Recommended NAS?

[valnar]

Originally Posted by Lucas

There 's just no easy way to have 19 drives in one box!

Holy hard drives Batman!

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by Lucas

Ditto.

I am actually going to 3 box solution. SageTV server with TV cards + Recording Hard Drives, NAS for archived video and the clients.

There 's just no easy way to have 19 drives in one box!

I have 21 drives in this case and these 5 1/4 bay harddrive expansion and a 600W power supply. Actually I have 3 of the earlier model of this case but only one of them is this full of drives.

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by Polycron

How are you handling the move of files from your recording system to your NAS storage system? Are you compressing your video before moving. Are you manually moving the files?

I'm a newbie on SAGE (7 days old). My previous software (BTV) had an option to compress my video and move my files from my main system to my Naslite box. This worked ok and was automatic but I wasn't too keen on being forced to compress the files first. The reason for my big Naslite box was so that I wouldn't have to compress.

I'm curious how people are moving recorded shows to their NAS boxes with SAGE. I had hoped that simply marking a recording as archived could be tied to moving it to my NAS but so far I haven't figured out if this is possible.

Welcome Polycron.

One way, as you said is to use the convert feature to move them from drive to drive. You can probably (someone needs to chip in here) setup a conversion profile that does a straight copy without reencoding.

There is the manual way off-course. You just add a new recording dir in SageTV, close SageTV, move your files and restart sagetv.

You should refer to the FAQ. There are explicit instructions.

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

I have 21 drives in this case and these 5 1/4 bay harddrive expansion and a 600W power supply. Actually I have 3 of the earlier model of this case but only one of them is this full of drives.

I know of the case. It's a bit pricey but it's great. I don't think there are many other options.

I prefer building separate boxes using low end hardware + hardware raid controller with support for 12 drives. These cost about $300 each without the drives.

[Humanzee]

You guys seen the Drobo storage robot? It looks pretty slick but I don't know how fast it would be for video storage.

I'm about to build a quiet client machine for the family room so that I can put my now stand alone (future server) with 7 HDD's into the closet under the stairs. I'm going to put a monitor cable through the closet wall so that it sits on the counter in the kitchen. Just to clarify I'll still be able to run the Sage GUI and watch my programing off the server monitor correct? I've always assumed this anyway.

My plan for redundancy is to have an extra drive in my client PC that will replicate a drive in the server that currently stores our family pictures, music etc. Because I don't have room for RAID1 in that sever case I currently have the files are replicated to a usb drive , but I always for get to plug it in and synchronize it. My recording and video storage is not redundant because I won't cry if I loose them. Ill be pissed but it wont be irreplaceable like the photo archive.

I use sync toy from Microsoft for file replication between directories. Its free.

Then I'll get a HD extender for the bedroom when ever they are available.

[tmiranda]

With no disrespect intended, what two different things are you referring to? Because in my experience, in no way is recording to a network share better than locally at IDE/SATA speeds.

Thing 1 - holding all of the parts needed to make a quiet computer capable of running Sage.

Thing 2- housing a bunch of hard drives in a reasonably quiet manner.

If noise is no issue I'd go with one big box. If noise is an issue you need to break up the components so you can manage the noise and heat situation better.

I record just about everything (3 SD tuners) straight to the NAS without problem and my NAS CPU is an 800 MHz C3. I'm not sure if this would work with 3 HD tuners all recording at once.

Edit: I am in the process of upgrading my NAS so it can hold more drives.

[stevech]

I am collapsing to a one box from many boxes. Too many OSes and fiddling.
One tower PC in the garage with RAID-1 500GB x 2. One partition w/64K blocks for video and one w/4K blocks for everything else important.

Run Sage on this same PC. And some other home automation stuff.

Media extenders for viewing videos; some wireless. Vanilla 11g is plenty fast enough. Seems like each Std Def TV stream is about 5Mbps and a small fraction of the available disk read speed, esp. w/64K blocks. Also small portion of 11g's net IP speed.

PC for Sage/RAID is for now a clunky old AMD2400 DDR333, and an old PCI card RAID-1 with SATA drives. Yields 40MB/s read and 15MB/s write (not good numbers vs. newer stuff). But these seem more than adequate (no HD TV).

[KJake]

Originally Posted by Lucas

I prefer building separate boxes using low end hardware + hardware raid controller with support for 12 drives. These cost about $300 each without the drives.

*credit card empty* Care to share components you'd use? I know how to build a computer, but my problem is that I tend to make things expensive, fast.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by KJake

*credit card empty* Care to share components you'd use? I know how to build a computer, but my problem is that I tend to make things expensive, fast.

Ouch. If you are competent with Linux, you should not ignore software RAID5 and RAID6 under Linux. I have found it to be VERY fast, reliable, and no need for an expensive hardware controller. In fact, you can take the disks from the one linux system, and move them to another linux system with completely different disk controllers, and bring the array back up easily. This is very hard to do with hardware controllers. Once you create the array, you need that exact controller in a new system, which may or may not be easy.

Also, modern kernels support the use of SATA port multipliers, so each of the 6 SATA 2 ports found on your motherboard can actually drive 5 SATA drives each. That's 30 SATA drives, just off the motherboard SATA ports.

I use the addonics SATA port multipliers, and one of the addonics 5 in 3 5SA hot-swap drive backplane, along with an older supermicro 5in3 SATA backplane, and it uses just 2 ports.

I like the Coolermaster stacker case, which lets you house up to 20 drives in the case, and it has room for 2 PSU's so you can use one to power all the drives, and the other for the CPU, etc....

It doesn't have to be that expensive to build a fast NAS. Mine can drive a gigabit ethernet very hard. And it also supports a web-DAV service too so you can browse it via HTTP, FTP, etc... in addition to a windows share. I find using a full up Linux distribution very handy.

As soon as I get some time, I'm going to move showanalyzer to run on my NAS server using wine. It's got a AMD 3800 X2 CPU in it that I got for $70, so it has CPU to spare, even after doing software RAID. And I am using XFS, which really makes excellent use of RAM for disk buffering etc...

Performance is definitely overkill, but it was very cheap. And super flexible.

Thanks,
Mike

[nyle]

Originally Posted by Lucas

The problem is that it is impossible from a power supply, cooling and cost point of view to keep all hard disks in one box if you need more than 1TB of storage.

That used to be true but you can do this configuration now with 1 or 2 drives.

2 X 500GB SATA drives for about $249.
1 X 1TB SATA drive for about $499.

-Nyle

[KJake]

Originally Posted by mikesm

If you are competent with Linux, you should not ignore software RAID5 and RAID6 under Linux. I have found it to be VERY fast, reliable, and no need for an expensive hardware controller.

Yup, I am. I have built a couple of servers, with hardware and software RAID. My latest, I almost used XFS on, but it was after I shipped it out to the colo destination and was too cheap to have them ship it back so I could start over.

I was starting to like the idea, however, of running it Windows so that I could move ShowAnalyzer and the Sage service to the system to offload the system upstairs.

Now I'm torn -- maybe I'll build two systems. Granted the Sage server doesn't need much attention so I may just buy a cheap Dell/HP system, the storage configuration is what is vexing me, and using Linux and software RAID sure does simplify things.

Thanks

[nyle]

Originally Posted by stevech

I'd recommend against a NAS box.
IMO:
Just use a RAID card and some drives in the same PC that hosts the Sage Server.

This may be true of low end NAS boxes with poor processor power and disk i/o issues but I run a custom built Netware 6.5 SBS server on a simple old Shuttle SK43G box in my basement with 1TB of disk storage and actually find playback of my movies smoother than from the internal hard drive in the SageTV box. Both the server and the local drive are ATA100 and the local drive has larger block size than the Novell Server does.

Perhaps, offloading some of the I/O to the Gigabit Ethernet controller has that affect. I'm not sure but it works great for me.

-Nyle

[nyle]

Originally Posted by KJake

I'm looking for a NAS appliance and I know people in the Sage community have them. Any recommendations or warnings on products to look at and ones to stay away from are welcome and appreciated. I'll want at least 1TB of usable storage and the ability for RAID0+1 or RAID5.

I haven't tried their NAS boxes for SageTV but we have used them in computer labs with multiple users, including ones with large AV files - Bufflo Technologies makes some good NAS boxes. In keeping with their single drive line their Link Station Pro. Yes, no RAID to it but they go up to 750GB.

The do offer higher end units called Terastation with RAID 5.
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/...e/terastation/

However, I agree with the other members here that you'd be most likely better served by building your own.

With 500GB SATA drives going for $120 or less and you not needing all that much processor power for just a straight SMB box, you can build one for a lot less than the all in one solutions. I personally run Netware 6.5 sbs but Linux is free and there are a lot of easy to install distributions. After all most of those little NAS boxes are most likely running some variant of Linux anyway.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by mikesm

Ouch. If you are competent with Linux, you should not ignore software RAID5 and RAID6 under Linux.

<rest of reply>

Mike

Everything from your post is absolutely correct Mike, except that software RAID under Linux, as good as it is, doesn't support OCE/RLM last time I played with it. Unless you start with the number of drives you want to use, it's a pain to expand.

Robert

[KJake]

Originally Posted by valnar

Linux ... doesn't support OCE/RLM last time I played with it.

mdadm and lvm2 lets you add and remove drives.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by KJake

mdadm and lvm2 lets you add and remove drives.

lvm was my problem. I haven't played with that yet on Red Hat. OK, cool.

Robert

[KJake]

Originally Posted by valnar

lvm was my problem. I haven't played with that yet on Red Hat. ...

I would recommend mdadm - much easier to setup IMO.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by valnar

Everything from your post is absolutely correct Mike, except that software RAID under Linux, as good as it is, doesn't support OCE/RLM last time I played with it. Unless you start with the number of drives you want to use, it's a pain to expand.

Robert

That's what volume management is for. Lvm2 isn't bad, but I find EVMS much more capable. Either way, there are multiple solutions to this problem, and they work quite well. Better than hardware raid under windows without volume management.

Thanks,
mike

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by KJake

*credit card empty* Care to share components you'd use? I know how to build a computer, but my problem is that I tend to make things expensive, fast.

For NasliteV2, for starters, you don't need to know anything about Linux.
Around 1Ghz CPU is about the sweetspot. One of my servers has a P4 1.8Ghz celeron. The other a Pentium II 233MHz with a 200W PSU and 6 Drives.

The P4 CPU utilisation never goes above 40% and averages around 5%.
The PII averages around 30%.

Any motherboard that has the disk ports you need.

256 or 512Mb RAM for very large arrays.

So far Mobo+CPU+RAM can be had for less than $100.

Case with say 9 x 5.25 bays ~ I found a case for $60.
If need be you can get a case with noisy PSU included for $40.
But these generally only have space for about 10 Drives and you have to be picky so that the 3.5 drive cages are in front of a fan for cooling.

A Gigabit NIC. ~ $30

A good PSU with plenty of IDE and SATA power connectors ~ $60

Optional - 4 x LianLi 3in2 HardDrive Cages with built in fans ~ $120

Optional Hardware RAID controller ~ $120 New from ebay
Sata Adaptec 2610SA (Dell Cerc or HP OEM)
3ware 7500-8 , 7506-8 (IDE)
3ware 8500-8 , 8506-8 (SATA)

You can start with $250 + 3 or 4 drives and off you go.

As far as drives go, up to 6 months or so ago, the 300/320Gb drives had the best cost/Gb. The prices between IDE and SATA version were on par, so it made sense to go with IDE and an ATA RAID controller which had a lower cost than SATA RAID.

These days the 500Gb drives offer just as low $/GB as 320Gb drives, with the difference being that the SATA 500Gb versions are much cheaper than the IDE 500Gb drives so it makes sense to go with SATA.

I really recommend Hardware RAID 5 or some kind of offline server mirroring if you plan to store videos or DVD rips that took a long time to rip or obtain. There's just no cheap way of backing up a few terrabytes.

I started of with 1 server and 3 individual drives giving me about 1 TB of space.

One day, one of 300Gb drives failed taking with it a good part of my DVD collection rips. No big loss but after spending 2 weekends re-ripping the 45 or so DVDs I decided that there must be another way......

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by nyle

That used to be true but you can do this configuration now with 1 or 2 drives.

2 X 500GB SATA drives for about $249.
1 X 1TB SATA drive for about $499.

-Nyle

That's right, 500Gb drives are cheap these days.
I would prefer 3x500Gb RAID 5 for some protection.

1TB drives are one drive and are pretty expensive. In a year yes.

The other issue is that if going hardware Raid 5, we are limited by the 2TB logical drive limit so this means either 8x300, 7x320, 6x400 or 5x500Gb
RAID 5 configurations relying on "older" 6 or 8port RAID 5 controllers which are going cheap.