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I'd like to hear your opinions on upcoming my home storage network build

Hello everybody!

 

Recently, being tired of not being able to access my media across all my devices and over the Internet, I have installed Plex server on my main machine and it has been an amazing experience so far as now I can access all my movies, tv series and anime episodes stored on my PC wherever I am, as long as my main desktop is online. Being so satisfied, I want to take this to the next level now.

 

 

However, I am on a corsair Air 540 and coupled with the very little storage expansion possibilities I have with this chassis, I also have had the long dream of getting rid of the ugly 3.5" bays in the bottom so here is my plan as follows; aiming for storage expansion, protection against hardware failures, dedicated for Plex, FTP and network storage use; a reliable server of my own for file level storage access throughout all my devices:

- Modding wise and main chassis wise I am all planned out. Cutting the bottom plate, mounting a new one in, using SSDs for the hot swap bays there for the looks etc. etc..

 

 

What I would like to hear your opinions about is the planning of my server, which will be built into an mATX machine I have for my current TV machine.

 

Specs of the mATX machine: H97M-e motherboard from Asus, 16GB of RAM (to be used for RAM caching purposes, I have a UPS in place that can hold the machine up for 3 hours upon power loss), i5-4590 CPU. Please also note that this mATX machine will not be utilised for any other use case so the CPU based parity calculations will not interfere with normal work load; they will be the only work load on the machine.

 

My plan is to use all 4 SATA ports on my H97 motherboard in there to set up a single parity (RAID5) array of 4 disks using WD Red drives, have the m.2 slot of my motherboard in PCI-e mode to install a small 120GB m.2 drive for OS (it'll be over provisioned for 50% to ensure the highest life expectancy).

I plan to use Debian as host OS with the LUN of all 4 drives being shared over the network to my main desktop machine using simple network drive sharing features, so that I can simply map a drive from my Windows desktop and use it as if it is directly attached. Alongside of that I will have the Plex server on it for any media access I might want to do remotely, and/or using my phone, laptop etc. Then I will have a FTP server operating so that I can do file level operations on the server, to utilise it as personal cloud also, over my phone and laptop.

 

 

So what do you guys think, is using a combination of network drive sharing / Plex and FTP good enough for this, or are there any better solutions you can think of; or would you have a completely different approach? 

 

I look very much forward to your comments, thank you very much in advance for your time and thoughts.

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You may also want a UPS for your router and modem if they don't already have one that way the server can remain online as long as the internet connection to your home is still working.

Specs: CPU - Intel i7 8700K @ 5GHz | GPU - Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming | Motherboard - ASUS Strix Z370-G WIFI AC | RAM - XPG Gammix DDR4-3000MHz 32GB (2x16GB) | Main Drive - Samsung 850 Evo 500GB M.2 | Other Drives - 7TB/3 Drives | CPU Cooler - Corsair H100i Pro | Case - Fractal Design Define C Mini TG | Power Supply - EVGA G3 850W

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SNIP

 

I have a similar set up with 4 WD Reds, I have them in RAID 10 though, and I have that whole server backed up to an unlimited cloud service

 

I have the server mapped as an external drive to every pc in teh house, and use plex to stream media to iphones, tablets, pcs and tvs

 

I also have it set up to access anywhere online, so that I can just pop to a website, log in, and there are my files - my brother uses this to backup his mac since he doesnt live here

 

your setup sounds like a great idea

Desktop - Corsair 300r i7 4770k H100i MSI 780ti 16GB Vengeance Pro 2400mhz Crucial MX100 512gb Samsung Evo 250gb 2 TB WD Green, AOC Q2770PQU 1440p 27" monitor Laptop Clevo W110er - 11.6" 768p, i5 3230m, 650m GT 2gb, OCZ vertex 4 256gb,  4gb ram, Server: Fractal Define Mini, MSI Z78-G43, Intel G3220, 8GB Corsair Vengeance, 4x 3tb WD Reds in Raid 10, Phone Oppo Reno 10x 256gb , Camera Sony A7iii

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I would opt for a pci-e raid controller, i have had this myself.
But then the mobo died and i lost the array, with a raid card you can swap mobo's without fearing of losing the array.
They are expensive, but worth it IMO.

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You may also want a UPS for your router and modem if they don't already have one that way the server can remain online as long as the internet connection to your home is still working.

 

My apartment complex has a generator that powers on the router my ISP has in the building, which provides POE for devices compatible, so my switch in house is always powered on, and since the mATX machine (at most 150watts of peak power consumption right now) is on a 1.5KVA UPS I should be fine for even quite long power cuts.

 

We rarely have power cuts but once in a while there's the occasional storm, it never goes beyond 2-3 hours.

 

I have a similar set up with 4 WD Reds, I have them in RAID 10 though, and I have that whole server backed up to an unlimited cloud service

 

I have the server mapped as an external drive to every pc in teh house, and use plex to stream media to iphones, tablets, pcs and tvs

 

I also have it set up to access anywhere online, so that I can just pop to a website, log in, and there are my files - my brother uses this to backup his mac since he doesnt live here

 

your setup sounds like a great idea

 

Indeed, mine is very similar to yours! Though I wanted parity instead of mirroring and I will have very little writes on the system so I'd rather have the low write performance of RAID5 than the much bigger capacity reduction of RAID1/0.

 

Sounds like your cloud solution is much better than using FTP as I thought, sounds amazing in fact! What cloud service do you use for that?

 

I would opt for a pci-e raid controller, i have had this myself.

But then the mobo died and i lost the array, with a raid card you can swap mobo's without fearing of losing the array.

They are expensive, but worth it IMO.

A PCI-e RAID card is definitely worth it I agree with you but I am on limited budget and an extra 150 pounds is a lot of money (considering the card, WB cache, battery bank etc.). So I thought that since the host CPU won't be used for anything else than the parity calculations, it should be fine hopefully, also there'll be very very little write operation on the array once it is settled up and filled with the current data I have archived.

 

RAID technologies have come a very very long way the past few years, you can easily rebuild an array you had in one system in another now, as long as you've got the drives you need healthy. I've done this very recently for a friend who upgraded from X79 to X99 on her production machine; she had a RAID 0 array set up by me a few years ago and we were able to rebuild without much hassle.

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Sounds like your cloud solution is much better than using FTP as I thought, sounds amazing in fact! What cloud service do you use for that?

 

I am using livedrive for cloud storage, seems good to me!, was tempted to backup to a RAID 1 DAS, but i think cloud gives the physical security, its purely used for offsite backup, teh cheapest package is £3 a month and gives unlimited backup - I dont need their "breifcase" service as the server itself handles media sharing and playback etc

 

yeah the reason I am using mirroring too for performance is there will be data going both ways,

Desktop - Corsair 300r i7 4770k H100i MSI 780ti 16GB Vengeance Pro 2400mhz Crucial MX100 512gb Samsung Evo 250gb 2 TB WD Green, AOC Q2770PQU 1440p 27" monitor Laptop Clevo W110er - 11.6" 768p, i5 3230m, 650m GT 2gb, OCZ vertex 4 256gb,  4gb ram, Server: Fractal Define Mini, MSI Z78-G43, Intel G3220, 8GB Corsair Vengeance, 4x 3tb WD Reds in Raid 10, Phone Oppo Reno 10x 256gb , Camera Sony A7iii

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