DIY NAS. Please critique my build!

[Swarly]

Hello all.


Came across this forum recently and thought i would share my build and ask for a few opinions on it.

My main goal for this build was to be able to stream 3 simultaneous BD rips to three clients on my network. The math on the average bit rate of bluray movies vs the available bandwidth of gigabit LAN works out with room to spare so i went about putting together a disk subsystem that can saturate the GB LAN link.

RAID is a forgone conclusion here for speed and so i went with RAID 5 for redundancy mostly because backing up 4TB of data is not cheap or easy so i keep it live and redundant. My RAID controller of choice here is the 3ware 9680SE PCI-E. This is a 8 drive SATA RAID controller and supports up to RAID 6 on 8 drives.

Hard disks were a concern, Enterprise drives are expensive but fast and robust. I ultimately chose 8 750GB Seagate ES2 SATA drives (expensive but fast!).

The rest of the system consists of 2 Icydock 5 in 3 disk enclosures, an Intel DQ965WH mainboard and Intel Core 2 duo E6600 (2.2GHZ per core) with 4GB or DDR2-800.

For the OS i went with what was familiar to me, Windows server 2008.

Initial testing puts the array at over 100MB/sec on local transfers (disk to disk in the same system) and ~45 -65 MB/Sec over the LAN for reads.

 

[00Roush]

Welcome to the site!

Not sure exactly what you are looking for with a critque of your build but here goes...

Well you definately should be able to stream 3 BD rips with that setup and saturate a gigabit connection. To my knowledge max bit rate on BD is around 40 Mbps so 3 streams would only be 120 Mbps. With your setup you could probably serve 10-20 BD rips easy over a gigabit network.

I did have a few questions about your RAID setup and disks. Are you using all your disks in a single RAID 5 or do you have two RAID 5 groups? With that many disks in a single RAID 5 the possibility of losing the array is much higher. I think with 5 drives or more it is recommended to move to RAID 6 or combine multiple smaller RAID 5 arrays. Also I wondered why you went with the Seagate Baracuda ES.2 drives instead of the newer Seagate Constellation ES drives. I know the ES.2 drives are well regarded but I thought that they were no longer available.

My server here at home is running Windows Server 2008 and I have found it to have excellent performance. I actually expected to see a bit higher transfer speeds over your LAN. Is your client holding you back? What is the OS and specs on the client machine?

Overall I would say your setup looks solid. Maybe a bit overkill if all you need to do is stream a few HD movies at the same time. One thing I figured I would mention, if you haven't already done so, get yourself a good name brand power supply for your server. I have found that many of the low end power supplies are not built for continuos use and have awful capacitors in them.

00Roush