Anyone evr tried a Drobo with Sage?

[Fountainhead]

I saw one thread here on the Drobo that pretty much rips it conceptually, but has anyone ever actually tried it with Sage? Just curious. A couple of the Podcasts that I listen to were singing the Drobo's parises, though not specifically for streaming media.

I'm looking for a NAS-like solution, but what I don't like about traditional RAID devices is the need for X number of identical drives, which of course means that they all have to be upgraded together ($$$) or worse, what happens a year down the road when one of your 500GB drives goes south and no one bothers to make 500 GB drives anymore?

Anyway, the Drobo seems kind of attractive and I'd be curious if anyone has actually used one. I'm also looking at something like UnRaid.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Fountainhead

I saw one thread here on the Drobo that pretty much rips it conceptually,

If you like the idea of a device reporting more space than available I suppose...

but has anyone ever actually tried it with Sage? Just curious. A couple of the Podcasts that I listen to were singing the Drobo's parises, though not specifically for streaming media.

I'm looking for a NAS-like solution, but what I don't like about traditional RAID devices is the need for X number of identical drives, which of course means that they all have to be upgraded together ($$$) or worse, what happens a year down the road when one of your 500GB drives goes south and no one bothers to make 500 GB drives anymore?

I can still get IDE 250GB drives, for the array I built several years ago.

You might want to look at Windows Home Server. It's drive pooling works a lot like what you're looking for.

[Fountainhead]

Originally Posted by stanger89

You might want to look at Windows Home Server. It's drive pooling works a lot like what you're looking for.

I had an earlier beta of WHS installed awhile back. The "NAS-like" functionality is intriguing, but I hated the way it constantly monitored all the PC's (of which I have several in the house) and badgered me with notifications...NO VIRUS SOFTWARE ON JUPITOR!!!!....MERCURY HASN'T BEEN BACKED UP IN YEARS!!!!...TURN OFF THE STOVE!!!!! There didn't seem (in the beta I used) any way to micro-manage the alerts and have it ignore this feature on this system, and that feature on that system.

But you're right in that on one level it does what I want...creates a RAID-like drive pool from random drives.

With the price of big drives falling all the time, I'm just hesitent to build a NAS device dependent on specific-sized drives. When 1 TB SATA drives are $150 next year, I want to be able to slap one in without ditching four perfectly good 500GB drives.

[gplasky]

That must have been the first WHS beta. That was addressed in Beta 2 and later. For the feature you're looking for WHS fits it to a "T". And for the time I used it, it worked very well with Sage. (This was before Sage installed into WHS.)

Gerry

[Fountainhead]

Originally Posted by gplasky

That must have been the first WHS beta. That was addressed in Beta 2 and later. For the feature you're looking for WHS fits it to a "T". And for the time I used it, it worked very well with Sage. (This was before Sage installed into WHS.)

Gerry

Hmmm. OK, I'm downloading WHS RC right now to give it another try. (Yeah, the other was beta 1.)

Of course, I've yet to see where they're planning on releasing a software-only retail version for those who wish to build their own. They only speak about OEM pre-installed versions from hardware manufacturers. (I guess they want to control the experience, like they did with MCE.)

Maybe they'll really release the software only, but so far I've seen no official notice of such intent. I wonder when RC expires?

EDIT: Looks like it expires 10/8. Geez, what then?

[bcjenkins]

Originally Posted by Fountainhead

I had an earlier beta of WHS installed awhile back. The "NAS-like" functionality is intriguing, but I hated the way it constantly monitored all the PC's (of which I have several in the house) and badgered me with notifications...NO VIRUS SOFTWARE ON JUPITOR!!!!....MERCURY HASN'T BEEN BACKED UP IN YEARS!!!!...TURN OFF THE STOVE!!!!! There didn't seem (in the beta I used) any way to micro-manage the alerts and have it ignore this feature on this system, and that feature on that system.

But you're right in that on one level it does what I want...creates a RAID-like drive pool from random drives.

With the price of big drives falling all the time, I'm just hesitent to build a NAS device dependent on specific-sized drives. When 1 TB SATA drives are $150 next year, I want to be able to slap one in without ditching four perfectly good 500GB drives.

For what it is worth, there is also a thread with a very enlightening discussion regarding the use of linux and LVM-2 for the same concept. Depending on what you are after, it may be a better fit for NAS duties.

B

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25709

[PGPfan]

You guys should really check out unRaid. It truly does the raid 'like' thing - similar to the Drobo (only better) and is without the limitations of WHS - which is that it isn't raid 'like' at all.

I have both and use both - each has it's strength. WHS is great to run Sage on and of course the auto backup is great (although not what Fountainhead is looking for) but it's data redundancy isn't very efficient regarding hard disk space. unRaid is VASTLY superior in this matter - true Raid, but without the requirements of the same size/model hard drives, etc.

It's also FREE to try!

-PGPfan

[Fountainhead]

Originally Posted by PGPfan

You guys should really check out unRaid....It's also FREE to try!

-PGPfan

Sort of. I'm intrigued by unRaid, but it seems pretty fussy about hardware. The main showstopper for me (as far as trying it out) is that none of my boneyard PC's support booting from a USB key. That means that I'd actually have to buy a new motherboard, RAM, processor just to see if it works like I want. That's an expensive trial.

NAS2Lite looks nice, but it only supports traditional hardware RAID and the very limitations I'm trying to dodge. How about Openfiler? Anyone familiar with that one?

[PGPfan]

That's a shame about your hardware not booting from USB. The original unRaid (and up to version 4.0) was pretty picky about hardware (no AMD support, for example) but since it's using the latest Linux kernel there really is no significant limitations (except your hardware, as you mentioned).

It might be worth looking at the 'barebones' sales that I've seen frequently on TigerDirect. They often include all that you'd need to at least try unRaid at under $125.

Just a thought.

-PGPfan

[SprDtyF350]

Originally Posted by Fountainhead

Sort of. I'm intrigued by unRaid, but it seems pretty fussy about hardware. The main showstopper for me (as far as trying it out) is that none of my boneyard PC's support booting from a USB key. That means that I'd actually have to buy a new motherboard, RAM, processor just to see if it works like I want. That's an expensive trial.

NAS2Lite looks nice, but it only supports traditional hardware RAID and the very limitations I'm trying to dodge. How about Openfiler? Anyone familiar with that one?

I use NASLITE-2 with a kicker floppy that allows my old hardware that normally won't boot from a USB key to do so. The floppy loads some sort of driver, and then the USB key loads NASLITE-2. Maybe one of the programs you are wanting to try will do the same...

[Fountainhead]

Originally Posted by SprDtyF350

I use NASLITE-2 with a kicker floppy that allows my old hardware that normally won't boot from a USB key to do so. The floppy loads some sort of driver, and then the USB key loads NASLITE-2. Maybe one of the programs you are wanting to try will do the same...

Thanks for the tip. I did indeed locate the necessary files to make a kicker floppy, and while it works on one level, I still can't get it to load UnRAID from the USB. I've posted for help in the UnRAID forums, but I'm not really optimistic.

It (UnRAID) looks like a nice idea, but after reading through their forums it seems like it might be just way too flaky to trust my data with. I realize that forums like that generally attract the problems, but the nature of the problems and the frequent lack of resolution gives me concern.

[PGPfan]

Not sure what makes you feel that way. In my experience with unRaid, I remember only one person that lost data permanently. As I recall, it was due to an error on his part (impatience, so he did something he shouldn't have) but I know of many that will swear by it's robustness - myself included. I have over 3TB of music and dvd rips on mine and frankly I wouldn't use anything else to store it on - except a tape drive (which I can't afford).

Best of luck however you end up going!

-PGPfan

[Fountainhead]

Originally Posted by PGPfan

Not sure what makes you feel that way.

Just frustration, I'm sure. This old PC (PIII, 1 ghz, 512 MB RAM) has seen every Microsoft OS from win98, NT4 all the way to Windows 2003 server and every one of them in between. It's had at least 6 strains of Linux over the years. In the last 24 hours alone it's had Nas2Lite, Openfiler, and Windows Home Server. UnRAID is the first OS I've not been able to crowbar on the thing.

Originally Posted by PGPfan

Best of luck however you end up going!

-PGPfan

Which is probably nowhere right now. I guess I'll stick with my mishmash of individual internal and external drives until something appealing comes along.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by PGPfan

You guys should really check out unRaid. It truly does the raid 'like' thing - similar to the Drobo (only better) and is without the limitations of WHS - which is that it isn't raid 'like' at all.

The problem I have with unRAID is that it requires a full, dedicated PC to run. That's way overkill for a NAS, I suppose you could run an EPIA or something (assuming it's supported), but if I'm going to build a full-up PC, I want to be able to run other things on it. Hence, why I'm looking at WHS.

I have both and use both - each has it's strength. WHS is great to run Sage on and of course the auto backup is great (although not what Fountainhead is looking for) but it's data redundancy isn't very efficient regarding hard disk space.

Could you expand on that? I'm trying to get a feel for how WHS does redundancy.

Say for argument's sake, I've got a WHS box running 3 1TB drives in the pool with duplication turned on (3TB total storage). I write a bunch of 10GB files to the pool. My understanding is that each 10GB file will be stored on two of the 3 drives, meaning that each 10GB file will take up 20GB of the total storage. End result is I can fit 3000/20 = 150 10GB files.

-edit, just kind of thinking out loud here...

Basically, the only way to compare is to use common "methodology", that means talking about total storage capacity, and the overhead per file/byte vs the "usable" capacity (which we normally use with RAID). Going by that...

WHS just makes duplicate copies of each file/folder you have Duplication turned on for, that means 200% overhead for all duplicated files (total space is 2x size)

RAID is different in that it's overhead is n/(n-1), so for 2 drives it's the same 200%, for 3, it's 150%, for 4 it's 133 %, for 5 it's 125%, for 6 it's 120%, etc.

Darn, and I thought it was going to do exactly what I wanted (obviously didn't think about it), that being, provide RAID-esque redundancy (N-1 capacity) without RAID.

unRaid is VASTLY superior in this matter - true Raid, but without the requirements of the same size/model hard drives, etc.

FWIW, unRAID isn't RAID at all. It's multiple drives with parity calculated on the side. There's no striping (so not RAID-4), and no pooling (well there wasn't) so it's not like JBOD+parity.

[Fountainhead]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Could you expand on that? I'm trying to get a feel for how WHS does redundancy.

...


FWIW, unRAID isn't RAID at all. It's multiple drives with parity calculated on the side. There's no striping (so not RAID-4), and no pooling (well there wasn't) so it's not like JBOD+parity.

Regarding WHS...I've had it installed (albiet briefly) a couple of times, and I never could get a handle on how exactly the redundancy worked. But it did seem in my limited tests that if you selected redundancy (which you can do on a share by share basis) that it was basically copied to 2 physical drives. Meaning that every file took up twice the space. Not a particularly appealing prospect IMO.

Regarding the comment about unRAID. I was aware that it wasn't traditional RAID (hence, unRAID) and didn't stripe the data, but I thought that it did lump the available drive space into a common pool so that it was available at the user level independent of the physical disks. That's sort of the only appeal to me. I could build a windows box with a bunch of individual disks after all.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Fountainhead

Regarding WHS...I've had it installed (albiet briefly) a couple of times, and I never could get a handle on how exactly the redundancy worked. But it did seem in my limited tests that if you selected redundancy (which you can do on a share by share basis) that it was basically copied to 2 physical drives. Meaning that every file took up twice the space. Not a particularly appealing prospect IMO.

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out just "how bad" it is, just how much space you need before it's cheaper to get a real RAID card (RAID-5) than to buy extra space...

I'm going to type it out so it's here for me, and maybe help to others:

The premise of this is that so long as extra HDDs are cheaper than the RAID card ($500), it's more cost effective to do WHS Pooling/Duplication than RAID-5.

But where is that line?

Consider a good 8-port RAID card, they run about $500
Consider that storage is approximately $0.25/GB these days

You can buy 2.5TB of space for $500 these days ($500 /$0.20/GB), with 500GB HDDs, that means 5 500GB HDDs is the same price as an 8-port RAID card.

For 1.0TB of useable space, you need:
3x 500GB for RAID-5
4x 500GB for WHS (+1) WHS is cheaper.

For 1.5TB of useable space, you need:
4x 500GB for RAID-5
6x 500GB for WHS (+2) WHS is cheaper.

For 2.0TB of useable space, you need:
5x 500GB for RAID-5
8x 500GB for WHS (+3) WHS is cheaper.

For 2.5TB of useable space, you need:
6x 500GB for RAID-5
10x 500GB for WHS (+4) WHS is cheaper.

For 3.0TB of useable space, you need:
7x 500GB for RAID-5
12x 500GB for WHS (+5) WHS equivalent.

What about TB drives? Those run about $0.40 so ($500/$0.40/GB) = 1250GB or 1.25 TB drives

For 2TB of useable space, you need:
3x 1TB for RAID-5
4x 500GB for WHS (+1) WHS is cheaper.

For 3TB of useable space, you need:
4x 1TB for RAID-5
6x 1TB for WHS (+2) RAID is cheaper

Looks like 3TB is about the point, under that, WHS's pooling is probably more cost effective than RAID, above that, RAID is cheaper.

Regarding the comment about unRAID. I was aware that it wasn't traditional RAID (hence, unRAID) and didn't stripe the data, but I thought that it did lump the available drive space into a common pool so that it was available at the user level independent of the physical disks. That's sort of the only appeal to me. I could build a windows box with a bunch of individual disks after all.

I don't know the current state, but at one time, each disc was a separate volume, and there was a "call" for it to pool them, but (again, at one point), reading could be done at the "pool" level, but writing had to be done per-volume.

[Fountainhead]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out just "how bad" it is, just how much space you need before it's cheaper to get a real RAID card (RAID-5) than to buy extra space...

I'm going to type it out so it's here for me, and maybe help to others:

The premise of this is that so long as extra HDDs are cheaper than the RAID card ($500), it's more cost effective to do WHS Pooling/Duplication than RAID-5.

But where is that line?

...

Well, I think the appealing aspect of WHS is that you can use an oddball assortment of drives (even external ones) as one giant pool of usable space. Traditional RAID setups generally require same-sized drives, which is fine today but would be annoying down the road if you want to expand the array or replace a failed drive and you're stuck buying smaller drives than what's current, or worse having to replace 4 or 5 drives at once.

That's why I'd hoped unRAID behaved similarly to WHS in it's presentation of a pooled storage area.

[PGPfan]

Originally Posted by stanger89

FWIW, unRAID isn't RAID at all. It's multiple drives with parity calculated on the side. There's no striping (so not RAID-4), and no pooling (well there wasn't) so it's not like JBOD+parity.

I know that Stanger , I mean that it's is protected storage like a true Raid. IMHO, the non-striping really shows it's value in a home media server rather than the expense/overkill of a hardware raid 5.

Regarding the 'storage pooling' of unRaid, it doesn't have any. What it does (currently ) is allow you to share out a single top level directory which will show the contents of ALL the drives in the array. For example: you create a "movies" directory and a "music" directory in each drive in the unRaid. You fill up each movie and music share in each disk as you go along.

To playback anything, you'd have only 2 'shares' viewable - Movies, and Music - and inside each one you would see all the movies and music regardless of which drive it is on, and you'd launch playback from there.

Currently in beta test is the "writable user shares" which would allow you to write to "Movies" or "Music" and the unRaid software will do all disk space management for you.

As for WHS, if you don't select duplication - it's fairly efficient at storage BUT you have NO PROTECTION whatsoever. If you choose duplication you double the storage that any given file use but you gain the protection of having your data mirrored to another physical drive. Not that great of a safety feature imho, but it's better than nothing. That's why I use and recommend both. Use each one for it's strengths.

-PGPfan

[Fountainhead]

Originally Posted by PGPfan

Regarding the 'storage pooling' of unRaid, it doesn't have any. What it does (currently ) is allow you to share out a single top level directory which will show the contents of ALL the drives in the array. For example: you create a "movies" directory and a "music" directory in each drive in the unRaid. You fill up each movie and music share in each disk as you go along.

To playback anything, you'd have only 2 'shares' viewable - Movies, and Music - and inside each one you would see all the movies and music regardless of which drive it is on, and you'd launch playback from there.

Currently in beta test is the "writable user shares" which would allow you to write to "Movies" or "Music" and the unRaid software will do all disk space management for you...

-PGPfan

OK, this is freaky. I admit that my unraid box has only been up for a couple of hours. There are three drives and it's still doing a parity sync.

So I tried this...I created a "movies" folder on each physical volume and copied different files to each. I then opened \\192.168.1.118\movies and yep, there were all the files from both drives. OK. I get it. Cool.

But then I copied ANOTHER file over directly into \\192.168.1.118\movies and it shows up, but when looking at each individual physical drive in their respective "movie" folders, the file doesn't show up in either one! Yet I can map a drive to the "movies" share and the file is there. So where is it being stored? Is it stuck in some kind of "parity limbo" until the sync completes?

I know this isn't an unraid form, but you seem pretty knowledgable about it.

[PGPfan]

Sounds to me like you are trying to write to you virtual "movies" share. This won't be possible until TomM (unRaid's dev) releases version 4.2. What you need to do is to write to either any disks "Movie" share directly. Once that is done, got to one of the tabs (the name escapes me at the moment) and 're-scan' your "user shares". Now it will appear in the "Movies" share as you expect it to.

It will all be seamless and totally transparent in the much anticipated release that will enable "writeable user shares".

-PGPfan