, it would be in slot 9. I double check the serial number before replacing.


----------



## Boyboyd

That makes a lot of sense. I didn't actually realise that the serial number would be printed on the disk itself, i definitely prefer that way.

Gonna make an excel spreadsheet now. Thanks.


----------



## bengal

Wait what happens if your parity drive or the cache drive dies? Or both these drives dies?


----------



## Boyboyd

If the pairity drive dies then you just replace and rebuild it, seeing as how you have all your data it will be able to rebuild the parity data.

If the cache drive dies you'll just have slower read speeds until you replace it.


----------



## Murlocke

I now have all my parts for both servers, minus the 3x SAS cards. Hopefully I will have both servers built by next weekend, though it really depends on Provantage getting the cards in stock.

This thread has gotten incredibly big, and much of the posts are over a year old. After I get them built, i'm just going to make a new thread and stop updating this one.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Boyboyd*
> 
> If the pairity drive dies then you just replace and rebuild it, seeing as how you have all your data it will be able to rebuild the parity data.
> If the cache drive dies you'll just have slower read speeds until you replace it.


Correct, though you would lose all data on your cache drive since it's not protected. The majority of the time you don't have much on there though, I have it set to move data off of it once a week, so if the drive failed at the worst possible time I would lose 7 days worth of new data. Very rare, and even then 7 days worth of data is usually not very much.


----------



## Ellis

I forbid you from making a new thread unless the first post includes plenty of good photographs









I would like to see some though, both of the servers and of the awesome A/V setup that you must have. And I still want to see what however-many Blu-rays you have looks like


----------



## bengal

What if one data drive dies? Or two? Or three? Is the data on those drives safe? Or will it be lost?

And I believe you can't add more than one parity drive in unRaid?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> What if one data drive dies? Or two? Or three? Is the data on those drives safe? Or will it be lost?
> And I believe you can't add more than one parity drive in unRaid?


One data drive can be rebuilt, two or more cannot. You would only lose data on those 2 drives though. unRAID will add support for dual parity down the road, but that starts to get expensive (with 2 servers, i'm looking at $650 at current prices just for 4 parity drives).
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Ellis*
> 
> I forbid you from making a new thread unless the first post includes plenty of good photographs
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I would like to see some though, both of the servers and of the awesome A/V setup that you must have. And I still want to see what however-many Blu-rays you have looks like


I will post pictures of the new servers. I had my home theater specs (and a picture) up earlier. I removed them though because I felt the thread had too much of a "bragging" feeling to it and I wanted the thread to be focused on the server. My home theater is nothing compared to some of the users over on AVSforums. It honestly not even a home theater, it's a small dedicated room with 1 sofa, "high end consumer" 7.1 speakers, and Sony's current flagship 55" HX929.

I might post the specs again in the new thread, and a picture, but it's not incredibly amazing. Most the stuff is in my sig computer specs because I connect it to my receiver/speakers/TV.

I plan on buying a small server rack for these 2 new servers, but right now I can't afford it. They run about $200-$300, and I still need to spend about $800 on 5x 3TB drives. Right now I have $100, and I owe someone $800 since they loaned me the money to order the 2nd server sooner. Need to wait for a couple paychecks...


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> One data drive can be rebuilt, two or more cannot. You would only lose data on those 2 drives though. unRAID will add support for dual parity down the road, but that starts to get expensive (with 2 servers, i'm looking at $650 at current prices just for 4 parity drives).
> I will post pictures of the new servers. I had my home theater specs (and a picture) up earlier. I removed them though because I felt the thread had too much of a "bragging" feeling to it and I wanted the thread to be focused on the server. My home theater is nothing compared to some of the users over on AVSforums. It honestly not even a home theater, it's a small dedicated room with 1 sofa, "high end consumer" 7.1 speakers, and Sony's current flagship 55" HX929.
> I might post the specs again in the new thread, and a picture, but it's not incredibly amazing. Most the stuff is in my sig computer specs because I connect it to my receiver/speakers/TV.
> I plan on buying a small server rack for these 2 new servers, but right now I can't afford it. They run about $200-$300, and I still need to spend about $800 on 5x 3TB drives. Right now I have $100, and I owe someone $800 since they loaned me the money to order the 2nd server sooner. Need to wait for a couple paychecks...


Yeah but my home cinema is a monitor on my desk, and that's about it









You could always just make a Lack rack.


----------



## Murlocke

I just missed out on a bulk deal of $107/drive for 20 drives. Might end up having to spend $160/drive.


----------



## Murlocke

Well, my friend was able to get a bulk deal via his business. We ordered 20 3TB Western Digital WD30EZRX drives for $2000 (60TB total, $100 per drive). I will only be keeping 10 though, my friend is keeping the remaining 10.

Heck of a lot cheaper than I was paying...


----------



## herkalurk

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Well, my friend was able to get a bulk deal via his business. We ordered 20 3TB Western Digital WD30EZRX drives for $2000 (60TB total, $100 per drive). I will only be keeping 10 though, my friend is keeping the remaining 10.
> Heck of a lot cheaper than I was paying...


Wow, nice deal, I think I'll stick with my 3 X 2 TB samsung drives in a raid 5 for now. Glad you were able to get them at a reasonable price. How's the hot weather near UNI?


----------



## Murlocke

Just waiting for the last 3 SAS cards for 2nd server...
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *herkalurk*
> 
> Wow, nice deal, I think I'll stick with my 3 X 2 TB samsung drives in a raid 5 for now. Glad you were able to get them at a reasonable price. How's the hot weather near UNI?


I went outside for a bit, then immediately turned around and went back into the AC.


----------



## herkalurk

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> I went outside for a bit, then immediately turned around and went back into the AC.


I know that feeling, I've been inside all day here in St. Paul. I grew up just south of Cedar Falls actually, and my parents still don't have AC, but not living in the city helps with the heat, and less things to block the wind from getting through their little town. Are you planning to completely just up and move all 53 TB to the new server when the new drives arrive? Obviously in a systematic way to preserve the data....

Even if you have 2 or 3 1 gig links bonded, it would easily take days.


----------



## rickyman0319

WD 2TB HD for at leat $120 USD on newegg right now.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *herkalurk*
> 
> I know that feeling, I've been inside all day here in St. Paul. I grew up just south of Cedar Falls actually, and my parents still don't have AC, but not living in the city helps with the heat, and less things to block the wind from getting through their little town. Are you planning to completely just up and move all 53 TB to the new server when the new drives arrive? Obviously in a systematic way to preserve the data....
> Even if you have 2 or 3 1 gig links bonded, it would easily take days.


Nah, I already have movies on drives 10-20 and TV Shows on drives 1-9. That's another benefit of unRAID, I can just take out drives 10-20 and put them in the new server and it will work, and with the hotswap bays it'll take like 3 minutes. I will have to recalculate parity on both systems though before my data is protected, which will take about 13 hours. Going to put 5 empty 3TBs in both servers after that, which gives me about 30TB of free space. Should last 2-3 years at the rate I put data on there, but we'll see.









The longest process will be testing the new drives, I do complete read/write passes (x2) on them before I add them to the server. Each drive takes about 48 hours to complete this process, but I should be able to do all 10 at the same time.

(I'm also in debt now, it's going to take me about 2 months to pay these purchases off.. but I couldn't pass on $100/3TB)


----------



## herkalurk

Yay for multi threaded programs like that. It's sad though. You have more data in your home than my san at work (just shy of 40 TB).


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *herkalurk*
> 
> Yay for multi threaded programs like that. It's sad though. You have more data in your home than my san at work (just shy of 40 TB).


My friend who is taking half of the 20 drives we ordered also just broke 80TB. I was just telling him that if we combined our servers, we'd have over 160TB which is just crazy. There are much bigger home servers out there though... I'd really like to know what those people use them for.









I think if I converted everything to 720p MKVs i'd be using around 15TB, and I was really debating it at one point. I know I would regret it though, and it only becomes cheaper and cheaper to store things. If it wasn't for the flood, I could see 4TB drives being $120 by now and there's some pretty big hard drive advancements coming up. I think some companies are still claiming they will have ~10TB drives by 2015. If/when that happens, pretty much everyone could store uncompressed blu-rays for pretty cheap.


----------



## utnorris

That is an awesome deal. So what's going to be the final TB count for each server?


----------



## raisethe3

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> My friend who is taking half of the 20 drives we ordered also just broke 80TB. I was just telling him that if we combined our servers, we'd have over 160TB which is just crazy. There are much bigger home servers out there though... I'd really like to know what those people use them for.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I think if I converted everything to 720p MKVs i'd be using around 15TB, and I was really debating it at one point. I know I would regret it though, and it only becomes cheaper and cheaper to store things. *If it wasn't for the flood, I could see 4TB drives being $120 by now and there's some pretty big hard drive advancements coming up. I think some companies are still claiming they will have ~10TB drives by 2015. If/when that happens, pretty much everyone could store uncompressed blu-rays for pretty cheap.*


I would love to see it happen sooner though.


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *utnorris*
> 
> That is an awesome deal. So what's going to be the final TB count for each server?


45TB and 38TB.
83TB advertised including parity/cache.
75TB advertised not including parity/cache.
69.8TB 100% usable.

Right now i'm at 43.6TB 100% usable so it's a 26.2TB upgrade, and the new setup will have room for 14 more drives without having to replace drives or dedicate more space to parity. Easy sailing for the next ~50TB.


----------



## LuminatX

This is amazing! I've always wanted to set something like this up.


----------



## Rexel

I am planning on switching over to unRAID, but does the parity drive count as one of the 3 drives that can be used in the free version?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Rexel*
> 
> I am planning on switching over to unRAID, but does the parity drive count as one of the 3 drives that can be used in the free version?


I don't believe it does.


----------



## Boyboyd

I've got a question about popcorn hour. What is the internal HDD for? Just storing a database of what movies you have on your NAS?


----------



## Plan9

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> My friend who is taking half of the 20 drives we ordered also just broke 80TB. I was just telling him that if we combined our servers, we'd have over 160TB which is just crazy. There are much bigger home servers out there though... I'd really like to know what those people use them for.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I think if I converted everything to 720p MKVs i'd be using around 15TB, and I was really debating it at one point. I know I would regret it though, and it only becomes cheaper and cheaper to store things. If it wasn't for the flood, I could see 4TB drives being $120 by now and there's some pretty big hard drive advancements coming up. I think some companies are still claiming they will have ~10TB drives by 2015. If/when that happens, pretty much everyone could store uncompressed blu-rays for pretty cheap.


BluRays are compressed.

160TB does sound epic though, if a little excessive.







But seriously though - I'd kill for that kind of storage.


----------



## Ellis

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Plan9*
> 
> BluRays are compressed.
> 160TB does sound epic though, if a little excessive.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But seriously though - I'd kill for that kind of storage.


Yeah but by "uncompressed Blu-rays" he clearly means not compressing them any further.


----------



## legoman786

So jelly.

So, so jelly.


----------



## ZFedora

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Plan9*
> 
> BluRays are compressed.
> 160TB does sound epic though, if a little excessive.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But seriously though - I'd kill for that kind of storage.


Lol









He obviously meant that you can store raw blu-ray files without any additional compression...


----------



## Plan9

Can you add any compression? The Jar files are already zipped and you can't compress MPEG encoded audio/video any more without dropping the quality. I guess you could take out subs et al, but I can't imagine they'd take up that much space.

I've not really had a great deal of exposure to blu rays so I've probably missed the point, but i'd be interested to hear back on this


----------



## Chokladkakan

I am thinking, although I might well be mistaken, that by uncompressed we are referring to "pure" images, meaning the media file is the size of a full BluRay disc, much like how one can find releases of DVD images that are quite precisely 5.06 GB a piece.


----------



## Crazy9000

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Plan9*
> 
> Can you add any compression? The Jar files are already zipped and you can't compress MPEG encoded audio/video any more without dropping the quality. I guess you could take out subs et al, but I can't imagine they'd take up that much space.
> I've not really had a great deal of exposure to blu rays so I've probably missed the point, but i'd be interested to hear back on this


Special features, directors commentary, spanish language tracks... they all add up to quite a bit in the end.


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## Boyboyd

Theres usually more than 1 type of English audio on there too for the people without dts decoders

5.1 DTS-HD-MA / Dolby True-HD
2.0 AC3
Commentary in AC3
Subtitles


----------



## Plan9

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Chokladkakan*
> 
> I am thinking, although I might well be mistaken, that by uncompressed we are referring to "pure" images, meaning the media file is the size of a full BluRay disc, much like how one can find releases of DVD images that are quite precisely 5.06 GB a piece.


DVDs are different to BluRays in that a DVD ISO has to take up the entire size of the optical media - regardless of whether theres data or not (which results in DVD images having lots of zero bytes). BluRay ISOs only need to be the size of the data itself.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Crazy9000*
> 
> Special features, directors commentary, spanish language tracks... they all add up to quite a bit in the end.


Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Boyboyd*
> 
> Theres usually more than 1 type of English audio on there too for the people without dots decoders


I see. thank you


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Boyboyd*
> 
> I've got a question about popcorn hour. What is the internal HDD for? Just storing a database of what movies you have on your NAS?


I don't use it, never found a use for it. I think people that use it are ones that can fit all their data on a single HD.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Plan9*
> 
> Can you add any compression? The Jar files are already zipped and you can't compress MPEG encoded audio/video any more without dropping the quality. I guess you could take out subs et al, but I can't imagine they'd take up that much space.
> I've not really had a great deal of exposure to blu rays so I've probably missed the point, but i'd be interested to hear back on this


Special features, non-lossless audio tracks, etc. Each disc has like 5-15GB of "extras" on it that you can remove. The movie itself is exactly the same quality as it is on the disc. I've had some movies have over 20+ GB of extras on it, it's insane.

If I was to leave all that on there, my space requirements would be about 40% higher. It would also take much longer to start watching stuff, most the discs i've seen have ~10 trailers, 3-5 FBI warnings, the menu system, more FBI warnings, then the movie plays. After I remove everything, the movie just plays. One lossless track, and one subtitle track, movie at the exact same bitrate/resolution.

It's win/win.


----------



## Plan9

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> I don't use it, never found a use for it. I think people that use it are ones that can fit all their data on a single HD.
> Special features, non-lossless audio tracks, etc. Each disc has like 5-15GB of "extras" on it that you can remove. The movie itself is exactly the same quality as it is on the disc. I've had some movies have over 20+ GB of extras on it, it's insane.
> If I was to leave all that on there, my space requirements would be about 40% higher. It would also take much longer to start watching stuff, most the discs i've seen have ~10 trailers, 3-5 FBI warnings, the menu system, more FBI warnings, then the movie plays. After I remove everything, the movie just plays. One lossless track, and one subtitle track, movie at the exact same bitrate/resolution.
> It's win/win.


Sounds good.
How do you rip those moves? (if it's not against the T&Cs to discuss that)


----------



## bengal

Murlocke, where did you buy your SAS cables from? Link please?


----------



## DigitalSavior

Just read all 40 pages! Awesome thread!


----------



## bengal

Murlocke, which rail do the hard drives run on? The 12v or 5v?


----------



## DigitalSavior

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> Murlocke, which rail do the hard drives run on? The 12v or 5v?


12V


----------



## bengal

So is it better to have two separate 12v rails or a single one for 20 or more drives?


----------



## DigitalSavior

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> So is it better to have two separate 12v rails or a single one for 20 or more drives?


I'd go with a single rail. Power supplies with multiple rails might have rails dedicated towards pci-e which you wouldn't use in a storage server.

As long as it's a quality PSU supply it probably wouldn't matter. I'd personally go with a Seasonic, which are single rail. Most of the Corsair AX line are rebranded Seasonic.


----------



## bengal

So when all the drives are spinning up together, won't it stress the 12v rail too much? Is 60A enough for 20+ drives?


----------



## DigitalSavior

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> So when all the drives are spinning up together, won't it stress the 12v rail too much? Is 60A enough for 20+ drives?


60a x 12v = 720w

20 hard drives multiplied by say a maximum of 30 watts spin up is only 600 watts. You should be ok.

Murlocke's server seems to handle the load fine with 22 drives.

I'm no expert but I think you'd be fine.


----------



## Murlocke

The SAS cards for the 2nd server still have not shipped... I called them and complained. It's been 19 days, and they estimated it at 11 days. They said the next shipment should be Friday, so hopefully I can get my 2nd server up and running next week.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> Murlocke, where did you buy your SAS cables from? Link please?


http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=216

You can find cheaper.. but I just went with those. SAS cables aren't very cheap sadly.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> So is it better to have two separate 12v rails or a single one for 20 or more drives?


I would never recommend a dual rail to anyone, server or not. Always go single rail.








Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> So when all the drives are spinning up together, won't it stress the 12v rail too much?


My friends server has 22 drives and is using a 62A PSU (Corsair AX750). I like a little more headroom, so I went with the 850W version that has 70A. I'm sure it's plenty of headroom with either when using green drives. I'm sure 7200RPM drives would be fine too.


----------



## Murlocke

UPS just dropped off 60TB in a box.


----------



## Blindsay

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> UPS just dropped off 60TB in a box.


Very nice









on the subject of power, i notice my server which is just 10x 2TB drives idles around 100w but even during startup it doesnt go that much higher (it almost sounds like they are staggered when turning on though)


----------



## bengal

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> UPS just dropped off 60TB in a box.


Are these 3TB drives? I will buy one from you. I am serious about it. Will pay for the shipping.


----------



## Murlocke

Looks like unRAID just had another RC release that allows 24 drives in the array now (up from 21).
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> Are these 3TB drives? I will buy one from you. I am serious about it. Will pay for the shipping.


I'm using them, sorry.


----------



## DigitalSavior

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Looks like unRAID just had another RC release that allows 24 drives in the array now (up from 21).


Exciting stuff!


----------



## Boyboyd

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> Looks like unRAID just had another RC release that allows 24 drives in the array now (up from 21).


Perfect for those people with 24 bay 4u cases then.

I've actually found your exact case on sale here, but the conversion rate sucks. $400 becomes £418. I'll keep my eye on it though, but i'd rather upgrade my home cinema first.


----------



## lacrossewacker

how fast are you expending Read/Writing rates?


----------



## bengal

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> I'm using them, sorry.


Oh cmon sell me one. I need one real bad. How much are you looking for it?


----------



## Murlocke

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *lacrossewacker*
> 
> how fast are you expending Read/Writing rates?


Read is going to depend on the drive i'm reading from, generally 80-125MB/s.
Write (to array using cache) is going to be as fast as my Cache drive.
Write (directly to a data disk) is going to be like 25MB/s.

unRAID doesn't stripe data so there is no speed gains over a single drive, which is much preferred because it makes it virtually impossible to lose all your data. I would never hook up this many drives using only 1 parity on a system that stripes data, just asking for complete data loss.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> Oh cmon sell me one. I need one real bad. How much are you looking for it?


10 are already going to a RL friend who loaned me the money so we could do a bulk purchase of 20 drives. If all 20 were for me, then I could probably sell one or two. However, 5 are going in Server 1, 5 are going in Server 2. Most my drives are 99% full and ideally I want them at 90% or so. I have a lot of data I need to add to the server too.

Amazon has them for $150 right now, which is the same price per gig as the recent $100 for 2TB deal Newegg had. This is pretty much the lowest they've been since the flood.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Green-Desktop/dp/B004RORMF6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342020573&sr=8-1&keywords=3TB+green


----------



## OC-Guru

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bengal*
> 
> Oh cmon sell me one. I need one real bad. How much are you looking for it?


Google will sort you out a 3TB 

http://bit.ly/MZFQ54


----------



## bengal

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Murlocke*
> 
> 10 are already going to a RL friend who loaned me the money so we could do a bulk purchase of 20 drives. If all 20 were for me, then I could probably sell one or two. However, 5 are going in Server 1, 5 are going in Server 2. Most my drives are 99% full and ideally I want them at 90% or so. I have a lot of data I need to add to the server too.
> Amazon has them for $150 right now, which is the same price per gig as the recent $100 for 2TB deal Newegg had. This is pretty much the lowest they've been since the flood.
> http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Green-Desktop/dp/B004RORMF6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342020573&sr=8-1&keywords=3TB+green


:'(


----------



## flaviz

Soooo, you gonna download the Internet?


----------



## Murlocke

Finally..... The last 3 SAS cards shipped. Backorder for over a month. Should have both servers up and running next week, given there's no faulty parts. Lots of testing to do...
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *flaviz*
> 
> Soooo, you gonna download the Internet?


Only about 5% of the stuff on there is/will be downloaded, the rest is ripped from discs.


----------



## Murlocke

New thread posted, consider this thread no longer maintained.

Click here to visit my new server thread if you have any questions.


----------

