LTT Storage Rankings

[dalekphalm]

2 hours ago, alpenwasser said:

So... the reason I've not really been around much in the past year was because I was doing the final year of my degree and didn't really have any spare time. But the good news is: I'm finally an officially certified electrical engineer (albeit an unemployed one at the moment)! I will be updating the list in the near future (no, seriously! :D), but it turns out that there have been some updates to the Python libraries I'm using and the plot output is kinda broken (very nice of them, isn't it?), so I need to debug that first before I can update the rankings. Yay!
 

Maybe that'll motivate me to actually post the update to my server

[Night_Rider0]

Update 

Another Seagate is gone, altho reading this thread that seems to be a theme. just an update on the HGST Drives I have been using to replace failed one I put in there nearly a year ago has been running without issue to date 

 

HDD 0:  5 of Seagate Barracuda 3 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s in raidz1 [15TB actual][10 usable]

HDD 0:  4 of Seagate Barracuda 3 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s 

HDD 0:  3 of Seagate Barracuda 3 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s 

&

HDD 1:  2 of HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 HUS724030ALE641 6.0Gb/s 3.5" (Certified Refurbished) all in raidz1 [15TB actual][10 usable]

 

Software and Configuration:
This was just updated to FreeNAS-11.1-RELEASE

 

looking for the other post on this machine?

Orignal post

Update 1

Update 2

Update 3

 

 

[unijab]

I need a case that will fit all my drives into one system...

[alpenwasser]

44 minutes ago, unijab said:

I need a case that will fit all my drives into one system...

 

How many do you have at the moment?

 

*whispers*

 

Also, the images in your post are broken...

 

 

[unijab]

58 minutes ago, alpenwasser said:

 

How many do you have at the moment?

 

*whispers*

 

Also, the images in your post are broken...

 

 

 

I'll see if I can fix them....I need to get away from photobucket

They must of recently changed their TOS to prevent seeing the pictures if you aren't on their site, so you have to pay to embed them other places... Any recommendations??

 

..........

 

 

Well ... I have:

12 each 2.5" wd red 1TB

5 each 3.5" seagate 4TB

4 each 3.5" wd green 3TB

3 each 240G SSDs

2 each 960G SSDs

 

I would like to consolidate them all into one box if I can find something large enough... in tower form ( i dont have space for rack mount yet )

 

But I also want to have time to play with a qlogic FC hba to see if I can get it into target mode and create a hacked SAN server.... (instead of iscsi like I do now)

 

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, unijab said:

 

I'll see if I can fix them....I need to get away from photobucket

 

Well ... I have:

12 each 2.5" wd red 1TB

5 each 3.5" seagate 4TB

4 each 3.5" wd green 3TB

3 each 240G SSDs

2 each 960G SSDs

 

I would like to consolidate them all into one box if I can find something large enough... in tower form ( i dont have space for rack mount yet )

 

But I also want to have time to play with a qlogic FC hba to see if I can get it into target mode and create a hacked SAN server.... (instead of iscsi like I do now)

 

There's pretty much no way you're getting 26 drives to fit nicely into a single Tower style case.

 

If you really are wanting to do that, I'd look at maybe CaseLabs and see if they have a modular design that can take enough HDD cages.

[unijab]

2 hours ago, alpenwasser said:

 

How many do you have at the moment?

 

*whispers*

 

Also, the images in your post are broken...

 

 

FYI... did you not see the pictures in the post below that ... that are working?

 

[alpenwasser]

1 hour ago, unijab said:

 

I'll see if I can fix them....I need to get away from photobucket

They must of recently changed their TOS to prevent seeing the pictures if you aren't on their site, so you have to pay to embed them other places... Any recommendations??

 

 

I see you've uploaded them to LTT now. I'd actually forgotten that you could do that (just goes to show how long I've been absent ).

 

1 hour ago, unijab said:

 

Well ... I have:

12 each 2.5" wd red 1TB

5 each 3.5" seagate 4TB

4 each 3.5" wd green 3TB

3 each 240G SSDs

2 each 960G SSDs

 

I would like to consolidate them all into one box if I can find something large enough... in tower form ( i dont have space for rack mount yet )

 

But I also want to have time to play with a qlogic FC hba to see if I can get it into target mode and create a hacked SAN server.... (instead of iscsi like I do now)

 

 

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

There's pretty much no way you're getting 26 drives to fit nicely into a single Tower style case.

 

If you really are wanting to do that, I'd look at maybe CaseLabs and see if they have a modular design that can take enough HDD cages.

 

Yeah, Caselabs almost certainly have something which can accommodate 26 drives. Ain't going to be cheap though. You could also look for something with lots of 5.25" bays, and then fill those with hotswap cages. Given that some of your drives are 2.5", something like the Xigmatek Elysium could accomodate your HDD combo:

- one 8 × 2.5" -> 2 × 5.25" bay adapter

- one 4 × 2.5" -> 1 × 5.25" bay adapter

- three 5 × 3.5" -> 3 × 5.25" bay adapters

 

This would give you 12 2.5" slots and 15 3.5" slots, but it would be neither pretty, nor quiet, nor cheap. So I'd probably still recommend Caselabs. Or a custom mod, obviously, but that's going to be quite a bit of work if you want it done cleanly (it would fit into my server's case for example, and that's not even a huge tower).

 

41 minutes ago, unijab said:

FYI... did you not see the pictures in the post below that ... that are working?

 

All working for me now.

[79wjd]

Two years ago I swapped my pentium+H81+8gb DDR3 for a 1230v2+supermicro+32gb ecc and earlier today I added an HGST 5k4000, a second WD Blue, removed the 1tb barracuda and 1tb green, and replaced the CX500m with an RM650x. Bringing me up to 18tb total. 

 

I forgot to take some new pictures, so the old ones (from when I did the rebuild two years ago will have to suffice as it's mostly the same). 

 

Hardware
CASE: NZXT Source 210 
PSU: Corsair RM650x 
MB: Supermicro X9SCM-F
CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1230v2
HS: Stock Intel Heatsink
RAM: 32GB (4x8gb) ECC DDR3 1600
SATA controller: Syba SI-PEX 40064

OS Drive: 2x Sandisk Cruzer 16gb (Mirrored) 
HDD 1: 3x 4TB Western Digital Reds
HDD 2: 1x 4TB HGST 5k4000 (from an old WD My Book)
HDD 3: 2x 1TB Western Digital Blues (from my desktop/s) 
UPS: APC BE750G

 

Software and Configuration:
I'm running FreeNAS on my home media server consisting of six volumes.

• Four 4TB drives each in their own volume thus a drive can fail without compromising the rest of the data (16TB usable storage), used for the bulk of the storage.
• Two 1TB Blues each in their own volume. 

Usage:
The main use is in-home and remote streaming of movies, TV shows, photos, and games. Eventually I'll setup owncloud.

Photos:

 

 

I would still really like to replace the Source 210 as it's horrible for cable managing all the drives, but I can't see spending $70~ on an R4/R5/R6/804.

[dalekphalm]

8 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Two years ago I swapped my pentium+H81+8gb DDR3 for a 1230v2+supermicro+32gb ecc and earlier today I added an HGST 5k4000, a second WD Blue, removed the 1tb barracuda and 1tb green, and replaced the CX500m with an RM650x. Bringing me up to 18tb total. 

 

I forgot to take some new pictures, so the old ones (from when I did the rebuild two years ago will have to suffice as it's mostly the same). 

 

Hardware
CASE: NZXT Source 210 
PSU: Corsair RM650x 
MB: Supermicro X9SCM-F
CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1230v2
HS: Stock Intel Heatsink
RAM: 32GB (4x8gb) ECC DDR3 1600
SATA controller: Syba SI-PEX 40064

OS Drive: 2x Sandisk Cruzer 16gb (Mirrored) 
HDD 1: 3x 4TB Western Digital Reds
HDD 2: 1x 4TB HGST 5k4000 (from an old WD My Book)
HDD 3: 2x 1TB Western Digital Blues (from my desktop/s) 
UPS: APC BE750G

 

Software and Configuration:
I'm running FreeNAS on my home media server consisting of six volumes.

• Four 4TB drives each in their own volume thus a drive can fail without compromising the rest of the data (16TB usable storage), used for the bulk of the storage.
• Two 1TB Blues each in their own volume. 

Usage:
The main use is in-home and remote streaming of movies, TV shows, photos, and games. Eventually I'll setup owncloud.

Photos:

-snip-

I'm curious why you chose FreeNAS but also chose not to use ZFS RAIDZ volumes? Why didn't you use RAIDZ1 with the 4x 4TB HDD's, for example?

[79wjd]

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

I'm curious why you chose FreeNAS but also chose not to use ZFS RAIDZ volumes? Why didn't you use RAIDZ1 with the 4x 4TB HDD's, for example?

I just added the fourth drive this morning (everything else is a few years old at this point). And I needed 12tb usable before and 16tb usable now, so that would have required an extra $150/$300 (since I'd probably go z2 at that point) that I didn't want to spend. I chose FreeNAS because it was the first OS I tried and I really liked it. 

[alpenwasser]

18 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

I just added the fourth drive this morning (everything else is a few years old at this point). And I needed 12tb usable before and 16tb usable now, so that would have required an extra $150/$300 (since I'd probably go z2 at that point) that I didn't want to spend. I chose FreeNAS because it was the first OS I tried and I really liked it. 

Ah yes, that bitter cost of sweet, sweet redundancy. Been there, I empathize.

 

I'll update the rankings as soon as I've worked out the kinks in the script.

[unijab]

37 minutes ago, alpenwasser said:

I'll update the rankings as soon as I've worked out the kinks in the script.

 

 

I just realized that if I can get all my non-ssd drives into my storage server case.... I would jump up to 20th place... wow

[alpenwasser]

1 hour ago, unijab said:

 

 

I just realized that if I can get all my non-ssd drives into my storage server case.... I would jump up to 20th place... wow

 

 

 

[unijab]

So...

 

There is a really cool (IMO) change coming to my storage server soon... (aka its in the mail)

I figured out that you can get a FC HBA in target mode using Fedora...

 

So guess who got some really cheap 4Gb FC HBAs... and using linux multipathd.. really nice speeds!!! (not that my disk arrays will max anything out)

 

So no more iSCSI for me.

 

Also, been playing with ZFS (on linux)... so there's that also.

 

[565465464]

Update #1 

 

Long time since I've posted here and the storage situation has changed quite a lot. Gotten an interest in rack servers and I now have had a Dell PowerEdge R515 as my dedicated storage server for almost a year.

 

Old post

 

Hardware:

Server: Dell PowerEdge R515

CPU: 2x AMD Opteron 4174 HE

RAM: 32 GB DDR3 ECC

Controller/HBA: H200 (IT mode)

 

SSD 1: 128 GB Lenovo Branded Samsung

HDD 1: 4 TB Seagate Barracuda 5900 RPM
HDD 2: 4 TB Seagate Barracuda 5900 RPM

HDD 3: 4 TB Seagate Barracuda  5900 RPM

HDD 4: 4 TB Seagate Barracuda  5900 RPM

HDD 5: 3 TB Seagate Barracuda  5900 RPM

HDD 6: 3 TB Seagate Barracuda  5900 RPM

HDD 7: 3 TB Seagate Barracuda  5900 RPM

HDD 8: 3 TB Seagate Consellation  7200 RPM

HDD 9: 8 TB Seagate Archive 5900 RPM

HDD 10: 8 TB Seagate Archive 5900 RPM

HDD 11: 8 TB Seagate Archive 5900 RPM

HDD 12: 8 TB Seagate Archive 5900 RPM

Total storage: 60 TB

 

Software and Configuration:
 

The server is running FreeNAS 11.1 and I chose FreeNAS as I wanted ZFS for the additional data security and just to try something else than Windows.
 

The SSD is just sitting there unused as I would have to move the ESXi server that is on top away to take it out.

HDDs are set up in 3x ZPools:

• 4x3 TB drives RAIDz1 (RAID5) for 9 TB formatted.
• 4x4 TB drives RAIDz1 (RAID5) for 12 TB formatted.
• 4x8 TB drives RAIDz2 (RAID6) for 16 TB formatted.

In total I end up with 60 TB raw or 37 TB formatted (bit less due to using ZFS). 

 

Usage:
Storing personal files, backups for family, media and Veeam backups (VMs) .

 

Backup:
The most important files are backed up to Google Drive.

 

Photo's 

Spoiler

 

Front of servers. R515 on the bottom and a Supermicro server on the top with dual E5-2650L and 128 GB RAM running ESXi. 

 

Available space isn't a luxury, but it has to be in a separate room due to noise so I took the best I had available.

 

 

 

Rackable SGI SE3016 waiting to be used once I get another HBA for it which will allow for more expansion.

 

 

 

[unijab]

On 12/30/2017 at 7:09 PM, unijab said:

So...

 

There is a really cool (IMO) change coming to my storage server soon... (aka its in the mail)

I figured out that you can get a FC HBA in target mode using Fedora...

 

So guess who got some really cheap 4Gb FC HBAs... and using linux multipathd.. really nice speeds!!! (not that my disk arrays will max anything out)

 

So no more iSCSI for me.

 

Also, been playing with ZFS (on linux)... so there's that also.

 

 

 

Everything is looking good....

 

 

 

 

How it looks on my proxmox server....

 

 

[grimreeper132]

The Muffinator 

 

Hardware
CPU - Pentium E6600 

PSU - some old shitty HP one

MB - 

GPU - 8400 GS (Gigabyte GV-N84S-512I)

Case - an old case I own

RAM - 2 X 1024MB DDR2 (will be upgraded with 2 X 2048MB DDR2 sticks soonish)

HDD 1 - 4 X 2TB Seagate and/or WD drives
HDD 2 - 2 X 1.5TB Seagate and/or WD drives

OS drive - 8GB SanDisk Flash drive with xpenology on it

 

max storage- 11TB

Usable Storage- 6.5TB (Using SHR thing (the synology hybrid RAID one with 2 drive redundancy)

 

 

points- 19.7

[Jarsky]

On 30/01/2018 at 1:08 PM, grimreeper132 said:

The Muffinator 

 

 

+50 points for the name

[grimreeper132]

6 hours ago, Jarsky said:

 

+50 points for the name

Hey the Muffinator is a very sensible stupid machine which I am having issues with because my PC can't mount it as a network drive, but can see it, and connect to it's web GUI (I don't know what's wrong) but the Muffinator name I personally think is better than the other NAS I have The Toaster, and on par with The Portable Slice Of Bread and The Wirey Cheese Toastie

[tHe Admirer]

Okay, so it took me 2 days to go through this thread.

1 think I did notice, a huge "upgrade" in CPU horsepower from 2014 to 2017. Guessing its because the NAS isn't just a NAS anymore, but most are now VM Hosts as well.  Learn a lot from this thread and time to start planning my own NAS now. 

[GreasyGaming]

On 19/05/2017 at 2:13 PM, GreasyGaming said:

--snip--

UPDATED - 360TB

 

Added 9 more 8TB drives

Added Some more SSD

 

CASE: 45Drives 

MB: Supermicro X9SCM 

CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 @ 3.40GHz

HS: Standard

RAM: 32GB ECC Memory (4x 8GB PC3-12800)

HBA: 2 x HighPoint Rocket 750

SSD: Toshiba 120GB

SSD: 2x Samsung EVO 850 500GB

HDD 1: 45 x 8TB WD RED 5400 RPM

NIC: Onboard 2x 1Gigabit

NIC: HP Mellanox 10GbE Connext-2

[Helly]

Update #2

The hardware has been changed significantly so new list of hardware.

 

Hardware

CASE: Antec P183 Performance One
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 850W Modular
MB: Asus x99-Deluxe/U3.1
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 (2.1Ghz) (not overclockable, even 1 Mhz faster and it won't boot, probably cuz of the RAM)
HS: Noctua NH-D9L
RAM: 4x Kingston KTL-TS424E/8G - 8GB ECC

NIC: Asus PEB-10G/57840-2T
RAID CARD 1: Areca 1216-4i
RAID CARD 2: Areca 1880i

Boot Drive: Samsung 960EVO M.2, 1TB

HDD 1: 8x 5TB WD Red
HDD 2: Seagate Barracuda 3TB
HDD 3: Seagate Barracuda 1TB

 

PCPartpicker link

 

Software and Configuration:
Running Windows Server 2012 R2. Runs an FTP and Universal Media server to stream content to other devices. Server is also used to encode my bluray movies using makemkv and megui. Also using Hyper-V to run another instance of server 2012 R2 as a webserver with IIS.

My main array is the 8x WD's running in RAID-6 (on the 1880i). giving me a total of just over 27TB of usable space.

The second Areca card is currently not really being used. It only has the 2 seagates connected. The reason those drives are not on the onboard sata ports is because intel sucks and will slowly drag down the system performance and eventually crash the system into a BSOD and reboot, starting the process again. Tried all drivers, both new and old (and really old). No changes, got fed up, bought a raid card, problem solved.

 

Usage:

Storing my media files (tv shows, some YT downloads, most of floatplane, various other video's). currently almost 15TB in size. Files are usually copied over from my main PC over a 10Gbit direct connection to the server. The network/internet connection is a separate connection for now, can't find a good affordable 10Gbit switch :P.

Backup:
Only the most difficult stuff to find is backed up to a few leftover drives i have lying around. The rest i just don't have the finances or the will to backup somewhere. So if the worst happens, i'm just screwed :P.

Sidenote:

The observant reader or people who care to read my previous update might have noticed that movies are missing from the list of media files stored on here. That is because i gave up finding a case to house all my drives and array's and setup a second server. That server runs somewhat the hardware listed in the previous update with a few changes. Not really something worth mentioning, its just that the space the movies were taking up got too big and they needed to be moved.

 

Future plans:

The space the movies are taking up in the second server is already growing to fast, so the seagate drives in this server will be removed and replaced with 4 8TB or 6TB drives running in RAID-5 to hold the movies. Waiting for the price to drop to start doing this. So you'll have another update to look forward to in the future

[LAwLz]

Onee-Chan

 

Hardware:
Well, it's a Synology DS1817+ so... Not sure if I need to list all the hardware.

The CPU is an  Atom C2538 with 8GB of RAM, inside an 8 bay Synology case.

 

HDD 1: 3 x 4TB WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0

HDD 2: 1 x 4TB WDC WD40EFRX-68WT0N0

HDD 3: 2 x 4TB Seagate ST4000DM004-2CV104

HDD 4: 2 x 2TB Seagate ST2000DM001-1CH164

 

Software and Configuration:
OS: DSM 6.1.5

RAID config: (mdadm based) with 6x4TB in SHR2 (RAID6-like) and 2x2TB in RAID1.

RAID hot spare: 2x4TB for SHR2 and 1x2TB for RAID1

File system: Btrfs
File system capacity: I have two RAID volumes, combined into one share.

One RAID6 (24TB total, 16TB usable) and one RAID1 (4TB total, 2TB usable).

Combined the share is 28TB, with 18TB usable.

 

Usage:

Mostly storing files (primarily videos) but it also serves as a web server for my personal website, updates my DDNS and acts as a mail server (use it for throwaway emails).I stream video from it to my Android TV, tablet, phone and computers all the time, but I do that over regular SMB and not some server like Plex. I don't see the point.

On the RAID1 volume I keep torrents and other files which are constantly accessed. I don't want the entire RAID6 array to be up and running all the time.

I also plan on running H@H on the RAID1 volume. It's a distributed hosting program for a website I regularly visit. It lets users help with the hosting and in return the users get rewards like downloading full resolution galleries, currency that can be used to put out bounties for translations, editing and other stuff.

 

Backup:

I save my most important stuff on online storage providers too, like photos (in encrypted containers) on Dropbox. I can't backup all my stuff though.

 

Other:

I have to say I am a bit disappointed with the performance. I get about 70MB/s reads and ~50MB/s writes. I think it might have to do with the "advanced data integrity protection" being enabled on my shares. I'm going to disable it on a test folder and see if it makes a difference.

It doesn't really matter since it is still more than enough for what I use it for, but it doesn't feel good to get lower performance scores than I did with my old NAS (bottlenecked by the 1Gb/s connection for reads).

 

 

Photos:

Will post later, but I mean... It's just a Synology NAS with 8 slots.

Sorry for all the Swedish in the picture:

Spoiler

 

[Cynagen]

Before I go posting full specs here, I just wanted to throw out a couple of my concerns before I attempt to opt in to be counted.

I'm running a QNAP TS-431 (4-bay) + 4-bay eSATA port replicator for a total of 8 disks, the 4 disks in the eSATA enclosure are not in a RAID configuration (I popped them in one by one and had to manually transfer stuff from disk to disk so I never attempted to RAID them).
My concerns are that my base enclosure (the TS-431) won't qualify me in the first place, and that the 4 disks in the external enclosure won't count (for whatever reason) thus completely disqualifying me.

They're all for storage as per the requirement; I'm not including the USB2.0 RAID0 enclosure attached to the NAS; One of the disks in the external enclosure is the destination of incoming sources including my own Plex DVR captures (HDHomeRun Prime + CableCard ftw) others acting as sorted semi-deep storage (before it gets mirrored to DBox), and the internal bays are configured together as a RAID5 right now to store my movie collection for Plex. Overall, there's a 4x3TB RAID5 in the internal, and 3x2TB + 1x2.5TB individuals in the external enclosure for a total of 8 drives and 20.5TB total.

If somebody could clarify if I qualify, I'll do up a full post with pics, but if I don't qualify, I'll show myself out until I can get on FreeNAS at some point in the future.