Recommended NAS?

[pez]

Mike,
Thanks for answering my questions. You are a veritable wealth of information and it is much appreciated.

A while back I was talking to one of my SysAdmin friends about disk and network performance and they mention that they use trunking (two GigE port) to increase their bandwidth to their servers. Are you doing that?

Thanks,
-pez

[KJake]

I haven't heard it called trunking before, but yes, there are switches out there that support LACP, Link Aggregation, 802.3ad. To be effective at all, it needs to be bonded at the OS/NIC level and at the switch, otherwise you'd get something closer to load balancing (fail-over).

So, if your array performance is over 128MB/s, then you could bond two GbE connections to give the server a 2Gb/s pipe.

The Linksys gigabit switches that I have supports LACP out of the box, but I'm not using it yet. SLM2008 if you want to look it up.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by pez

Mike,
Thanks for answering my questions. You are a veritable wealth of information and it is much appreciated.

A while back I was talking to one of my SysAdmin friends about disk and network performance and they mention that they use trunking (two GigE port) to increase their bandwidth to their servers. Are you doing that?

Thanks,
-pez

Kjake summed it up nicely. It does take a special switch, which I don't have for GbE. I don''t stress the single GbE connection that much in real world use, I haven't even turned on jumbo frame support. MPEG2 HD just doesn't need all that much oomph. Maybe BR in the future will do it... :-)

Linux can do the link aggregation which your friends are talking about, but it's overkill for this application I think.

thx
mike

[pez]

Trunking might be a Sun term for link aggregation. But thanks for letting me know it takes a special switch. It doesn't appear that my Netgear GS108 supports 802.3ad.

It may be overkill for a sage server, but if i'm going to have two machines (one for sage and one for NAS) i need the have the sage server dual as a video editing machine for miniDV's in Premiere. Also, i run SA for comskip, but may look into what MythTV does for that so it can run on linux. So i think a C2Q would have a good change of using up the bandwidth.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by pez

Trunking might be a Sun term for link aggregation. But thanks for letting me know it takes a special switch. It doesn't appear that my Netgear GS108 supports 802.3ad.

It may be overkill for a sage server, but if i'm going to have two machines (one for sage and one for NAS) i need the have the sage server dual as a video editing machine for miniDV's in Premiere. Also, i run SA for comskip, but may look into what MythTV does for that so it can run on linux. So i think a C2Q would have a good change of using up the bandwidth.

In that case, why don't you dual home the NAS. One GbE to a switch that serves clients, and the other GbE patched idrectly to the Sage Server. If you bias the interfaces properly, they should talk to each over the private GbE, and then to everyone else via the switch.

There are comments in other threads about to to get SA running under Linux using wine - apparently it doesn't suffer a lot performance wise, so you could do that right on the NAS.

thx
mike

[pez]

So a show being sent to a Sage Client does not have go through the Sage Server.

Does Sage work this way also for an HDHR? I mean does the data from the HDHR go straight to the NAS, bypassing the Sage Server?

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by pez

So a show being sent to a Sage Client does not have go through the Sage Server.

Does Sage work this way also for an HDHR? I mean does the data from the HDHR go straight to the NAS, bypassing the Sage Server?

Correct, for prerecorded programming. For live programming, the client generally reads the recorded buffer from the NAS if sage is configured to store it there. Extenders all go through the server though.

thx
mike

[KarylFStein]

I don't think the HDHR data stream goes directly to the NAS. I had to sell mine, so can't say for sure, but don't imagine it knows anything about network shares. I'm pretty sure it streams to the server and then the server pushes it to the NAS.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by KarylFStein

I don't think the HDHR data stream goes directly to the NAS. I had to sell mine, so can't say for sure, but don't imagine it knows anything about network shares. I'm pretty sure it streams to the server and then the server pushes it to the NAS.

Sorry, the question was posed as how the client accesses the program, which would be through the nas, but of course it's only the sage server that talked to the HDHR...

Thx
mike

[KJake]

Originally Posted by mikesm

There are comments in other threads about to to get SA running under Linux using wine - apparently it doesn't suffer a lot performance wise, so you could do that right on the NAS.

I should do this...and the media center license should be OS agnostic so I could take my original windows installation and put it on my NAS - it's hardware is super overkill for just the NAS and wish that I could do a little more with it, to stress it a little.

[KJake]

Originally Posted by KJake

Good thing I've got those Hitachi drives standing by.

Curses! Two of the three don't even spin up in the USB enclosure!

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by KJake

Curses! Two of the three don't even spin up in the USB enclosure!

The USB enclosure is known to have issues, but I heave yet to hear of folks getting a bad drive, unless it was one where someone bought it, swapped out the drive with an old ide drive, and then returned it. Apparently some folks have done that - really rude. Which location did you buy them from? Are the seals on the drives intact?

thx
mike

[KJake]

Originally Posted by mikesm

The USB enclosure is known to have issues, but I heave yet to hear of folks getting a bad drive, unless it was one where someone bought it, swapped out the drive with an old ide drive, and then returned it. Apparently some folks have done that - really rude. Which location did you buy them from? Are the seals on the drives intact?

thx
mike

Bought them from Best Buy #406, one of the 3 here in the Grand Rapids, MI.

I was thinking about venturing out tomorrow to one of them to do an exchange.

Funny thing, I was freaking earlier tonight. Something happened today where either the cable from one of my multipliers became loose from the controller, or the multipliers flaked out and 5/6 drives went offline

I have it up and running again now and rebuilding, but I was not happy when I first saw 1/6 online.

[KJake]

Originally Posted by KJake

Bought them from Best Buy #406, one of the 3 here in the Grand Rapids, MI.

I was thinking about venturing out tomorrow to one of them to do an exchange.

Funny thing, I was freaking earlier tonight. Something happened today where either the cable from one of my multipliers became loose from the controller, or the multipliers flaked out and 5/6 drives went offline

I have it up and running again now and rebuilding, but I was not happy when I first saw 1/6 online.

well, bad luck returning, 5 drives are offline again. i'm not sure what this is going to mean since it was rebuilding

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by KJake

Bought them from Best Buy #406, one of the 3 here in the Grand Rapids, MI.

I was thinking about venturing out tomorrow to one of them to do an exchange.

Funny thing, I was freaking earlier tonight. Something happened today where either the cable from one of my multipliers became loose from the controller, or the multipliers flaked out and 5/6 drives went offline

I have it up and running again now and rebuilding, but I was not happy when I first saw 1/6 online.

Grand Rapids??? You're kidding! That's where the report of the swapped drives came from! Don't open them up, but return them.

[KJake]

Originally Posted by KJake

well, bad luck returning, 5 drives are offline again. i'm not sure what this is going to mean since it was rebuilding

i've got it running again - not happy, but it is working. there seems to be an incompatibility i've discovered on my system. i removed the PMP that I think is failing, added another Syba 2-port Sil controller, and plugged the 5 drives into sata ports on my nforce sata and the Sil ports with one free. the problem come during BIOS post - the second Syba card hangs the POST if there is a drive attached to it. if I leave it unplugged, and the plug it in after POST, it is fine.

the array is up and running again - I sure am glad that it is so forgiving.

in other bad news, i am pretty sure that i bought the wrong SATA array system from Addonics. I opened it up tonight and it has 5 SATA connectors on the rear ... not what I was expecting.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by KJake

i've got it running again - not happy, but it is working. there seems to be an incompatibility i've discovered on my system. i removed the PMP that I think is failing, added another Syba 2-port Sil controller, and plugged the 5 drives into sata ports on my nforce sata and the Sil ports with one free. the problem come during BIOS post - the second Syba card hangs the POST if there is a drive attached to it. if I leave it unplugged, and the plug it in after POST, it is fine.

the array is up and running again - I sure am glad that it is so forgiving.

in other bad news, i am pretty sure that i bought the wrong SATA array system from Addonics. I opened it up tonight and it has 5 SATA connectors on the rear ... not what I was expecting.

yeah, try and do that kind of recovery with a hardware based raid controller. Weird failure mode though. What kernel patch version are you using?

All my 5in3's have 5 sata connectors in the back. They connect to a PMP which then talks to a sata 2 port. I didn't know they made any other kinds.

Are you sure the PMP is failing? There is not much to them. Are you sre all the cables are good and seated firmly? It took a lot of effort in my system to keep the cabling neat and connectors not stressed.

thx
mike

[KJake]

Originally Posted by mikesm

What kernel patch version are you using?

2.6.22-rc6

Originally Posted by mikesm

All my 5in3's have 5 sata connectors in the back. They connect to a PMP which then talks to a sata 2 port.

Ah, i didn't ever catch on to that - it always sounded like the PMP was built-in for the 5in3, my bad.

Originally Posted by mikesm

Are you sure the PMP is failing?

yeah, I think it is failed now. after the drives disappeared again, i couldn't get them to come back after fiddling with the connections, or reboots.

[KJake]

Originally Posted by mikesm

yeah, try and do that kind of recovery with a hardware based raid controller.

i did once, and lost everything i love that i was able to move every disk around and it still found 5/6 of them automatically. i only had to readd one of them and then it started rebuilding right away.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by KJake

i did once, and lost everything i love that i was able to move every disk around and it still found 5/6 of them automatically. i only had to readd one of them and then it started rebuilding right away.

At least thats working out ok. What happened with the 1tb drives? Were the seals tampered with? Whoever did that swapping around is a real tool. Look at this page of the fatwallet thread: http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/mess...2358&start=140