Storage Server Options

[ehcah]

Hello,

I currently run an unRAID, 12TB usable NAS in an external 8 bay enclosure attached to one of my servers via a port multiplier card. To say the least, performance is slow. A lot is most likely due to the cheap card that attaches the enclosure. The rest is mostly as a result of how unRAID writes data. I should point out that we have 3 dedicated HTPC's in our house and I have never had any stuttering or quality issues.

Having said that... I have purchased a 24 bay 4U Server Chassis, MOBO, i5 Processor, 8GB of RAM, SSD drive for OS or Cache, alternate USB thumb drive for OS (solution dependent) and an Areca 1280ML 24 port controller. Once the hardware arrives, I will populate 12 of the 24 bays with 2TB drives. I will NOT rebuild with unRAID and I want to move while I easily have enough empty disk to move data. My gut is telling me there are other, more scalable solutions out there. I'm probably thinking a Raid 6 like solution and between 18TB-20TB usable out of the 12 x 2TB drives. Management, stability/reliability, ease of expansion and future drive replacement when larger drives become affordable are my biggest considerations.

Rather than asking what I should do, I'd like to solicit users feedback on the following solutions. If you feel like pointing out pro's/con's, great. I'm mostly trying to figure out which of these solutions is most popular with the home media crowd.

My short list includes, FreeNAS, Nexenta or simply building another Ubuntu Server using Raid 6, LVM and samba shares. ZFS is my target with two of the solutions, the last is probably just plain old faster, but a full server install rather than appliance. I have ruled out unRAID, EON, OpenFiler, Debian + zpool, OpenIndiana and Windows Home Server.

For my particular application, storage focus is for Movies, Music, Pictures and a segregated area for backing up our home pc's. I should note that some of the solutions I've ruled out are based on gut feel and/or my experience testing them in a VM. I do not feel that any of them are bad solutions.

Thank you for any time consideration given to my post.

ehcah

 

[00Roush]

Well that is quite the setup you have. All of the OSes on your short list work well and once setup would provide good performance. I just recently checked out Nexenta (well actually NexentaStor ) and I must say it is quite good. FreeNAS and Ubuntu are probably the most widely used for home setups though.

Your best bet is probably to use ZFS since you will be storing quite a bit of data. Not sure if you know or not but based on this you might consider a 2 x (5 + 1) RAIDZ (20 TB) or a 2 x (4 + 2) RAIDZ-2 (16 TB) setup versus a single (10 + 2) RAIDZ (20 TB) storage pool. Since you have so many disks I doubt you are going to have a problem with performance so a SSD cache drive is probably not necessary.

In my opinion it comes down to FreeNAS or Nexenta. FreeNAS is more user friendly (unless you use NexentaStor) but ZFS support is still kinda new. Nexenta is harder to setup but is rock solid for ZFS support. Kinda hard to choose. The good thing is that FreeNAS takes like 10 minutes (probably less than 5 min) to setup and start testing from the live CD.

Don't get me wrong though I think Ubuntu Server is a great choice too but I think ZFS really makes managing lots of disks easier.

00Roush