Help for building my first own data server

[Phillip_Sam]

Hi guys

 

I, my girlfriend and my room mate want to build our own data server.

 

We do have a spare old rig for usage:

-i7 3770

-asus p8h77-m

-4gb of ram

-650w cooler master bronze psu

-128gb samsung 830 ssd

-gtx 650 (don't think this will be needed at all)

-2 wifi cards (because all our main rigs are directly connected, maybe there's a chance to use both cards for better connectivity)

 

I'm willing to donate 4 of my WD Black 2TB HDD from my current rig and he's planning to buy 2 used WD Black 2TB HDD's used. If needed I'll donate some of my 32gb of ram (yeah I know they are overkill for my gaming rig but i bought them as a whole and used for ~ 150$, which was allmost for free 3 years ago)

 

Our future data server is right now on the attic (it doesn't get too hot there, we ram some stresstest durring summer and it didn't burn down the house).

 

What should it be used for:

-storage for our media collection

-backup for my main rig (which will have ~1.25TB of SSD storage)

-streaming movies to our tv's in the living room, our office room and his bedroom

-teamspeak server

 

Here are now my questions:

-Which raid would you recommend for 6 HDD's. Speed isn't that necessary, as it is limited to the wifi cards. We would like to have at least 8TB of space (10 would be better ^^)

-Which OS? (Now it's running Windows 10)

-Any hardware we are missing and we should buy for our purpose?

-would you recommend buying some large 6 or 8tb hdd's for backup?

 

Our budget shouldn't exceed 500CHF (about 500 USD).

 

Any help is welcome and thanks for all the helpful answers.

 

Best regards,

some guys from Switzerland ;-)

 

 

[scottyseng]

35 minutes ago, Phillip_Sam said:

-snip-

Ah, it's depressing that your spare old rig's CPU could probably fight with mine (2500K)...

 

4GB of RAM should be fine, its' just a file server. They use a lot less resources than you'd imagine. Be very careful of used drives, try to check the smart data / stress test the drives by running Extended Test using WD Lifeguard diagnostics.

 

I'd probably go for RAID6, but what are you using to RAID? Software RAID (Intel RAID controller on motherboard)? Software RAID like FlexRAID or Windows Storage spaces? A hardware RAID card isn't ideal for this because they want RAID rated drives (Not to mention cost a lot).

 

If you run out of ports on the motherboard, you may need to get a HBA card to break out into more SATA ports for your needs.

 

Windows 10 is fine for this basic file server. I would recommend at least one 6 or 8TB WD Elements drive as a external drive backup for the server, because more backups are better.

 

I'm also assuming you have a case....I think the only thing I would point out is you should probably buy a UPS unit for this server in case the power goes out.

 

I just hope your wifi coverage is good in the attic, it would suck if the speeds were really bad due to a bad wifi signal.

[Phillip_Sam]

33 minutes ago, scottyseng said:

Ah, it's depressing that your spare old rig's CPU could probably fight with mine (2500K)...

 

4GB of RAM should be fine, its' just a file server. They use a lot less resources than you'd imagine. Be very careful of used drives, try to check the smart data / stress test the drives by running Extended Test using WD Lifeguard diagnostics.

 

I'd probably go for RAID6, but what are you using to RAID? Software RAID (Intel RAID controller on motherboard)? Software RAID like FlexRAID or Windows Storage spaces? A hardware RAID card isn't ideal for this because they want RAID rated drives (Not to mention cost a lot).

 

If you run out of ports on the motherboard, you may need to get a HBA card to break out into more SATA ports for your needs.

 

Windows 10 is fine for this basic file server. I would recommend at least one 6 or 8TB WD Elements drive as a external drive backup for the server, because more backups are better.

 

I'm also assuming you have a case....I think the only thing I would point out is you should probably buy a UPS unit for this server in case the power goes out.

 

I just hope your wifi coverage is good in the attic, it would suck if the speeds were really bad due to a bad wifi signal.

Thanks for your fast reply.

 

I and my mate do buy and sell a lot of pc parts. Thats the reason our "old" rig has a 3770.

And 300 bucks for a pc with 3770, 16gb ram, 500gb ssd was too good to say no 2 years ago :).

 

What kind of raid would you suggest? Is software-raid from windows good enough for what we want.

I'm running now 4 hdd's in raid 0 with windows software raid and I've never had any problems with it.

 

Can I run raid 6 as software raid on windows 10?

 

Yeah of course everything is in a case with  enough space for 6 HDD and 4 more via a "3x5.25 to 4.3.5 adapter"

 

Do you think a ups is needed? Because there aren't any really important files on this server. Mainly media and if we get a power lost durring transfering files one movie may be corupted.

 

The wifi is not perfect but it was fast enough to transfer a movie from my pc to it with about 80-100MB/s. Which isn't perfect but is plenty :).

 

So you wpuld specifically recommend an external 8tb drive for backup. Like an 8tb drive in a sata-usb caddy connected to the pc?

[spellmanuk]

I agree with scotty apart from I would personally use raid 10 as it's multiple mirrored pairs so if you have 8 disks you could technically have 4 disks fail without loosing anything obviously there'd be something drastic going on if that where to happen but a raid 10 minimises data loss the most in my experience. 

[scottyseng]

49 minutes ago, Phillip_Sam said:

-snip-

Ah, I think $300 was how much my 2500K with the motherboard was...5 years ago though...That is a steal though.

 

I think the Windows software raid is good, though if you want to do the Windows Storage version of RAID6, you need a SSD as a caching drive because I hear it can get really slow. You might check to see if the Intel onboard RAID can do RAID6 (Not all can...usually it's only RAID 0, 1, or 10). You can also settle for RAID10 (but you lose half the space...).

 

Well, if there's nothing important, then no. However, if you strike it bad with a power outage, you risk losing the RAID array due to corruption (What didn't get written to the disk would be lost). It would suck more to have to rebuild the array than the data in your case, but I can't make that call for you.

 

80-100MB/s is actually fairly good for wifi.

 

Well, that, or a off the shelf external USB drive, like the before mentioned WD Elements drive. Some of them are actually cheaper than buying the bare 8TB drive itself.

 

39 minutes ago, peej said:

I agree with scotty apart from I would personally use raid 10 as it's multiple mirrored pairs so if you have 8 disks you could technically have 4 disks fail without loosing anything obviously there'd be something drastic going on if that where to happen but a raid 10 minimises data loss the most in my experience. 

RAID10 with eight disks would still only allow one disk to fail safely. If the correct two die, you could lose one of the RAID 1 pairs. You are right though, you could in theory be able to lose four drives out of eight if the correct ones die. But losing half the disk space really sucks, I used to have RAID10 on my NAS, but changed over to RAID6 because it was actually faster / I gained a chunk of space back.

[Phillip_Sam]

15 minutes ago, peej said:

I agree with scotty apart from I would personally use raid 10 as it's multiple mirrored pairs so if you have 8 disks you could technically have 4 disks fail without loosing anything obviously there'd be something drastic going on if that where to happen but a raid 10 minimises data loss the most in my experience. 

I think you may be a little bit wrong. As far as I know if you have a raid 10 with 8 drives, you have 2x raid 0 with 4 drives, which are mirrored with raid 1.

So if one drive from each raid 0 fails, you would lose everything. Whereas with raid 6 you can loose 2 drives and nothing will happen.

But you are right as you could have 4 drives fail from the same raid 0 and nothing would happen.

[scottyseng]

23 minutes ago, Phillip_Sam said:

I think you may be a little bit wrong. As far as I know if you have a raid 10 with 8 drives, you have 2x raid 0 with 4 drives, which are mirrored with raid 1.

So if one drive from each raid 0 fails, you would lose everything. Whereas with raid 6 you can loose 2 drives and nothing will happen.

But you are right as you could have 4 drives fail from the same raid 0 and nothing would happen.

What you're thinking of is RAID01 (Mirror of stripes), RAID 10 is a stripe of mirrors (RAID0 of a pair of RAID1 array)

 

It's correct, but it has to be the correct four drives...You can lose one drive with 25% of the data (One drive out of the pairs that hold Data A, B, C, and D) and both RAID1 array would be fine. However, if three drives failed (or the wrong two drives...the two holding on 25% of the data) in on one RAID1, it would kill the array.

 

RAID 1:

Drive 1 (Data A) X

Drive 2 (Data A)

Drive 3 (Data B) X

Drive 4 (Data B)

 

RAID1:

Drive 1 (Data C) X

Drive 2 (Data C)

Drive 3 (Data D) X

Drive 4 (Data D)

 

If the drives with Xs died, it would survive...but ah, has to be the right drives.

[leadeater]

RAID 10 is a RAID 0 stripe of many RAID 1 pairs, you can lose the entire array and all the data with just 2 failed disks or be totally fine if 50% fail. RAID 6 you can lose any 2 disks and the array is still online but degraded, the only time this would be risky is if your not properly monitoring the health of your disks. You should never actually have 2 failed disks unless 2 fail simultaneously which is more likely to kill a RAID 10 than a RAID 6, you need 3 to fail for that anyway.

 

RAID 10 is used when low write latency is important, database server etc. Parity RAIDs are best used in file servers as they are still resilient but are expandable unlike RAID 10, and expansion on file server is common where expansion on database servers is not. Also when I say low write latency that does not mean RAID 5/6 have slow writes as that is absolutely not the case, they just have lower IOPs.

 

As RAID 10 arrays get bigger they actually get less safe, much more so than RAID 6.

[spellmanuk]

 

[leadeater]

24 minutes ago, peej said:

-snip-

Problem is I trust Linus's opinions and information on RAID about as much as how far I can throw a piano . His statement on RAID 6 being slow is only true of software RAID and very entry level RAID cards, a decent RAID card with BBU + cache will stream read and write faster than RAID 10 will. Lots of small I/O writes is faster on RAID 10 as there is no parity calculations but as the write operations get bigger and less of them per second RAID 6 pulls ahead.

 

We have millions of dollars worth of Netapp enterprise storage and these use dual parity + 2 hot spares per disk shelf, we're talking hundreds of disks and well over 1PB of usable storage capacity.

[spellmanuk]

Just now, leadeater said:

Problem is I trust Linus's opinions and information on RAID about as much as how far I can throw a piano . His statement on RAID 6 being slow is only true of software RAID and very entry level RAID cards, a decent RAID card with BBU + cache will stream read and write faster than RAID 10 will. Lost of small I/O writes is faster on RAID 10 as there is no parity calculations but as the write operations get bigger and less of them per second RAID 6 pulls ahead.

 

We have millions of dollars worth of Netapp enterprise storage and these use dual parity + 2 hot spares per disk shelf, we're talking hundreds of disks and well over 1PB of usable storage capacity.

Yeah I wasn't sharing for his opinions I was sharing as an easy way to explain the diffences since people seemed to be confusing RAID 10 and RAID 01 and RAID 6 

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, peej said:

Yeah I wasn't sharing for his opinions I was sharing as an easy way to explain the diffences since people seemed to be confusing RAID 10 and RAID 01 and RAID 6 

Yea the RAID 10 vs 01 thing is confusing but there is a simple way to solve it. No one should be mirroring a large group of two RAID 0's, that's just asking for disaster. Creating mirror pairs and then striping them is the proper way to do it, so RAID 0+1 doesn't exist .

[spellmanuk]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Yea the RAID 10 vs 01 thing is confusing but there is a simple way to solve it. No one should be mirroring a large group of two RAID 0's, that's just asking for disaster. Creating mirror pairs and then striping them is the proper way to do it, so RAID 0+1 doesn't exist .

Well yeah in practice it's a stupid idea 

[Mikensan]

from what you said OP the data isn't important so redundancy or simply downtime isn't a big deal. So a raid 6 doesn't have a whole lot of benefit for you. Something like Windows storage spaces or flexraid with a parity disk will keep it simple and sufficient. The only time you might hit some speed drops is if 2 people want to transfer stuff off the server at the same time and that data just happens to be on the same disk, it will start slowing down but for streaming 1080p I don't expect 2 streams from a single disk to have any impact. As a media NAS you will be happy with that. 

 

Now if you want to setup iscsi and run virtual machines off this NAS from another host, there's a lot more to consider