Recommended NAS?

[kbyrd]

I started another thread with this, but this one seems to get all the attention. I have Linux box with a single drive (soon to be md RAID, just testing now) formatted with XFS acting a Samba server, with Sage on a WinXP box that has the smb share as a mapped drive.

I'm getting a bunch of drop outs in my recordings. I know it's in the recording vs. the playback because the skips are in the same spot every time. It's a GigE network doing not much else, there are at most 2 SDTV recordings at a time, and hdparm tells me the drive gets 75MB/s locally. This morning 'xfs_db -c frag' told me I had 95% fragmentation. I formatted this drive less than a week ago, copied files to (I copied them from drive-to-drive locally from the old ntfs drive, but shouldn't that have given me perfectly unfragmented files?), and then setup Sage to point to this as it's recordings directory.

Any ideas?

[UPDATE]

I read a bit at http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XFS_Filesystem and discovered that copying a bunch of files actually might lead to bad fragmentation. I assume my "dropped time on recording" problem is because the head is seeking everywhere. We'll see what defragging does.



[UPDATE][UPDATE]
This seemed to just be a problem with a single slow drive over the network. When I moved to RAID5, everything started working fine.

[nyle]

I just migrated my primary server over to OpenFiler running over ESXi. So far everything looks great. I have dual gigbit nics in it that do basic load balancing. I've watched videos off it on SageTV and another PC in the house without stutter.

It took a little while to figure out the OpenLDAP setup but once past that the rest was easy. 3TB of storage for now. I can add more just by putting in another SATA drive.

[kbyrd]

Originally Posted by nyle

I just migrated my primary server over to OpenFiler running over ESXi. So far everything looks great. I have dual gigbit nics in it that do basic load balancing. I've watched videos off it on SageTV and another PC in the house without stutter.

It took a little while to figure out the OpenLDAP setup but once past that the rest was easy. 3TB of storage for now. I can add more just by putting in another SATA drive.

What gear are you running ESXi on? How are your drives setup? I've been thinking about converting my Linux Sage box to ESX and then run a Solaris VM to serve up ZFS over NFS then run a SageTV server on a Linux VM which uses the NFS shares as storage.

[KJake]

Has anyone bought any 2TB drives yet? I just added a 1tb drive to fill out my addonics bay, but I'm going to be storing more HD movies now and space gets used fast. I have a 4x750 array that I'd like to replace and I'm thinking of starting with a 4x2TB, but I'm not sure if they're good to buy yet? I think WD is the only one making them.

[nyle]

Originally Posted by kbyrd

What gear are you running ESXi on? How are your drives setup? I've been thinking about converting my Linux Sage box to ESX and then run a Solaris VM to serve up ZFS over NFS then run a SageTV server on a Linux VM which uses the NFS shares as storage.

Running a vanilla box with my old MSI AMD Athlon 64 2Ghz with 2GB Ram in an old generic ATX case with a new power supply. The hard drives are simply 1.5TB SATA direct attached to the controller. I back up all cirtical data to multiple locations on other network locations.

I skipped NFS and used CIFS with OpenFiler(Linux based free NAS system). I'm using it as a storage location for all family data, photos, FLACs and AVC(MP4s.)

[nyle]

Originally Posted by KJake

Has anyone bought any 2TB drives yet? I just added a 1tb drive to fill out my addonics bay, but I'm going to be storing more HD movies now and space gets used fast. I have a 4x750 array that I'd like to replace and I'm thinking of starting with a 4x2TB, but I'm not sure if they're good to buy yet? I think WD is the only one making them.

I've got 3 of the 1.5TB but not the 2TB they just came out. I'd wait a few weeks more to see some more reviews on them but that's just me.

[flavius]

I just bought this Macally cheapo Nas and a pair of 1TB WESTERN DIGITAL WD10EVVS.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by flavius

I just bought this Macally cheapo Nas and a pair of 1TB WESTERN DIGITAL WD10EVVS.

NewEgg sold a few but has none or stopped. Only 4 user reviews (marginally useful)

Overstock.com selling for $116. Does this mean this generation of the product is discounted due to end of life?

Do you know yet:

1) RAID1 speed on gigE with a fast Windows (SMB?) client PC?

2) Does GUI allow formatting a partition with large cluster sizes (e.g., for mpeg video files)?

[flavius]

Originally Posted by stevech

NewEgg sold a few but has none or stopped. Only 4 user reviews (marginally useful)

Overstock.com selling for $116. Does this mean this generation of the product is discounted due to end of life?

I don't know. Maybe. It's also on Amazon. I bought it on ebay. After taking a quick look at the manual (which you can download at macally.com), it's obvious that a little bit of networking knowledge is required. Personally, I like the flexibility.

RAID1 speed on gigE with a fast Windows (SMB?) client PC?

Don't know. And not a concern for me, since I'm going to run this in linear mode as a secondary storage.

Does GUI allow formatting a partition with large cluster sizes (e.g., for mpeg video files)?

I didn't see anything in the manual. FS choices are NTFS, ext2 and ext3.

[flavius]

Originally Posted by stevech

1) RAID1 speed on gigE with a fast Windows (SMB?) client PC?

The drives arrived today, so I ran a few tests. I'm getting consistently 80 MBit when writing. I did put a new switch into the basement. The cabling down there, though, is old and poorly shielded.

The drives are ext3, in linear mode. And it was a Mac SMB client.

Does GUI allow formatting a partition with large cluster sizes (e.g., for mpeg video files)?

Definitely not.

[Folkboat]

Quick question re: the Macally box.

Is there an automated HDD "sleep" function??

Thanks

[flavius]

Not that I can see.

[Skiier__Dude]

I just won a Linksys Media Hub . It's sort of a NAS on steriods and is on the easy to use end of the scale. Haven't tried it out yet but I will let you know what I think of it once it arrives.

[Skiier__Dude]

So, I've had this NAS running for about 2 weeks now. Super easy to setup. Run the CD on one of your machines, plug it into your network -- configures itself. You can have it automagically find videos, photos and music, or point to where your info is stored. Has an auto-backup program with it that can shadow drives and back them up. Has a number of Raid functions that I've not played with yet. iTunes like interface for playing music is pretty cool. I've got the version with the LCD screen and a single 500G drive. Adding a second drive to the empty slot is simple and takes 10 seconds -- but has to be a non-partitioned drive for it to work.

[KJake]

Added another 1tb disk Easy.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/lvm2|vol|vol1
                      5.7T  4.1T  1.7T  72% /export

[bond00]

So has anyone been able to write to a NAS? By write, I mean store the timeshift data and recordings on a NAS? If so, how do you do it? I have been unable to do that and even add a network share as a media folder.

I go to Browse, but the network drive letters do not show up...only the local drive letters do. I try going to Network Places and it may find the network device, but I can not access it. My shares are password protected and SageTv doesn't seem to support the username/password for SMB shares.

I'm running SageTV Server 6.5.11 beta.

[KJake]

Yes, I record everything to my NAS; however, I do not use passwords.

[stanger89]

Sage has to be running as a user with permission to access the shares. And you may have to use "Specify..." to define the path rather than browsing.

[teststrips]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Sage has to be running as a user with permission to access the shares. And you may have to use "Specify..." to define the path rather than browsing.

Specify...

\\servername\share or more correctly \\NAS_name\share

You can also use the NAS's IP address if you happen to know it \\192.168.x.x\share

[flavius]

I just bought this Macally cheapo Nas and a pair of 1TB WESTERN DIGITAL WD10EVVS.

I just got a D-Link DNS321 today and added a pair of 1.5 TB (Seagate 7200.11). Installation and setup is even easier than for the Macally NAS. You can also mail yourself some sensor and system logs, if you want. Otherwise there isn't anything I can see justifying the additional $30 plus. The D-Link also seems noticeably slower than the cheaper Macally, but there are actually a couple guys still working on the firmware.