Advice/experience needed.

[panteragstk]

This is a hardware and a software question, but mostly hardware so I figured this would be the appropriate section to post.

Here goes. I am wanting to expand my SageTV system to include a dedicated server, a large NAS unit (depending on the advice I get), and many client pc's. My reason for not using extenders will be obvious later.

I am going to build the server using WHS. This brings up the first set of questions: Will the future version of WHS be 64bit so I can use lots of ram in my system? If so, then when is it being released? I've read that you can put recordings in the drive pool as long as the drives are formatted correctly with 64k clusters. Does that mean that all pooled drives will have to be formatted that way? How reliable is WHS "raid"? The reason I ask is because I've considered either buying a NAS unit that has raid capabilities and storing data on it, but they are expensive. That or building an unRAID server or RAID5 or 6 server in addition to the WHS server. In that case the WHS server would be used for recording only. The way I'm thinking is I could build a WHS server and have an unpooled 4TB raid 0 array of drives for recording so they will have lots of bandwidth so I won't have the problems I do now when recording 3 shows to a single drive. The server will have 3 hd-pvr's (if I determine they are worth it) and my current 2 cards for a total of 7 tuners. So 4 drives in raid 0 should have sufficient bandwidth for 7 recordings and multiple shows being viewed at once. That is quite a bit of bandwidth needed. Then my pooled drives will store my ripped movies/music etc.

That is my thinking on the server side.

The reason I am going to build individual client pc's is because the extender has no dvd/blu ray drive and that is important to me. I want the clients to be the only device connected to the tv's (with the exception of game consoles). This setup will eventually be a whole house system including multi room music system and clients in every room with a tv. This brings up another question. Will the server transcode my ripped blu rays or will the clients just stream them from the server like they would if I just pointed them to the directory the movies are in?

For now that is it. Any further suggestions are more than welcome. I do have a list of parts for the server and clients, but I want to see what you guys would suggest before I tell you. What do you think the hardware requirements will be for my setup? For arguments sake lets say I have a total of 4 clients that could potentially all be viewing recorded tv or live tv at the same time and possible and extender or two for rooms that do not require dvd playback. That could be 6 recordings viewed at once and potentially 7 shows being recorded at the same time.

Thanks in advance.

[mayamaniac]

I've used Windows dynamic disks (software raid) for many years without problems. If you plan to record and watch multiple recordings at the same time, 64K cluster is a must. Assuming you are getting four 1TB drives, I think it should easily handle the load.

I REALLY REALLY REALLY would steer away from PC clients. It ain't worth the time and frustrations unless you plan to be a full time computer repair technician in the house. Just get AnyDVD and rip your Blu-Rays to the server, the HD200 Extenders will play them.

[Djc208]

The SageTV Client software works like the Sage Server software without the recording features. So the client computer does all the heavy lifting and the server just provides the data and maintains the history/schedule/library/etc. So no transcoding, but the client has to have all of the necessary codecs for the files you want to play.

The WHS "Raid" just maintains a copy of the selected folders on different HDDs within the drive pool. It's invisible to you other than requiring twice the space. I doubt it's as reliable or fast as a good RAID setup, and probably not the best option for backing up recordings or even a lot of ripped files. But it's easy to implement and rather fool-proof from the user side.

If you're looking to maintain a backup of your recordings or ripped movies I'd probably consider using an NAS unit that does RAID, or maybe add an array to the WHS but not as part of the "pool".

Otherwise I have to agree with Maya, the HD200s will do BD playback and are drastically easier to install and maintain, not to mention smaller, quieter, and cheaper than a full client machine. I'd use as many as possible and limit the clients to where you need full PC capabilities or want local BD playback (via disk).

[PiX64]

I would highly recommend the freenas solution connected to a gigabit switch for DVD/Blu-Ray backup and streaming.

For my DVD NAS i have the following setup:

1) FreeNAS running of off USB thumb Drive
2) 3 x 1TB Maxtor drives
3) PERC 5i true hardware raid controller at Raid 5
4) I can provide more hardware specs if you are interested

The above setup for a NAS has proven to be more than reliable. My NAS has been up an running for 75 days and counting without a reboot.

As for the Server side I cannot comment on the WHS as i use windows xp Pro SP3 on a dual core pentium D 3.6 GHZ. I do however run 2 SATA drives for a total of 500GB recordings space, 1 x HVR1600 for analog, 1 x ATI external for STB connection, and 1 x 2 tuner HDHR for QAM. Been up an running for 2 months this way without missing a beat.

I also have 1 client pc and 1 HD200. I would highly recommend the HD200 over the client pc. HD200 just works. streams DVD and upconverts them amzingly well. It's a good solid piece of hardware in my experience.

~Mike

[panteragstk]

Thanks for the responses. I do plan to use extenders where bd/dvd playback is unnecessary, but I have played with sage enough that I think my clients will work ok. I won't have more than 2 at the max 3 so it isn't that big of a deal. I've been a repair tech for a long time so no problem there. It sounds like you guys would trust a raid 5 or 6 setup over whs' version. I think I would too. I would like some more examples of a good NAS setup.

Thanks again.

[PiX64]

As promised here is my complete NAS setup

- Athlon 64 x2 dual core 5000+
- XFX Geforce 8200 mobo
- 2GB DDR2 Corsair
- 3 X 1TB MAxtor SataII/300 32MB Cache HDD's
- Perc 5i HARDWARE raid controller (2 channels 4 disks per channel)
- Ultra m923 full tower case Link
- APC Battery Backup

Freenas - 0.69 AMD64 Embedded system running off of Kingston 1GB USB drive

Sahweeeeeeeeeeeet!

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by PiX64

As promised here is my complete NAS setup

- Athlon 64 x2 dual core 5000+
- XFX Geforce 8200 mobo
- 2GB DDR2 Corsair
- 3 X 1TB MAxtor SataII/300 32MB Cache HDD's
- Perc 5i HARDWARE raid controller (2 channels 4 disks per channel)
- Ultra m923 full tower case Link
- APC Battery Backup

Freenas - 0.69 AMD64 Embedded system running off of Kingston 1GB USB drive

Sahweeeeeeeeeeeet!

MAXTOR?

[Taddeusz]

Kind of overkill for a NAS.

Also FreeNAS is really terrible for network throughput. Within the last month or so I threw a 1TB drive in my SageTV server and moved everything off the 750GB of storage in my FreeNAS box onto it. No matter what I did I could never get more than about 45MB/s throughput. Now with my SageTV server pulling double duty as a file server for my media my network throughput transferring files to that share peaks at around 100MB/s. Definitely a negative for FreeNAS.

Otherwise I really liked FreeNAS. If I were to self roll another NAS I'd go with a different OS. FreeBSD just doesn't have proper driver support so, as in my case, things like integrated network adapters don't have proper drivers. If you go with a discreat NAS OS go with something based on Linux.

[PiX64]

I completely agree that my setup is overkill for a nas, but it was just so cheap to set it up that i couldn't pass it up. the mobo, proc, ram, case, pc cost me around $175. It also has hdmi out as well as truhd 7.1 support. So my thought was that if i ever decided to use this as a server/client it would be perfect.

I noticed network throughput issues with freenas when i was running it with software raid. As soon as I decided to make the plunge into hardware raid with the Perc 5i card i had no problems what so ever. I have 3 client machines and am able to record 2 hd 2 sd all at the same time while watching a different DVD on each of the clients (dvd being pulled from freenas). Dvd's do not lag, start instantly, and play perfectly.

Ii know Maxtor isn't the greatest , but they have always been reliable for me and again were so cheap for retail drives that i couldn't pass it up. $89 a piece at Fry's.

[Taddeusz]

I wasn't using RAID at all. They were just individual disks hooked to the onboard SATA controller. If it wasn't FreeNAS itself if I had to hazard a guess where the bottleneck was I would probably have to say it might have actually been the network adapter to a certain extent but I have to wonder.

I'll explain a little further. When I was putting together my NAS I basically went for as little as I could spend and keep the power profile as low as possible. I bought an MSI 945GCM7-F motherboard with a Celeron 420 and 1GB of RAM. Very cheap. I think it all cost me about $100. All told I think I might have spent about $150 because I went the CF route and had to buy a 2GB CF card with a CF to IDE adapter. Still, it was on the very cheap but I wanted to stick with all Intel as I feel a little burned with AMD now.

Anyway... the motherboard has onboard gigabit via a PCIe Realtek RTL8111C chip. So it should be pretty fast. Well, that was my problem. FreeBSD does not include drivers for the RTL8111C chip and so neither does FreeNAS. So I had to pull a PCI Intel gigabit adapter out of my closet to throw in it. I really didn't want to do this because it added to the power profile and PCI is less than ideal for gigabit ethernet. One of my constraints was to make this system use as little power as possible, hence the Celeron.

At one point I did get a 32-bit FreeBSD driver for the onboard NIC but it was a pain to get set back up when it came time to uprade the OS. Plus, it was a 32-bit driver. Oh, and to add insult to injury the Realtek NIC actually performed a little worse on FreeNAS than the Intel. When I switched to 64-bit FreeBSD it could not be used. So I just settled for the PCI NIC with the idea that I'd eventually get a supported PCIe NIC.

This brings us to about a month ago. I had about 20GB of storage left on my NAS. I convinced my fiance that its time to spend $100 on a WD Green 1TB drive. I threw it in my SageTV server which is running a PCIe Intel NIC and Windows XP. Now I'm really happy with the performance I'm getting to my networked media.

Here shortly I'm going to put Windows on what was my NAS and determine whether it really was the OS, then I can actually use the onboard NIC. I've actually read elsewhere and seen benchmarks showing how poor FreeNAS's network performance really is compared to Linux based NAS OS's.

[panteragstk]

FreeNAS sounds good, but I was thinking about using unRAID or hardware raid with something like freenas. Does anyone have any alternatives to freenas?

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

FreeNAS sounds good, but I was thinking about using unRAID or hardware raid with something like freenas. Does anyone have any alternatives to freenas?

Open Filer is supposed to be good.

[PiX64]

Not sure if you all are aware of this, but the newest version of Freenas .069 has support for most onboard Realtek cards. My current setup has an onboard realtek Gitgabit interface, and it works great without any throughput problems.

As for openfiler, the only thing i can say is that i have also heard good things about it. Mainly from a guy i work with though, He loves the fact that it has iscsi support. Not sure if you need iscsi support....


~Mike

[bjterry62]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

FreeNAS sounds good, but I was thinking about using unRAID or hardware raid with something like freenas. Does anyone have any alternatives to freenas?

I have a headless unRAID Free setup currently housing all my SD DVDs. It's been in use for about 6 months with no issues. Hardware is:

AMD Turion 2.0ghz 25W
MSI RS482M-IL skt 754
Kingston Valuram 512 x 1 DDR-400
Old case with 300W psu
WD Caviar 750gb SATA II x 3 in custom aluminum bracket with 120mm cooling

Power consumption is about 75W in use.
HDD Temps are 4deg above ambient.

unRAID setup is stupid simple. If I ever want to expand above the 3 drives allowed by the free edition, I just pay for a higher level and load up more drives.

BT

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by bjterry62

I have a headless unRAID Free setup currently housing all my SD DVDs. It's been in use for about 6 months with no issues. Hardware is:

AMD Turion 2.0ghz 25W
MSI RS482M-IL skt 754
Kingston Valuram 512 x 1 DDR-400
Old case with 300W psu
WD Caviar 750gb SATA II x 3 in custom aluminum bracket with 120mm cooling

Power consumption is about 75W in use.
HDD Temps are 4deg above ambient.

unRAID setup is stupid simple. If I ever want to expand above the 3 drives allowed by the free edition, I just pay for a higher level and load up more drives.

BT

Thanks for the info. That sounds great. I have a pretty old amd setup as my server that wold work for a NAS unraid setup. I'm still not sure if I want to invest in a nice hardware raid card that could do raid 5. The only question about raid 5 i have is if i get a card that can support say 4 drives then I decide to expand will a new card allow me to add drives to the current array or will i have to have more than one array?

[BigTim]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Open Filer is supposed to be good.

I will add a vote for Openfiler. I've been using it for years (I own a web hosting company) and recently chose it for my NAS in my home network.

I read a few responces up about slowness issues. I too had problems with speed at home and lost myself in finding what the cause was and resolving it. In the end it turned out to be AVG Anti Virus crippling the network. After removing the Anti Virus from all the windows boxes I was seeing 80Mbit transfers in any direction across all the machines on the net. My server, client and NAS all use the Realtec gigabyte NIC that is onboard.

I live alone so I am never watching from more then 1 location at a time. I have Openfiler using a combination of software RAID5 and LVM, but I am rebuilding the box this coming week as I am adding an Adaptec 5405 raid card and Chenbro CK12803 28-port SAS expander. The box itself is an AMD 7750 CPU with 1gb ram and 6 hitachi 1tb drives. I carved 7gb for the OS and swap, then made 2*3 drive raid5 arrays, joined them with raid0 ( I guess that would technically be raid50 ) and then use LVM to manage the space, and format with the XFS file system.

I simply cannot fathom the time it would take to rip all the content again, which is why I chose raid5 and at todays cost of ~$80 per TB drive, I just couldn't justify the risk of raid0 or JBOD. I am only using the NAS for storage of DVD/BD so write speed is not very important, but I have run hdparm on the array and it rivals some 8 drive hardware raid10 systems I have.

If you are semi-comfortable with linux, Openfiler is a no-brainer choice for a NAS. Yes I view myself as extremely proficient with Linux, but I don't really see having any linux knowledge being needed with this appliance past the install. I've seen a few resellers offer Openfiler pre-built appliances as well if you care to avoid the install.

[jm9843]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

I am going to build the server using WHS. This brings up the first set of questions: Will the future version of WHS be 64bit so I can use lots of ram in my system? If so, then when is it being released? I've read that you can put recordings in the drive pool as long as the drives are formatted correctly with 64k clusters. Does that mean that all pooled drives will have to be formatted that way? How reliable is WHS "raid"?

WHS v2 is reportedly going to be exclusively 64-bit as it's based on Windows Server 2008. I would expect it to be released sometime next year.

There is a tutorial for formatting disks in the drive pool with 64k clusters although it is outside of the scope of "normal" WHS use. I believe that, yes, you'd then want to format all drives in the pool in the same way. You wouldn't necessarily have to do so, but it would defeat the purpose if you didn't...which is why I keep my Sage recording drive out of the pool. If a drive is unmanaged by the WHS disk migrator service you'd want to rdp into the system, format for 64k clusters, share it (rtv01, rtv02, rtv03, etc.), and set permissions on it. This is a perfectly resonable arrangement for me because I am not interested in redundancy on my recorded tv share.

WHS "raid" (i.e. duplication) seems to be pretty bulletproof. When something is copied to a WHS share, the disk migrator service kicks in and "balances" the data by moving it to a disk with available space. If the share in question has duplication turned on, the data is written to two physical disks. If WHS detects that a disk is failing, it will send a notification to any clients on the LAN with WHS Connector software installed. Then within the WHS console you can choose to "remove" the disk which results in all data being automatically moved off of that disk and load balanced to the reamining good disks. Another nice thing about WHS is that the drives are simply NTFS formatted drives. If something were to happen to your boot volume and the "reinstall" option of WHS were to fail, you could simply pop any "pooled" disks into another system to recover your files. And as someone who has had a RAID-5 array go kaput on them due to multiple simultaneous hard disk failures, it's nice to know that I'll be able to recover at least some of my data if the same thing were to happen to the WHS. For your most important data, there are add-ins available to mark your shares for Amazon S3 or other cloud storage backups.

Originally Posted by panteragstk

The reason I ask is because I've considered either buying a NAS unit that has raid capabilities and storing data on it, but they are expensive. That or building an unRAID server or RAID5 or 6 server in addition to the WHS server. In that case the WHS server would be used for recording only. The way I'm thinking is I could build a WHS server and have an unpooled 4TB raid 0 array of drives for recording so they will have lots of bandwidth so I won't have the problems I do now when recording 3 shows to a single drive. The server will have 3 hd-pvr's (if I determine they are worth it) and my current 2 cards for a total of 7 tuners. So 4 drives in raid 0 should have sufficient bandwidth for 7 recordings and multiple shows being viewed at once. That is quite a bit of bandwidth needed. Then my pooled drives will store my ripped movies/music etc.

Why seperate servers for this? Set up your RAID-0 array for recording on the WHS, format to 64k clusters, but don't add it to the WHS storage pool. Add additional disks to the pool for storing ripped movies, music, pictures, etc. and turn "duplication" on per share as you deem necessary.

Originally Posted by panteragstk

The reason I am going to build individual client pc's is because the extender has no dvd/blu ray drive and that is important to me.....This brings up another question. Will the server transcode my ripped blu rays or will the clients just stream them from the server like they would if I just pointed them to the directory the movies are in?

I echo other user's comments to seriously consider going with the HD200 as opposed to PC clients. Rather than having optical disc drives in every room, rip your DVDs/Blu-rays to the server. Additionally, you can install AnyDVD on the server and add the optical drive(s) attached to it to the SageTV video library; you'll be able to stream those discs (both DVD and Blu-ray) out to your HD200 clients.

If you do decide to use PC clients, Sage Client will "stream" the content from the server as if you "just pointed them to the directory the movies are in" while Sage Placeshifter will rely on the server to transcode the video. Although that might not be true if you have the "LAN" option selected in the Placeshifter options, someone please correct me if I am wrong.

Originally Posted by panteragstk

For now that is it. Any further suggestions are more than welcome.

Kind of in response to some other poster's comments: I really don't see a compelling reason to use some other NAS configuration in addition to or in lieu of WHS, unless you are conscientious of WHS duplication using more disk space than a RAID array.

In addition to having only one box instead of two; WHS offers ease of disk management (including per share redundancy); client backup and restore, share backups to external discs to take offsite, remote access, and the ability to easily extend the core features with user created and commercial add-ins. I think one of them is called Sage-something or other.

I realize that most all of those things or something very similar can be acheived in a different environment, but the beauty of WHS is that it makes it dead simple.

[panteragstk]

Thanks for the advice. I think WHS will do fine for me. I guess I will end up upgrading it to v2 when it is available. Now I just have to decide how much power i need in a server to start picking parts.

Thanks again.

[ArcAiN6]

I have been using freenas for a few months now, and using the 0.7x version, i seem to be noticing no bottlenecks when it comes to bandwidth.

So i guess my question really is this:
How would one go about using the freenas server(s) for use with SageTV. Is it simply pointing the sage client to the NAS locations instead of a local location?

Or is there some other software being installed on the freenas server to make use of it's built in UPnP support?

Also. Not sure if this qualifies as part of the same discussion or not, but using freenas as the OS, would it be possible to put all the tuner cards in the freenas server, and remotely set the recording schedule so that the recording, storage, and streaming are all done from the freenas server?

The reeason i ask these questions is i currently have 15 servers at the house 2 of which i would like to utilize for this particular project.

2x web-server/hosting on backbone connection, (1 is emergency fail-over)
2x SMTP/POP3/IMAP (1 for emergency fail-over)
6x servers for network rendering of 3d animation / video production
1x testing server (sand boxing application / configuration / software upgrades)
2x backup server (loaded to the gills with raid drives, not much else)

leaving me with the 2 other servers to use for sage/freenas integration.

To some this may appear to be a bit overkill, but i like to warm my hands by the blinkie-lights on cold winter nights... lol j/k.

Seriously, how would one go about using the two servers for strictly sagetv serving of media to the rest of the house. I would like to get a test server up and running as soon as possible so i can best accomplish the needed changes to the servers / network.

What i plan on doing is putting my created works, 3d animations, videos etc on one server, and my anime, tv recordings, and music on the other. This way i can better load balance the network once everything is set up properly and ready for integration within the house.

any advice would be MOST appreciated.

[paulbeers]

Freenas is running FreeBSD. While much like Linux, it isn't the same and therefore couldn't be used by Sage for video capture. Where you could use a FreeNas server would be for media storage and just point your servers/clients to the network share (UNC paths). I did this for awhile with my FreeNas server as I was able to boot from a CD/thumbdrive which left all of the drives in the server available for storage. I had all of my DVD's stored on that server and it worked rather well. However, in the end I found it to be cheaper to just run one server (obviously) and so I moved all of my drives to my Sage Server and dismantled my FreeNas server.