LTT Storage Rankings

[Jeepman]

Hardware
CASE: Old Micron Server Case aprox  21x15x23 inches and on wheels 
PSU1: Antec TP650 (MB & VC)

PSU2: Orion YH-480W (for HDD's)

MB: ASUS Z87-Deluxe
CPU: Intel i7 4770S
HS: Stock Intel heatsink
RAM: 16GB DDR3 2400
RAID CARD 1:
RAID CARD 2: 
SSD: 
HDD 1: 2TB Seagate ST2000DM001 Primary OS
HDD 2: 3TB WD30EFRX
HDD 3: 4TB WD40EFRX
HDD 4: 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001

HDD 5: 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001

HDD 6: 2TB Seagate ST2000DM001

HDD 7:

HDD 8:

HDD 9:

 

Software and Configuration:
Running windows 7 Ultimate soon to be switching to Windows server 2012R2
13TB as media storage 

Usage:
I use the storage for movies and TV series, I am running Plex media server for anytime anywhere access.
Soon to be switching everything over to a Dell 2950 and a few HP G5's with full redundancy

Backup:


Additional info:

Still need a lot of work but this is just for kicks so I haven't spent a lot of time with it, should be interesting once switched over to the Servers and add even more storage drives...


Photo's:

 

 

[AidanJMessenger]

Right just an update on what drives I've chosen.

 

Dabs a UK Tech Retailer had just put 3TB WD RED NAS Drives on sale for £12 more expensive than the WD Green Drives, So I've Ordered 4 of them. They were £92.94 Each with £4.98 24hr Delivery so all together £376.74 so $560 and C£707.

That's pretty sweet! I'm guessing you're intending on going the raid6 route since you've bought 4 drives? Can't wait to see a post on your system!

[Sousuke]

That's pretty sweet! I'm guessing you're intending on going the raid6 route since you've bought 4 drives? Can't wait to see a post on your system!

 

Will be making it soon as the hard drives will be here today but I've got an annoying thing to announce that I won't be using a PC Server for the RAID as the RAID Card I purchased isn't compatible with the Motherboard in the server and due to the costs of re-fitting the server out ... I'd rather go for a simpler solution if I have to go to that expense.

 

I've purchased a Netgear RN10400-100EUS ReadyNAS 104 ... Yea long ass name but its the best budget 4 Bay NAS Enclosure which has all the features I need and I still have a mostly unpopulated server to do some other things with like a game server or something like that.

[Alexdaman]

Just replaced my motherboard and CPU with this : Asrock Asrack Avoton C2750

 

8 Core @ 2.4ghz Atom - Avoton

12 SATA ports on board

I kept my Adaptec 32105 with 12 Ports

2 Intel Gigabit NICs with teaming support or fail over

1 IPMI management port

only 3 USB 2.0......

Passive cooled

 

 

went from 210watts to 130watts so its a nice improvement.

I guess the PERC 5i was consuming around 30 watts 

Dont feel the difference in speed so that's a good thing! 

 

 

Running on Windows Server 2012 for now. 

 

The onboard management is great!  

I now have a Total of 24 ports , which is a little low. im going to get an 20+ controller soon 

 

[AidanJMessenger]

Will be making it soon as the hard drives will be here today but I've got an annoying thing to announce that I won't be using a PC Server for the RAID as the RAID Card I purchased isn't compatible with the Motherboard in the server and due to the costs of re-fitting the server out ... I'd rather go for a simpler solution if I have to go to that expense.

 

I've purchased a Netgear RN10400-100EUS ReadyNAS 104 ... Yea long ass name but its the best budget 4 Bay NAS Enclosure which has all the features I need and I still have a mostly unpopulated server to do some other things with like a game server or something like that.

I would've just suggested going with something like freenas, since a RAID card isn't really necessary. But that's just me; I'm not really a fan of pre-built NAS units. If only because they don't do the main thing I care about - Plex. Well some of them support it, but they don't support any of the features that matter. 

[Sousuke]

I would've just suggested going with something like freenas, since a RAID card isn't really necessary. But that's just me; I'm not really a fan of pre-built NAS units. If only because they don't do the main thing I care about - Plex. Well some of them support it, but they don't support any of the features that matter. 

 

The Motherboard in my server has no RAID Support so a RAID Card was needed  

 

The NAS Enclosure I've gotten has PLEX, DNLA and iTunes support. Also comes with an automatic application for Windows Backups so will make that easer.

[MG2R]

The Motherboard in my server has no RAID Support so a RAID Card was needed

 

Why no love for software RAID?

 

[swizzle90]

I would normally read through this whole thread to find an answer before posting this but I'm about to leave for work. The only thing I have left to buy in order to upgrade my server is my RAID card. I am going to have some 2TB drives that will not fit into my case, I have a 4-Bay Mediasonic box that is currently unused and plan on putting the drives into it. My question is, if I hook the Mediasonic box up to my computer with eSata will it be part of my total storage space on the list? It will be hooked to the server 24/7 so I'm pretty sure the answer is yes but, I just wanted to double check.

[Sousuke]

My RAID NAS Called BlackHole.

 

Hardware:
CASE: Netgear ReadyNAS 104
HDD 1: 4x 3TB WD WD30EFRX
Power: usage: 46W

Software and Configuration:
OS: Netgear ReadyNAS OS 6
RAID config: 4 x 3TB in RAID5
RAID hot spare: 1 x 3TB
File system capacity: 8.17TB In RAID5 12TB without RAID
 
Usage:

Backing up my MacPro, MacBook Air, Gaming PC and the Media Server

Backup:
Yes, using Time Machine and the backup utility that came with it ... if it sucks then maybe something else :lol:
 
Photo's:
 

 

Before you ask me any questions about this ... its still building the RAID Array :lol:
 

Why no love for software RAID?

 
The system could only have a maximum of 2GBs of Memory and a dual core CPU so decided against it.

[MG2R]

My RAID NAS Called BlackHole.

 

Such coincidence! One of my friends named his home server BlackHole as well

 

 

The system could only have a maximum of 2GBs of Memory and a dual core CPU so decided against it.

 

That's plenty to run software RAID. For reference: my first NAS ever ran RAID5 on an ASUS AT3 ION board. That's a very low power (8W), embedded Intel Atom 330 (dual core, 1.6 GHz). It hit transfer speeds of 80MB/s on samba shares. I've ran it on an Intel Celeron G465 (single core, 1.9 GHz). That was enough to saturate gigabit LAN, and even SATA.

 

I'm running my system with mdadm as software RAID manager on Debian. It consumes about 200 MB of RAM at any point in time.

[Sousuke]

Such coincidence! One of my friends named his home server BlackHole as well

 

 

 

That's plenty to run software RAID. For reference: my first NAS ever ran RAID5 on an ASUS AT3 ION board. That's a very low power (8W), embedded Intel Atom 330 (dual core, 1.6 GHz). It hit transfer speeds of 80MB/s on samba shares. I've ran it on an Intel Celeron G465 (single core, 1.9 GHz). That was enough to saturate gigabit LAN, and even SATA.

 

I'm running my system with mdadm as software RAID manager on Debian. It consumes about 200 MB of RAM at any point in time.

I go for software RAID in the future but for backups I'd way rather Hardware RAID.

[MG2R]

I go for software RAID in the future but for backups I'd way rather Hardware RAID.

 

Fair enough

 

BTW: IME those ReadyNAS enclosures are awesome. My friend has a two-bay one which has been running for 5-ish years without a single glitch. Has survived power cuts and abuse from family members

[Sousuke]

Fair enough

 

BTW: IME those ReadyNAS enclosures are awesome. My friend has a two-bay one which has been running for 5-ish years without a single glitch. Has survived power cuts and abuse from family members

 

For the money, it looked like a fantastic deal, sure I'd love to have gotten a Synology NAS but with the amount of money I'd rather had invested more into my current server but for the money I don't think you could do better.

 

EDIT: 13th March 2015- It took 33hrs to build the RAID5 Array! Well now its time to get abusing it

[Alexdaman]

And in the meantime the largest system in this topic is running splendidly on seagate drives

I have never had any problems with them, and that goes for the 2tb and the 4tb model.

 

check this  

 

[TJStamp]

Just replaced my motherboard and CPU with this : Asrock Asrack Avoton C2750

 

I am looking at that board to build a low cost Ultra-fast SSD iSCSI storage node with some 20gbps infiniband ports on it, have a slight worry that the relatively low performance cores will cause IO bottlenecks before being able to saturate all the sata controllers though

 

Have you been able to run any perf tests on the storage?

[looney]

I am looking at that board to build a low cost Ultra-fast SSD iSCSI storage node with some 20gbps infiniband ports on it, have a slight worry that the relatively low performance cores will cause IO bottlenecks before being able to saturate all the sata controllers though

 

Have you been able to run any perf tests on the storage?

 

 

Maybe wait for the new XEON-D platform, thats what im doing for my new SSD iSCSI datatsore.

It comes standard with 2 10Gbit intel nics.

[Pancake]

I have 15TB currently, as soon as I start to get low I add more drives

 

Hardware (Enclosure) 
CASE: SGI Rackable Omnistore 3016 (Direct SAS Attachment) 
PSU: Stock low profile 450w

HDD 1: 4TB HGST

HDD 2: 4TB Seagate
HDD 3: 3TB Seagate
HDD 4: 3TB Seagate

HDD 5: 1TB Samsung

 

Hardware (File Server) 

 

CPU: 2 x vCPU cores from ESXi host

RAM: 6GB (Hot add supported)

SSD: 40GB Thin provisioned from a 512GB MX100 SSD on ESXi host

Network: 10GB/s VMNET3 Virtual Adapter 

HBA: IBM M1015 Flashed to IT Mode, with internal to external MiniSAS Adapter

 

Hardware (Main ESXi Host) 

 

• Intel Xeon E3-1256L V2 (4c/8t) 45W TDP CPU

• 32GB ECC

• SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O

• Antec EarthWatts EA-380D

• iStarUSA D-213-MATX (2u Rackmount)

• Noctua NF-R8 x 2

• Noctua NH-L9I CPU Cooler

• ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB996SP-6SB (Fan replaced with Noctua NF-A4x10)

• 8GB HP Flash Drive (Internal)

• 4-Port SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 miniSAS Adapter

• IBM M1015 RAID Card (Passed through to FS01 VM and connects to the Rackable for storage)

• 2 x 512GB Crucial MX100 SSD

• 500GB 2.5” Hard Drive (Random Storage)

 

Software and Configuration:
Server runs Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard, with Stablebit Drivepool managing the drives. This is the reason I dont have an excessive pool size, I can add the drives as a I go, so there is no point investing in drives I am not using. I also use Stableit Drive Scanner to monitor health. I use PerfectDisk to defrag the pool. The IBM M1015 is passed through to the VM using VT-d meaning the VM has full control of the RAID Card

 

I have duplication on everything but Movies and TV Shows, they are all backed up and are not critical.

 

Usage:
Everything, Movies and TV Shows, backups etc. The only thing that is not stored here is Camera recordings from Blue Iris, and VM's

Backup:
Everything is backed up to CrashPlan+

 

Photo's:

 

 

[Alexdaman]

I am looking at that board to build a low cost Ultra-fast SSD iSCSI storage node with some 20gbps infiniband ports on it, have a slight worry that the relatively low performance cores will cause IO bottlenecks before being able to saturate all the sata controllers though

 

Have you been able to run any perf tests on the storage?

 

I did , 

 

I dont run raid on the onboard s-ata and only on my Adaptec 32105 (its old...)

the raid gets anywhere from 400-520mb per second. 

from the Marvell controller to my raid or another JBOD drive i get arround 120mb/s in file copy´s.

 

Its a great little board.

Running 2 VM´s on it without anny problems and Plex media server. 

[MG2R]

Photo's:

 

Oh I LOVE the look of that rack!

[Pancake]

Oh I LOVE the look of that rack!

 

Its actually just 2 Ikea nightstands 

[Foxxer]

Holy! I won't leave this thread!

[Blade of Grass]

I have 15TB currently, as soon as I start to get low I add more drives

 

Hardware (Enclosure) 

CASE: SGI Rackable Omnistore 3016 (Direct SAS Attachment) 

PSU: Stock low profile 450w

HDD 1: 4TB HGST

HDD 2: 4TB Seagate

HDD 3: 3TB Seagate

HDD 4: 3TB Seagate

HDD 5: 1TB Samsung

 

Hardware (File Server) 

 

CPU: 2 x vCPU cores from ESXi host

RAM: 6GB (Hot add supported)

SSD: 40GB Thin provisioned from a 512GB MX100 SSD on ESXi host

Network: 10GB/s VMNET3 Virtual Adapter 

HBA: IBM M1015 Flashed to IT Mode, with internal to external MiniSAS Adapter

 

Hardware (Main ESXi Host) 

 

• Intel Xeon E3-1256L V2 (4c/8t) 45W TDP CPU

• 32GB ECC

• SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O

• Antec EarthWatts EA-380D

• iStarUSA D-213-MATX (2u Rackmount)

• Noctua NF-R8 x 2

• Noctua NH-L9I CPU Cooler

• ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB996SP-6SB (Fan replaced with Noctua NF-A4x10)

• 8GB HP Flash Drive (Internal)

• 4-Port SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 miniSAS Adapter

• IBM M1015 RAID Card (Passed through to FS01 VM and connects to the Rackable for storage)

• 2 x 512GB Crucial MX100 SSD

• 500GB 2.5” Hard Drive (Random Storage)

 

Software and Configuration:

Server runs Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard, with Stablebit Drivepool managing the drives. This is the reason I dont have an excessive pool size, I can add the drives as a I go, so there is no point investing in drives I am not using. I also use Stableit Drive Scanner to monitor health. I use PerfectDisk to defrag the pool. The IBM M1015 is passed through to the VM using VT-d meaning the VM has full control of the RAID Card

 

I have duplication on everything but Movies and TV Shows, they are all backed up and are not critical.

 

Usage:

Everything, Movies and TV Shows, backups etc. The only thing that is not stored here is Camera recordings from Blue Iris, and VM's

Backup:

Everything is backed up to CrashPlan+

 

Photo's:

 

-snip-

-snip-

I have a very similar network setup, EdgeRouter Lite and an HP 1910-24.

 

Nice rack

[looney]

I have a very similar network setup, EdgeRouter Lite and an HP 1910-24.

 

Nice rack

 

Me to only I have the big brother of the EdgeRouter.

 

Edge Max Pro & HP 1810-24G.

 

Thinking of upgrading the switch to a Juniper EX3300-24T though.

[TJStamp]

I was wondering about upgrading my switch too, had a drunken ebay moment and bought a Netgear ProSafe GS724Tv2 which I was expecting to terrible... Surprisingly it's not bad at all still need something with a faster fabric though as latency falls to pieces when it's running above 10gig

 

[robbo600]

Hardware
CASE: Synology DS1813+

UPS: APC 2200XL

CPU: 2.13GHz Intel Atom D2700
RAM: 4GB DDR3

HDD 1:  4TB Western Digital WD4001FAEX-00MJRA0
HDD 2:  4TB Western Digital WD4001FAEX-00MJRA0
HDD 3:  4TB Western Digital WD4001FAEX-00MJRA0
HDD 4:  4TB Western Digital WD4001FAEX-00MJRA0

HDD 5:  3TB Western Digital WD30EFRX-68AX9N0

HDD 6:  3TB Western Digital WD30EFRX-68AX9N0

HDD 7:  3TB Western Digital WD30EFRX-68AX9N0

HDD 8:  3TB Western Digital WD30EFRX-68AX9N0

 

Software and Configuration:
Synology DSM with SHR across the 8 drives which gives 21.64TB of usage capacity.

Usage:
Linux ISOs, Lot's of Linux ISOs
Backup:
Pfft

Photos: