Suggestions for hard drives and setup

[Grall]

No, we are merely educated on the subject.

I'm not entirely convinced of that going from your post...

When drives use anywhere from 2-2.8 Amps on spin-up, a mere 9 drives will draw more than the meager 18 Amps that most split-rail power supplies use for the 12Volt line

"A mere"? 9 drives is more than at least 98% of all PC chassis will even hold to begin with. Then figuring out how many users actually install that many drives... We're now talking extreme fringe cases here.

even the 80 Plus Gold Rated models.

Can't speak for everyone of course, but the 12V "rails" (typically, a PSU only has ONE actual rail for each voltage; it's the outputs from that rail that are split up for safety reasons mainly) on my PSU are rated at 30A each, and there's 6 of 'em. Of course, the OCP triggers if you pull 30A from all of 'em at once...or should anyway. Otherwise something will blow, but this is a high-end Enermax unit, so I trust its safety features.

You need to realize that the same rail used for HDDs also needs to power the motherboard, cpu, and cooling fans on split-rail PSUs.

You wouldn't have just 18A 12V for all those components in any decently designed PC system. 18A wouldn't even be sufficient for CPU + PCIe12V, let alone drives AND fans too.

Of course when your server houses 23 drives, that's anywhere from 46-64.4 Amps just for the drives on spin-up, you need to really be concerned about power supply specs.

What on EARTH do you need 23 drives for?

Maybe you should consider retiring some of all that data to long-term offline storage instead as unless you're running a business I can't imagine you having need for that much on a day-to-day basis. And if you're running a business then that's outside the scope of my original reply - and the thread as a whole I should think.

 

[MfA]

Some Intel motherboards support staggered spinup in AHCI mode I think.

 

[BRiT]

Grall,

Maybe you overlooked the fact that we're already on the fringe case here as the original poster is asking about RAID5 and RAID10 setups! Anyone asking about a setup like that could easily be getting into the mere 9 HDD range.

As for storage, if your case has 6 5.25" front-bays you can use two 5-in-3 HDD bay cages to house 10 HDDs without even using your internal drive bays!

I plan to use those 23 2TB HDD's to store my DVD and BluRay movies in order to serve up the content to my various XBMC media front ends with great ease.

 

[Grall]

Maybe you overlooked the fact that we're already on the fringe case here as the original poster is asking about RAID5 and RAID10 setups! Anyone asking about a setup like that could easily be getting into the mere 9 HDD range.

Yeah, maybe I should have paid better attention. I did read the OP though, and you could certainly make a raid5 array with less than 9 drives.

As for storage, if your case has 6 5.25" front-bays you can use two 5-in-3 HDD bay cages to house 10 HDDs without even using your internal drive bays!

Hope those bays have active cooling then... And noise could be a bit of an issue too, resonance can be a b!tch with so many spindles going.

I plan to use those 23 2TB HDD's to store my DVD and BluRay movies in order to serve up the content to my various XBMC media front ends with great ease.

Ugh. Earning enough money to pay for 23 HDDs and the power to run them (not to mention ripping and possibly transcoding your movie library) sounds like a lot more work than just going to a shelf and taking out the disk of the movie you wanna see and popping it into a player, but hey... To each his own I guess.

 

[Mize]

LOL. 23 definitely qualifies as a "shitload" of drives for a single server!
BRiT: are you seriously saying you have your compupter on a 50 amp fuse in your house? Most people would have a computer on a 15 amp or 20 max. It you're pully 40+ amps at startup you'd blow the fuse on my clothes dryer

 

[BRiT]

I should probably clarify a few things, that's the long term plan.

Currently I only have 6 2TB HDDs, 1 is the Parity drive, so that's 5 2TB data drives. However as the space fills up, I plan to expand the unRAID array by adding more 2TB drives. The upper limit currently is 22 drives total but there's plans to expand that to 24 drives due to Norco's new cases. The unRAID Roadmap includes adding a second parity drive (Q Parity or Diagonal Parity scheme) so the array can sustain a 2 drive failure without data loss.

Personally, my plan to deal with the power is several fold.

• I run a CPU with awesome idle power usage (Intel i3 530) as 90% of the time it's downclocked to 1200Mhz.
• I opt for pure Green drives.
• I utilize staggered spinup on the SATA controller cards.
• I set up different spin-up groups so not all drives will be spinning at once.
• I use a community addon that tries to keep the file directory entries in cache so the drives can sleep until the actual content is needed.
• I will get a quality single-rail 80Plus Gold certified PSU. (Need to upgrade from current PSU which tops out around 10 drives)

It's on a 30 Amp circuit now, but that will change if need be.

I ran an 8 drive RAID5 array on older 250GB PATA drives and it was entirely too loud for exactly the reason Grall stated, resonance with too many active spindles. Since unRAID does not stripe data, it allows idle drives to spin down. That feature combined with all the drives being Green models allows for the system to being barely audible.

Typical drive temps during the summer when streaming a movie is 30-35C. It helps the server is in the basement next to the rec-room. I cant remember the exact specifics but according to some Google and/or Russian drive reliability studies, the bell curve found to be in the 30-40 C range and something like 35-40 being best. It's actually possible to see odd drive behavior in the 10-20C range and has been reported several times in their forums. Once the users warmed up their server, the oddities stopped.

There are a few diehards on the unRAID forums which have the Norco 4220 or Norco 4224 case filled with 20 - 24 hdds. I think most are built around older drives, but they upgrade to 2TB as the older drives need to be retired and as bargains permit.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

My current server setup just features 8x drives from 1-1.5 TB each and has no expansion options (Sun Micro Ultra 40 M2 workstation). Fantastic machine but in need of replacing due to inefficient 1 KW PSU, inefficient (by today's standards) lower power Opteron CPUs, limited to 8 internal hotswap drive bays, power hungry and inefficient Nvidia chipset, etc...

I'm still waffling over whether to use a dual core i3 or a quad core i5 (for better transcoding performance) or possibly waiting to see what AMD's Bulldozer brings to the table. It's served me well but I'm finally close to filling up the server (less than 1 TB left). HD video takes up a LOT of space, especially once you start putting on full seasons of Anime or other TV series.

As well my current plan is between 12-16 2TB drives with either a 1 platter 7200 rpm drive (low power) or SSD for the main system drive.

I was originally going to wait for WHS v2, but with the removal of DE, that's no longer an attractive option, so I'll probably build a new WHS v1 server and donate my current WHS v1 server.

Regards,
SB

 

[Simon F]

Some Intel motherboards support staggered spinup in AHCI mode I think.

I was just wondering if that were possible as I read this thread - but then I also started wondering about regenerative spin down as well to save power so I'm probably going a bit crazy :smile:

 

[Davros]

Brit how do you cope with such a major hard drive problem, that would drive me insane....

 

[Frank]

Half the reason for building my own NAS is the expandability: instead of replacing drives by bigger ones and copying terabytes of data around (due to room and available SATA connectors in my game/multimedia pc), I can now simply add a drive to the array.

The plan is to add two drives in the near future, the first to expand the array to RAID 6, the next to grow it. And then I can add another two drives before I run out of SATA connectors (I can add 2 4-in-3 bays for additional drives). That's a total of 10 drives (2 boot, 8 data). The PSU is able to handle that as well.

And offline storage is incredibly inefficient, the easiest and cheapest way is to simply store the harddisks. Tapes and Bluray disks are expensive, and you need a few thousand DVDs.

 

[BRiT]

Half the reason for building my own NAS is the expandability: instead of replacing drives by bigger ones and copying terabytes of data around (due to room and available SATA connectors in my game/multimedia pc), I can now simply add a drive to the array.

Yup, that's exactly why I like unRAID, you just add a drive to it to expand it and it doesn't need to shuffle data around at all and no need to replace all the drives with larger ones. The only time you need to replace a drive with a larger one is if you're at the current maximum slots supported by unraid which is currently 22 (20 data, 1 parity, 1 cache) but should be expanding to 24 or more over time.

Most of the other PC's on the network rarely use over 60Gigs locally, some are under 20Gigs.

I'm still surprised that WHS Vail is going to be missing their biggest feature, Drive Extender.

Brit how do you cope with such a major hard drive problem, that would drive me insane....

Uhm, What? I have no idea what you're even talking about Davros.

 

[Davros]

Dont be pretending you dont know
You have hard drives that arnt filled with Gaming Goodness, how do you sleep at night

 

[Mize]

Bummer. unRAID costs $$ Sounds nifty though.

Davros, you'll be happy to know I had to relocate my Steam directory to a dedicated 1 TB gaming drive (non Steam games stayed behind on the old drive).

edit: I keep media on a Brisbane 5050e linux box, but it's mainly MythTV as I don't often watch a movie more than once.

 

[Frank]

Btw, about rails from PSUs: most cheapish PSUs have only a single voltage regulator for all the voltages together, and a single protection circuit designed to trigger when one of them exceeds the maximum wattage. Or: you can fry them by extracting less wattage than designed from any single rail, but more than designed from all the rails combined. And the voltage will drop on the rail used to the max, and rise for the ones that are mostly idle

A better PSU takes that into account, has a separate regulator for all the voltages (not rails), and throttles back when that happens. An even better one is designed with overcapacity in mind, and only monitors the overall (thermal) break-down point. And the best also have a different (and independent) voltage regulator for each rail.

So, you might break and fry a cheap one if the total combined wattage on the rails exceeds the design max, while a good one will happily supply a current above the rated maximum on each rail for a while, until the thermal breakdown protection for the whole unit is triggered.

Or, in different words: a cheap one can and probably will break down while the total wattage is still below the maximum at which each rail is valued, if more than one are taxed at the same time, while a good one won't break a sweat while going full-out for a limited period of time.

That's the difference between maximum and sustained power.

 

[corduroygt]

If you want to get a 2TB drive today, here's the one to get:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145475

 

[BRiT]

Yup, NewEgg has a Shell Shocker deal on the new model Hitachi 2TB 5K3000 drive for $60. From the initial early review of it, it runs at 5940 RPMs.