NAS on HTPC Sage Computer Setup

[limiter]

I am planning on building a NAS on my SageTV server box. I want to have a place for all my computers (Mac/PC) to connect and store files. I want to avoid spending the money on an off-the-shelf NAS as well as avoid yet another box, power, fan noise, etc that comes with that. The setup goes like this:

• FreeNAS running on FreeBSD which is running in VMWare Player running on Windows 7 Pro. This server also runs SageTV service. HDTheater's connect to the server.
• VMWare Player is setup so it has 2 virtual drives which will be on two 2TB hard drives.
• In FreeNAS you can setup a soft raid. I will make a mirrored raid in FreeNAS using the two Virtual Drives.

Disadvantages: Slow, takes up some system resources, relies on software raid, running in a virtual machine can be flaky.

My thinking is the read/write access only needs to be as fast as my network not as fast as a local drive. The data on the virtual drives could easily be recovered since they are just files on a regular NTFS Windows drive. If one drive fails all I need to do is recreate that virtual drive on a replacement hard drive and rebuild the raid. This has the advantage of not needing the exact same drive as the original (So I could go 2TB to 3TB or whatever).

FreeNAS and VMWare Player are free so the only cost is the storage.

My SageTV server would record TV to a separate local drive, not the NAS. To be honest I don't do much recording anyway; only OTA HDHomeRun.

I have most of this setup working already. I am waiting on the 2TB drives so I haven't setup a RAID yet, but I have another virtual drive shared out on the network, FreeNAS is running in the VMWare Player on Windows 7 ok.

I am looking for suggestions/comments. Any problems I might run into? Anyone doing something like this?

[wrems]

You may consider unRAID... I know Stanger was working on a similar setup as to what you're proposing. I haven't been following the thread but probably worth some consideration...

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...59&postcount=1

[SWKerr]

I am struggling to see why this solution would be better than a Windows share. What benefit are you getting for all this additional complexity?

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

I am struggling to see why this solution would be better than a Windows share. What benefit are you getting for all this additional complexity?

Exactly what I was going to say. If you insist on software RAID, Windows can do it natively. But why bother with RAID at all in this situation? You'll still need a real backup solution for your irreplaceable data, and there are plenty of options that can do it incrementally in background to another disk, another computer on your LAN, or some cloud-based backup service.

[limiter]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

I am struggling to see why this solution would be better than a Windows share. What benefit are you getting for all this additional complexity?

There is no AFP support in Windows, and connecting with a Mac with Samba has issues (filename incompatibility, files that are opened and never get closed until a reboot). The HTPC frequently would cut off Mac computers and never allow another connection until a reboot as well which was annoying.

[limiter]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Exactly what I was going to say. If you insist on software RAID, Windows can do it natively. But why bother with RAID at all in this situation? You'll still need a real backup solution for your irreplaceable data, and there are plenty of options that can do it incrementally in background to another disk, another computer on your LAN, or some cloud-based backup service.

The last thing I want is yet another server to back up my Sage server. That is why I want a raid. Cloud backup? Are you pushing 100s of GBs of data every week to the cloud? I think I would hit my bandwidth cap in half a month.

Maybe raid is not a "real" backup solution for you, but at least in terms of media it is good enough for me.

[jptheripper]

I went through this for months. Even went the Windows Home Server route.

Ended up with a hardware RAID card and a couple dozen windows shares.

Life = simpler = better = WAF UP = happier = etc...

[reggie14]

I can understand your desire to use a RAID network share as a backup location. GKusnick is right that you'll want to do something else for irreplaceable data, but in many cases it doesn't make sense to use a cloud service to backup difficult-to-replace data (e.g., ripped or encoded DVDs), but you still might want some protection from drive failures.

For me, I consider backup images of my computers "difficult to replace" but not "irreplaceable." I have important files backed up to cloud providers, but that's a much, much smaller amount of data. So, I have a 10TB unRAID box that I backup my machines to, and I keep ripped movies/TV shows on. It works well. Its nice to have a storage location that I can treat as essentially unlimited.

But, I'm not a big fan of the idea of running FreeNAS in a VM on your Sage box- particularly if you intend to backup your Sage box to this VM. I just think there are too many things that could go wrong that I wouldn't want to trust my backups to a system like that.

It doesn't sound like you need a lot of space, all you want is 2x2TB in a RAID 1. Small special-purpose NAS devices aren't terribly expensive, although needing AFP support is a little problematic. Still, you could get a ReadyNAS Duo for about $200, though performance will probably be a bit slow (10-15MB/sec writes). The $250 QNAP TS-210 is probably a bit better (~20MB/sec writes).

Even if you had an extra computer laying around, unRAID probably wouldn't be for you. AFP support is coming in the most recent beta, but development of unRAID v5 has been slow enough that I'd be awfully nervous about counting on reliable AFP support. The developer has a nasty habit of disappearing for extended periods of time.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by limiter

Maybe raid is not a "real" backup solution for you, but at least in terms of media it is good enough for me.

If it's just media, then fine. But the (apparently mistaken) impression I had from your first post was that you wanted your Sage server to do double duty as a general purpose file server for files of all types.

[limiter]

Everyone can ignore this now. The write speeds were decent with my setup 10-15 MB/s, but for some reason read speeds were 0.6-1MB/s which is not good, in fact pretty terrible.

I will probably get a stand alone NAS at this point. Thanks for the comments and suggestions.

@GKusnick I was talking primarily about media, sorry that wasn't clear.

[stevech]

I have a small NAS and a win7 PC with Sage, Home Automation, web server and other stuff, RAID1 disk pair for video and C:, and lots of other drives. Lots of windows shares.

The NAS is just too slow by comparison (low speed CPU). And the *nix file attribute differences with NTFS screw up some of my WIndows based backup programs. NASes can now do NTFS mounts for read/write but the speeds are slooooow.

So, simpler is just windows shares.

The glitzy media server functions in QNAP and Synology (seemingly far better than others), are appealing but I don't thing they'd actually be used much here. And you can always put free Boxee "Make" on your windows PC. It's kinda fun.

[svemuri]

Originally Posted by limiter

Everyone can ignore this now. The write speeds were decent with my setup 10-15 MB/s, but for some reason read speeds were 0.6-1MB/s which is not good, in fact pretty terrible.

I will probably get a stand alone NAS at this point. Thanks for the comments and suggestions.

@GKusnick I was talking primarily about media, sorry that wasn't clear.

Just got a Netgear Stora MS2000 (no drives) for $99(Newegg, Buy etc) and I am amazed! It has two "slots" that can accept any SATA drive (bare). With a small hack (openstora.com), it becomes a small low power linux box that can be used for other light duty operations besides NAS (Squeezebox, Torrents etc). Linux OS is on a flash drive and does not need HDD. Check it out. Write/Read speeds were between 15-20MB/s on a GigE LAN.
Sarat

[Fuzzy]

I'd agree with the suggestions here to just keep it simple. I use my sage server for virtually all my general purpose storage. 'Irreplaceable items' (documents, pictures, wiz.bin backup, etc.) are backed up off-site to a family member's house, and also to a cloud based service. 'Hard to replace' which consists of recordings, ripped movies, etc, I don't even bother with RAID on. If the worst thing that would happen if I lost a drive is that I'd have to get up and find the disc that I wanted to watch, I can live with that.

The real problem here seems to be apples terrible SMB client implementation (which, personally, I feel is intentional). There are a few AFP servers for windows, but I don't think any of them would be considered affordable for home use.

[stanger89]

Figure I'll jump in here as I've wrestled with many of the same "issues" or maybe more correctly requirements:

• Reasonable performance (it's media not work/scratch)
• Not excessively increase power
• Be simple and reliable
• Lots of storage with easy options to expand

For a little background I got started in my media storage quite a while ago with, well actually initially it was onboard RAID with 4 like 50GB drives or something. Well suffice to say that was the last time I would ever use onboard RAID (it was flaky). Next step was a 3ware 7506-8 (IIRC) with 8x250GB drives which was basically bulletproof. Filled that up and ran into the trouble of that early controller didn't support OCE so it was going to be a bear to upgrade, so I bought a ReadyNAS X6, which was also very good. I upgraded the drives in that once from 500, to 1500GB (for 4.5TB total), but inevitably I filled that, and by this time the X6 was old and it showed.

So this is where I think my struggle is applicable to this thread, this is when I really started struggling with my options. I looked at good RAID cards but those were expensive, replacing my ReadyNAS, but that was even more expensive, Windows shares were out because of no redundancy, and even if you hack in Windows software RAID, you can't expand the array so that was out.

I tried FlexRAID but it's "View" functionality was incredibly limited for writing to the "array" and it appears it may have finally died (apparently the forums have been down for a while).

All this time, I'd known about unRAID and it sounded great, but it would require another box, so like the OP I resisted for a long time. I tried VMWare ESXi which might have actually worked if my tuners were more compatible.

But eventually my research brought me to a somewhat surprising realization/discovery. And that was the Supermicro X7SPA/X7SPE. What it is is a mini-ITX motherboard with an Atom 330 processor. The the bare board uses only about 23W, and IIRC is only 30-40W when you through in an 8-port Supermicro SATA card. The X7SPA/E has 6 SATA ports onboard, and 14 if you add the Supermicro AOC card.

Basically I realized that my fear/resistance to "another box" was unjustified. It results in a simpler setup (just plug in power, lan, drives and go), almost no extra power, and offers easy upgrade options. You can get 10TB (maybe 15TB with 3TB drives if they're supported) with just the X7SPA/E, and 26TB-39TB with the AOC card, and good performance for media.

I think unRAID is a great solution for those looking for some basic redundancy and easy operation, and if you can get your brain wrapped around the fact that that "extra box" really isn't nearly as bad as it seems. And like I said, I understand the resistance to the extra box, it took me a while to get over it myself.

[jptheripper]

Same struggles here. Finally went with an internal RocketRaid 8 port card and have never been happier.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Basically I realized that my fear/resistance to "another box" was unjustified. It results in a simpler setup (just plug in power, lan, drives and go), almost no extra power, and offers easy upgrade options. You can get 10TB (maybe 15TB with 3TB drives if they're supported) with just the X7SPA/E, and 26TB-39TB with the AOC card, and good performance for media.

What OS are you using with that board?

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

What OS are you using with that board?

It sounds like unRAID.

unRAID v5 will have AFP support. Its in beta right now, but the developer has largely disappeared for a while. The last beta was released March 6. I'm relatively confident that Lime Tech will release v5 final at some point in the next 6 months, but that's about all I'm confident of. If the OP really needs AFP support I would hold off on building an unRAID box until there's more progress on v5.

[limiter]

A lot of people keep saying "Windows shares" like it is the solution to everything. I need the Macs to be able to connect to the share easily and I can say after struggling with this for a while that Windows 7 Pro does not do this well with Macs. I have tried registry settings and lots of other suggestions, nothing works well.

@Fuzzy SMB implementation on the Mac sucks. I blame Apple as well.

The last few months I ended up setting up a basic FTP server on the Sage server (before I tried FreeNAS) which was clunky, but worked better than the Windows share.

Now I have an external NAS which is working well with both Windows, Mac, and lets all my other devices (Xbox, PS3, Receiver) see music, pictures, and videos. The NAS has email notifications, UPS support for auto-shutdown, temperature and SMART monitoring, sleep cycles, VPN, lots of other built-in features.

[Taddeusz]

Strange, I have had no issues with my Mac's and the shares on both my Windows 7 and XP machines.

[limiter]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Strange, I have had no issues with my Mac's and the shares on both my Windows 7 and XP machines.

I couldn't consistently transfer large files (1-6GB) or groups of large files (10-20GB) to or from the Mac. The connection would break with an error (on the PC) and the only way for the Mac to reconnect would be to restart the SageTV server. I transfer files of this size frequently so it became a giant pain.