Building An Unraid Server Box

[PattayaPete]

Anyone had experience building an Unraid box in Thailand? If so I'd appreciate suggestions on where to buy the hardware.

Ideally I'd like up to 20 removable drive cages although 16 is probably more realistic. Supermicro motherboards are recommended and I'd prefer to follow the recommendation although I'd like to hear of experiences with different MBs.

Here in Pattaya it would appear such hardware is way to difficult for the local suppliers so a trip to Bangkok will be required. If you can shorten my search and shop time I'd be most grateful.

[dave_boo]

I've looked at unraid in the past and wasn't terribly impressed. You can get the same, or better out of ZFS. Granted the best implementation of ZFS is in (open)Solaris followed by BSD with it happening in userspace in Linux. However, what are you going to use this box for? 16 drives, even at 250GB/each, equals out to 4 TB. Planning on storing a lot of movies?

I used to recommend Tyan if you want a good motherboard, but they've consistently had bios issues that do not get updated ever since the original Opteron days. Supermicro is an excellent brand (got a X8DTN with two Xeon e5530 waiting to be put together), but do you really need that grade of a motherboard? Asus offers really good motherboards, I'd go with that for something as simple as a file server. Add in a card with enough ports (doesn't need raid) and you should be set. If you're set on Supermicro (however note that you'd have to find a board with at least 16 SAS/SATA-can't find any of their AMD boards that offer it- connectors and those pickings will be slim and expensive), than here's their contact information.

[PattayaPete]

Thanks Dave. Yeah, it will be a media server. I have 12 terabytes already and am running out of space (I have a big collection). Six sata ports and then some PCI express cards with more sata ports seems to be the go.

[steve187]

I have a msi with 8 ports sata, i looked but couldn't find any more, sata 3 harddrives are becoming available

[JohnnyFeelIt]

Theres a guy in PanTit with a custom server hardware shop. I think its either the 3rd or 4th floor near the excalators on the side where the carpark is..

He speaks excellent English and is more than happy to stand around and have a bs about hardware whether u end up buying from him or not.

Edited August 28, 2010 by JohnnyFeelIt

[siamect]

An extremely interesting topic, please let us know your choises and experiences...

I would probably just use any server edition of GNU/Linux... what are the thoughts/reasons for using the unRAID software?

Martin

Edited August 28, 2010 by siamect

[PattayaPete]

Why I like Unraid.

Well my opinions only come from what I have read on the internet as no practical experience as yet. But I believe the advantages are . . .

Boot from memory stick so you don't lose a drive to the os.

Up to 32 disks supported

You lose one disk as a parity disk but then have complete backup if any 1 disk fails

If 2 disks fail all other disks will still be readable

Can add additional disks at any time without rebuilding

Its cheap

Free trial for up to 3 disks to try before you buy

Large user support community

A bit techy but not too much and I think I can handle it

Much cheaper and more expandable than a custom NAS box

From what I have been reading the idea is to use a mother board with 6 or 8 sata ports and a couple of PCI E ports. You can then get PCI E cards with up to 8 sata ports. Two of these would allow 16 drives plus whatever the MB came with. That's a lot of drives and a lot of expansion capabilities.

I can't get to Bkk for a few weeks but if I can find the hardware I am definitely going to build one of these beasts. I'll let you know how it goes.

[dave_boo]

Why I like Unraid.

Well my opinions only come from what I have read on the internet as no practical experience as yet. But I believe the advantages are . . .

Boot from memory stick so you don't lose a drive to the os.

Up to 32 disks supported

You lose one disk as a parity disk but then have complete backup if any 1 disk fails

If 2 disks fail all other disks will still be readable

Can add additional disks at any time without rebuilding

Its cheap

Free trial for up to 3 disks to try before you buy

Large user support community

A bit techy but not too much and I think I can handle it

Much cheaper and more expandable than a custom NAS box

From what I have been reading the idea is to use a mother board with 6 or 8 sata ports and a couple of PCI E ports. You can then get PCI E cards with up to 8 sata ports. Two of these would allow 16 drives plus whatever the MB came with. That's a lot of drives and a lot of expansion capabilities.

I can't get to Bkk for a few weeks but if I can find the hardware I am definitely going to build one of these beasts. I'll let you know how it goes.

I'd like to point out there is a way to install OpenSolaris to a thumbdrive (or you can cop out and use BeleniX which requires you simply to make a live cd and install the OS onto a thumbdrive from your live session).

Also, AFAIK, there is no upper limit on the number of drives that can be added, whether you're trying it out or running it full time. And unlike Unraid, adding a drive larger than the parity isn't a problem (in Unraid your parity drive has to be at least as big as your largest drive). Zpools allow drives to be added on the fly. It also allows you to designate hotspare(s?).

Did I mention that it's free also?

One thing you're going to have to think about is the arrangement of the drives. Are you going to get those 5x3,5" into 3x 5,25" adapters (the ones that turn the 3,5" drives sideways and take up 3 of your 5,25"-cdrom-bays)? Are you going to find a case with enough drives? Are you looking for sleds so that if your array drops a drive you can swap it out? Are you going to go with an external SAS/SATA box (and the cabling that goes with it)? Are you planning on rack mounting it? Are you ready to put up with the fan noise that goes with it unless you have it stored out of the way somewhere?

[PattayaPete]

Curse you dave_boo. Just when I had made up my mind you come along and confuse me :-)

I had never heard of ZFS till you brought it up. I have now had to spend hours researching it and from what I have read it would indeed appear to be a better option.

I have a nodding acquaintance with Linux but all this Solaris is stuff is completely new to me and a little bit intimidating. Reading the various support web sites I'd have to say that the Solaris community seems a bit more techy than I am comfortable with. Still looking for an idiots guide to Solaris and ZFS. I understand that once its set up, operation is fairly simple but I am having doubts about my abilities to set this up from scratch, including building a compatible box.

BeleniX does look like a simple option for getting the system to boot off a memory stick. Why do you consider it a "cop out".

I am planning on locating the server in a large cupboard under the stairs so noise is not an issue but ventilation may well be. So Dave if I go the Solaris ZFS route can you recommend a specific motherboard and PCI sata controller cards that you know would be compatible. I am hoping to find a case in Bangkok with up to 20 sled mounting drive bays. Something like this Norco at Newegg would be ideal. Don't know if such a thing exists in Thailand though.

I think I'll probably give ZFS a go and if I fail to get it running revert back to unraid.

[siamect]

Curse you dave_boo. Just when I had made up my mind you come along and confuse me :-)

I had never heard of ZFS till you brought it up. I have now had to spend hours researching it and from what I have read it would indeed appear to be a better option.

I have a nodding acquaintance with Linux but all this Solaris is stuff is completely new to me and a little bit intimidating. Reading the various support web sites I'd have to say that the Solaris community seems a bit more techy than I am comfortable with. Still looking for an idiots guide to Solaris and ZFS. I understand that once its set up, operation is fairly simple but I am having doubts about my abilities to set this up from scratch, including building a compatible box.

BeleniX does look like a simple option for getting the system to boot off a memory stick. Why do you consider it a "cop out".

I am planning on locating the server in a large cupboard under the stairs so noise is not an issue but ventilation may well be. So Dave if I go the Solaris ZFS route can you recommend a specific motherboard and PCI sata controller cards that you know would be compatible. I am hoping to find a case in Bangkok with up to 20 sled mounting drive bays. Something like this Norco at Newegg would be ideal. Don't know if such a thing exists in Thailand though.

I think I'll probably give ZFS a go and if I fail to get it running revert back to unraid.

Seems complicated... isn't it enough with just a normal file system and keep a decent backup in a different location....

Martin

[dave_boo]

Curse you dave_boo. Just when I had made up my mind you come along and confuse me :-)

I had never heard of ZFS till you brought it up. I have now had to spend hours researching it and from what I have read it would indeed appear to be a better option.

I have a nodding acquaintance with Linux but all this Solaris is stuff is completely new to me and a little bit intimidating. Reading the various support web sites I'd have to say that the Solaris community seems a bit more techy than I am comfortable with. Still looking for an idiots guide to Solaris and ZFS. I understand that once its set up, operation is fairly simple but I am having doubts about my abilities to set this up from scratch, including building a compatible box.

BeleniX does look like a simple option for getting the system to boot off a memory stick. Why do you consider it a "cop out".

I am planning on locating the server in a large cupboard under the stairs so noise is not an issue but ventilation may well be. So Dave if I go the Solaris ZFS route can you recommend a specific motherboard and PCI sata controller cards that you know would be compatible. I am hoping to find a case in Bangkok with up to 20 sled mounting drive bays. Something like this Norco at Newegg would be ideal. Don't know if such a thing exists in Thailand though.

I think I'll probably give ZFS a go and if I fail to get it running revert back to unraid.

I aim to please.

If you want the Linux experience with the OpenSolaris kernel (and the benefits that go with that), why don't you also check out Nexenta? Basically Debian with OpenSolaris kernel. There's even a NAS version ready to roll; but it limits you to 12 TB of storage space on the free version.

It's a cop out because a 'real' user would install it from source; just a gentle jab.

Check out Solaris' HCL (Hardware Compatability List). Basically Intel good! Since you're only going to be serving media, I'd go with the lowest powered cpu from the current generation on an Intel board. I took the liberty of checking out a recommended combo for you using InvadeIT.

ASUS P5KPL SE..............1990 THB

Intel Celeron 430 (35w)..1550 THB

Kingston 2x2GB DDR2...3180 THB

Nvidia 8400GS (w/o fan).1290 THB

Total....................................8010 THB

Biggest problem is that they don't have controller cards. I do shudder at the thought of shipping from the States for a similar item; but whatever you get make sure that you have individual SATA connectors otherwise you'll be investing in more (expensive) hardware to accomodate your case.

Seems complicated... isn't it enough with just a normal file system and keep a decent backup in a different location....

Martin

I was actually going to point out to him that running a Linux distro off of a thumbdrive is now pretty much trivial as is setting up the fstab to make the other drives folders inside the /media/ partition.....

I don't think that multi-TB backups would be very fun (although probably more fun than losing multi-TB worth of data). Wonder what a decent tape drive and cartridges in LOS to back up all that would cost.

[siamect]

What is the point of booting from a thumb drive?... It will be slower than doing it from a normal drive...

You still can boot from a thumb drive in case anything goes wring with the os...

Backups of 12TB data sucks big time, I agree, but it is still needed regardless if you use a super filesystem like ZFS or Btrfs, or RAID5 ir unRAID or just plain old ext4.

And it should be located in some location other than the running system....

Luckily I guess most of that 12TB is pretty static... It would be even more terrible if you had one TB in and one TB out every day....

Good luck

Martin

[dave_boo]

What is the point of booting from a thumb drive?... It will be slower than doing it from a normal drive...

You still can boot from a thumb drive in case anything goes wring with the os...

Backups of 12TB data sucks big time, I agree, but it is still needed regardless if you use a super filesystem like ZFS or Btrfs, or RAID5 ir unRAID or just plain old ext4.

And it should be located in some location other than the running system....

Luckily I guess most of that 12TB is pretty static... It would be even more terrible if you had one TB in and one TB out every day....

Good luck

Martin

I assumed that it was similar to HTPC owners using a CF card to store the OS. Leaves the whole of your drive(s) for media storage. Plus a slimmed down distro could easily be launched with the toram argument and be faster than pulling anything off disk.

There are solutions to backups (incremental), but the length of time to even create the original backup would be ridiculous. It gets worst if you're looking at doing the backups over the internet.

[siamect]

I assumed that it was similar to HTPC owners using a CF card to store the OS. Leaves the whole of your drive(s) for media storage. Plus a slimmed down distro could easily be launched with the toram argument and be faster than pulling anything off disk.

There are solutions to backups (incremental), but the length of time to even create the original backup would be ridiculous. It gets worst if you're looking at doing the backups over the internet.

I think anyway you get a more stable system if you boot from a traditional disk. That's what all datacentres are doing...

The space required for this is not much compared to the total.

The toram or copy2ram arg is for sure speeding up the execution compared to not using it if you boot from a USB or a CD but I doubt that it is quicker than a traditional install. I don't have any numbers and I may be wrong, but that's the feeling I get. I believe that most Gnu/Linux systems are buffering very well so that it in reality is very little difference at least for repeated accesses... so I wouldn't take that as and argument for choosing a USB booted solution.

I can think of one thing and that is the perceived simplicity of installation, just dump the USB thing on any hardware and walk away... But today installation is not a problem really...

I think if I had 12TB of data I would probably double up my disk capacity... and dump half of the disks at a friends place.... With that volume it is much quicker to walk with the disks in your bag than to send the data over the internet... It is a tricky thing...Just make sure you don't use any strange format for storing the backups... at least it should be a well documented open format.

At the place I work I they use some 800GB tapes... I think for a private dude the tape stations are a little pricey...

http://accessories.d...s1&sku=341-4687

And then what do you do when the station is broken and no spares exist.... It is always a good idea to rotate you old backup into the media you use now so you don't have to save 15 year old tapes...

Martin

[PattayaPete]

The point of booting from a usb disk is to allow all hard disks in the box to be in the array for file serving. The major problem with this whole project is hooking up enough disk drives to get all the space I want. Although the os takes up very little space it means that the whole drive can not be included in the array, thus reducing total capacity by 2 terabytes and that's a lot.

Backing up is just not an option. I am aiming to get, not 12, but 32 - 40 terabytes of storage in this beast. I don't think there is any practical backup system to backup that level of data so the next best thing is to have as stable and fault tolerant system as I can get.

Dave, I spent the afternoon installing BeleniX on an old box I had laying around. It a Pentium 4 with 512megs of memory and 2 disk drives, 36 gigs and 70 gigs. I managed to get it all working with a few hiccups getting my win 7 computer to access the share but got it going eventually. I'm feeling quite pleased with myself.

The amazing thing is that this ancient box managed to serve two HiDef movies to 2 different computers on the network at the same time.

Still have a few issues to sort like the fact that it throws lots of errors when it closes down. However an interesting Sunday afternoon's entertainment.

Thanks for your help so far. I may need more

[dave_boo]

I think anyway you get a more stable system if you boot from a traditional disk. That's what all datacentres are doing...

The space required for this is not much compared to the total.

The toram or copy2ram arg is for sure speeding up the execution compared to not using it if you boot from a USB or a CD but I doubt that it is quicker than a traditional install. I don't have any numbers and I may be wrong, but that's the feeling I get. I believe that most Gnu/Linux systems are buffering very well so that it in reality is very little difference at least for repeated accesses... so I wouldn't take that as and argument for choosing a USB booted solution.

I can think of one thing and that is the perceived simplicity of installation, just dump the USB thing on any hardware and walk away... But today installation is not a problem really...

I think if I had 12TB of data I would probably double up my disk capacity... and dump half of the disks at a friends place.... With that volume it is much quicker to walk with the disks in your bag than to send the data over the internet... It is a tricky thing...Just make sure you don't use any strange format for storing the backups... at least it should be a well documented open format.

At the place I work I they use some 800GB tapes... I think for a private dude the tape stations are a little pricey...

http://accessories.d...s1&sku=341-4687

And then what do you do when the station is broken and no spares exist.... It is always a good idea to rotate you old backup into the media you use now so you don't have to save 15 year old tapes...

Martin

Actually data centres are going towards SSDs. A CF card is a poor man's SSD. No moving parts, no seek time (compared to a hdd), super low latency, zero spin-up time (and the added load that puts on your PSU at start-up, no heat, etc. A thumbdrive is a CF (and an SSD for all intents and purposes) on a USB interface.

I feel you about the back-ups, even though I disagree with the method. An LTO-4 drive can be had for ~940 USD and tapes are round about 35 USD each. Not using compression means to back up your 12 TB of data will cost you 1465 USD. Using compression drops that to 1202.50 USD....not bad for something with 20+ years of shelf life; and a darn good deal if you amortise the cost over that shelf life. Of course numerous backups are the name of the game, so there's a cost there also. Going LTO-3 cuts the drive price to nearly a third and knocks some 5 USD off each tape (meaning you can, for the cost of running LTO-4 compressed backups, backup with no compression for the same cost or use LTO-3 compression and realise some 360 USD savings--although you'd change a lot of tapes).

[siamect]

Actually data centres are going towards SSDs. A CF card is a poor man's SSD. No moving parts, no seek time (compared to a hdd), super low latency, zero spin-up time (and the added load that puts on your PSU at start-up, no heat, etc. A thumbdrive is a CF (and an SSD for all intents and purposes) on a USB interface.

I feel you about the back-ups, even though I disagree with the method. An LTO-4 drive can be had for ~940 USD and tapes are round about 35 USD each. Not using compression means to back up your 12 TB of data will cost you 1465 USD. Using compression drops that to 1202.50 USD....not bad for something with 20+ years of shelf life; and a darn good deal if you amortise the cost over that shelf life. Of course numerous backups are the name of the game, so there's a cost there also. Going LTO-3 cuts the drive price to nearly a third and knocks some 5 USD off each tape (meaning you can, for the cost of running LTO-4 compressed backups, backup with no compression for the same cost or use LTO-3 compression and realise some 360 USD savings--although you'd change a lot of tapes).

True, they are moving to SSD but they are for sure not using USB interface... They are using them as conventional disks... no toram arg...

The link to the LTO-4 seems to put things in a different light, thanks, I have to re-evaluate my view of tape backups for smaller users... that is good. I thought it just needed to be expensive and wrote off the idea... I stand corrected...

Compression...in this case I think the compression will be giving little gain. The formats of video is already quite well compressed as it is...

Martin

[dave_boo]

The point of booting from a usb disk is to allow all hard disks in the box to be in the array for file serving. The major problem with this whole project is hooking up enough disk drives to get all the space I want. Although the os takes up very little space it means that the whole drive can not be included in the array, thus reducing total capacity by 2 terabytes and that's a lot.

Backing up is just not an option. I am aiming to get, not 12, but 32 - 40 terabytes of storage in this beast. I don't think there is any practical backup system to backup that level of data so the next best thing is to have as stable and fault tolerant system as I can get.

Dave, I spent the afternoon installing BeleniX on an old box I had laying around. It a Pentium 4 with 512megs of memory and 2 disk drives, 36 gigs and 70 gigs. I managed to get it all working with a few hiccups getting my win 7 computer to access the share but got it going eventually. I'm feeling quite pleased with myself.

The amazing thing is that this ancient box managed to serve two HiDef movies to 2 different computers on the network at the same time.

Still have a few issues to sort like the fact that it throws lots of errors when it closes down. However an interesting Sunday afternoon's entertainment.

Thanks for your help so far. I may need more

I'm a bit concerned about you NOT wanting to back it up. For the amount of scratch that you're going to be spending on it, there's no way I can see how you can justify not doing it. 25 compressed LTO-4 tapes would be sufficient to backup the whole of your system.

Would be interesting to see those errors; I don't know if the rest of the forum wants to see them also, so either post them here or PM me and I'll see what I can do to help. Give me the last 25 or so lines of /var/adm/messages and /var/log/syslog. If I had to pull a guess out of mi derriere, I'd reckon they're probably just services that refuse to die and Solaris just kills them.

I'd recommend getting more RAM if you're looking for a file server; it helps out a lot. I'd also highly recommend not using that chip in your LAN, it wasn't called Preshott for nothing.

[siamect]

Backing up is just not an option. I am aiming to get, not 12, but 32 - 40 terabytes of storage in this beast. I don't think there is any practical backup system to backup that level of data so the next best thing is to have as stable and fault tolerant system as I can get.

I'm a bit concerned about you NOT wanting to back it up. For the amount of scratch that you're going to be spending on it, there's no way I can see how you can justify not doing it. 25 compressed LTO-4 tapes would be sufficient to backup the whole of your system.

Unless the data on your server is useless you need a backup....

How much new data do you expect to add every day....

That should give you the long term requirements once the initial backups are done...

Martin

Edited August 29, 2010 by siamect

[dave_boo]

True, they are moving to SSD but they are for sure not using USB interface... They are using them as conventional disks... no toram arg...

The link to the LTO-4 seems to put things in a different light, thanks, I have to re-evaluate my view of tape backups for smaller users... that is good. I thought it just needed to be expensive and wrote off the idea... I stand corrected...

Compression...in this case I think the compression will be giving little gain. The formats of video is already quite well compressed as it is...

Martin

I did not state that the SSD are using USB. The reason that they are using them as conventional disks is that the access time is nil. Pete already expressed why he wanted to use a thumbdrive, I brought up different reasons. The fact that you're on a thumbdrive precludes a lot of writes as you can wear out the cells. Most of the wait on a boot, or launching an app, is not the bandwidth but rather the latency of the drive. Give me a while and I'll run some benchmarks between the various setups.

I do believe you're correct; compression would be of little use for already compressed data; however LTO uses a really cool compression method that actually compresses the data (or attempts to) and writes that and the raw data to tape. At that point it compares the sizes and marks the smaller as the accessible and leaves a header to point to the one to keep.

None the less, you'll have to double the amounts of cartridges if you are planning on backing up exclusively media. So sorry.

[PattayaPete]

The reason backups are not so important is that most of the data can be re-created. Either from DVD or Blu-Ray or re-downloaded from the internet. It's a horrible job and not something I'd want to do, but it can be done so its not a disaster to lose a disk or two.

I've been running a media server with no redundancy or backup for about 4 years now and so far have never lost a disk. Tempting fate no doubt which is why I am looking to create a more fault tolerant system now.

Dave, I delted BeleniX already and installed openSolaris 9.6. This is all just play stuff to help me get familiar with the system. OpenSolaris runs like a dog on the Pentium. Much slower than BeleniX but no errors on close down. While I have your attention I have a question that so far I can't find the answer to. With ZFS and raidz what happens if you lose two disks at the same time. Do you lose all data in the array?

[Darvil]

I hope I'm not too late with this post. I came upon this thread as I was looking up linux just for the hel_l of it.

I read up on this and I was going to give you a third alternative and IMHO the best solution. Flexraid (http://www.openegg.org/FlexRAID.curi).

A few months ago I've decided to rebuild my fileservers into one massive machine. Before I did that I did some of my own research looking at the ups and downs of each different methods of doing it. I probably should write a blog post (just been too lazy).

Anyway here's a little background. I work with linux everyday and windows (begrudgingly admitting). My first real fileserver was using opensolaris and it worked well for me for a while. I have to admit, I really bought into zfs but soon enough I ran into some snags; mainly the inability of opensolaris to expand the array. You can increase the size of the drives in the array but I prefer to expand slowly as harddrives prices fall. So the next format I moved to was having 2 3ware 12 port arrays. One fileserver was running centOS and the other server 2008. Both give me the ability to buy drives as the prices fall and then to expand my array.

But after buying quite a few drives I started to feel like I'm risking data loss.

So I went on another journey.

First I looked at unraid. Initially I was impressed but after comparing it to flexraid I decided to forgo it.

If you compare it head to head flexraid is comparable on most things.

Things such as

1.) drives spin down when not used

2.) If there is a catastrophic failure you only lose the data on the drives you lose.

3.) Can expand as much as you want (although unraid is limiting).

4.) mix match drives of all sizes (and with flexraid you can even add in drives that already have data)

5.) pretty easy to setup. Flexraid can be setup on the browser (you have to use firefox though)

Unraid is superior to flexraid in one way. It is a live system. Meaning as soon as you upload data to the drives, the data is safe right away. Flexraid meanwhile is a snapshot based so everytime you change data on it you will have to resync. This I decided was not that important as most of my data is static (IE media server) and I rarely update data on my server. Plus you can schedule syncing times on the flexraid server (IE every 6 hours, every day, every week etc..) The author also mention that he will be doing a live version in the near future.

Flexraid is superior to unraid in a few ways.

1.) Its free

2.) You can run it on windows and Linux. This means you can also use the media server as another machine you can do extra stuff with. For example what if you want to turn your media server into a Boxee server? How about running a webserver, ftp, etc etc. With unraid you can also do that but it will require a linux nerd (kinda like me) and involves way too much work for simple things. I use Ubuntu on mine and basically can do anything on the machine PLUS have it run as a media server.

2.) Flexraid runs on top of your OS so you have alot more flexibility. For example you could even share a folder from another PC and add that into the array. Now that folder is protected under flexraid.

3.) Since the last release (a few days ago) both windows and linux version now support two parity drives. Last time I look at unraid it only supported 1 parity drive.

4.) Unraid is limited but with flexraid you can add as many folders, drives, etc you want.

As for opensolaris, I really still like it and I use nexenta for backing up data at my work but I don't think for media storage it is the best. Like I said if you want to use your media server (opensolaris based) for something else it is harder to implement it unless you're geek. Although there is little chance of losing 3 or more drives at once the probability of losing everything increases as you keep racking up on the drives. Sure you can create a few more raidz array and put it all together but then you will lose space and isn't as cost effective. I think if you want to maximize your space with cost effectiveness, a reasonable amount of security, reasonable amount of speed (you won't notice if its a media server that only streams) and a great amount of flexibility, there really isn't any better option then flexraid.

For your info I am running a norco 4220 (20 hot space 4U) as you've linked above. The 80mm fans that come with it are incredibly noisy but you can get a kit that replaces them with 3 120mm fans which makes the server really quiet (like a normal PC). If you buy the norco 4224 its 24 port and already comes with 120mm fans but I don't know how loud it is.

I use a Tyan board (supermicro is my fav though) with 2 supermicro card. On my version I have 2 2.5 slots on the top where I installed 2 laptop drives in a raid 1 for redundancy for the OS install. If you're going to go with norco make sure you buy the right connectors to the back panel as they're specific.

I used to have about 20 drives but I sold off my 500 gigs and replaced them with 2TB. Currently 4 2TBs (1 of them is the parity drive) and 8 1TB for a total of 13 TB. Right now I'm using a little over 9TB and my snapshot takes about 15 hours (first time) and subsequent resync takes only about 30 mins (after I upload like 100 gigs of data).

I use Ubuntu 10 on my media server. I combined all the drives under flexraid protection using MHDDFS. This is incredibly easy to do and I see all the drives combined together in a single mount which works great (If you're going this route make sure you mount the MHDDFS with like 15 gig spare on the drive).

On the windows edition of flexraid it comes with flexview which combines all the drives together for you so if you want to use windows.. you're covered on that.

Well wow I did type alot. If you have any questions you can ask me or just drop some questions at the flexraid forum. I suggest reading up on it for a while as I just bombarded you with alot of information. Try it out and I'm sure you'll be impressed and will probably adopt it

[PattayaPete]

Thanks for the info Darvil, I will check out the links you provided.

Did you buy the Norco boxes in Thailand and if so, where?

Edited September 16, 2010 by PattayaPete

[Darvil]

I am actually in the States right now so I got it here. I don't know how you would obtain this in Thailand (although I'm curious as to how if there is a way). And I'm wondering how I can bring it back to bkk when I move back.

[PattayaPete]

Just a quick follow up to thank those who shared an opinion.

I now have an operational server and I am very happy with it. All equipment was purchased off the shelf in Pantip Plaza.I went with a Chenbro case (RM41416). Quite pricey at 21,200 baht but with 16 removable drive trays and plenty of space inside for internal mounts it is exactly what I needed.

Sands computers on the ground floor had some very nice Supermicro solutions starting from 140,000 baht. Nice but too rich for me. Found another shop on the third floor which also had some nice cases but at 59,000 baht for case and power supply again too rich for me. Settled on a small shop on the second floor mentioned by someone in an earlier post for all the gear. PCG Computers near the back escalators.

After all the discussion I finally decided to stick with unRaid. I did a lot of research into other options mentioned here, going so far as to build test systems in old boxes I had laying around. The clincher for me was the support community for unRaid and the fact that it is almost exclusively used by people who want a media server. People just like me so we speak the same language (not to geeky).

Setting the system up was a breeze and I had it on line and serving media in less than 3 hours. I'll leave it at that but if anyone else wants to do a similar thing I am happy to give more info on the whole process.

Here's a pic of the beast in full flight.

Edited October 14, 2010 by PattayaPete

[sacretagent]

Just a quick follow up to thank those who shared an opinion.

I now have an operational server and I am very happy with it. All equipment was purchased off the shelf in Pantip Plaza.I went with a Chenbro case (RM41416). Quite pricey at 21,200 baht but with 16 removable drive trays and plenty of space inside for internal mounts it is exactly what I needed.

Sands computers on the ground floor had some very nice Supermicro solutions starting from 140,000 baht. Nice but too rich for me. Found another shop on the third floor which also had some nice cases but at 59,000 baht for case and power supply again too rich for me. Settled on a small shop on the second floor mentioned by someone in an earlier post for all the gear. PCG Computers near the back escalators.

After all the discussion I finally decided to stick with unRaid. I did a lot of research into other options mentioned here, going so far as to build test systems in old boxes I had laying around. The clincher for me was the support community for unRaid and the fact that it is almost exclusively used by people who want a media server. People just like me so we speak the same language (not to geeky).

Setting the system up was a breeze and I had it on line and serving media in less than 3 hours. I'll leave it at that but if anyone else wants to do a similar thing I am happy to give more info on the whole process.

Here's a pic of the beast in full flight.

HI,

running unraid myself in Bangkok on a asus p5b plus motherboard with a few extra adaptec contollers.... have 12 TB of storage (12 *1tb drives) and 1 parity and 1 cache drive

all is put into a cooler master cm590 case with a few hotswap cages

was looking to expand this thing till the max of 22 drives for unraid ...

this chenbro case ... is it only the case for this price ?

or is it complete with MB and powersupplies ?

could you let us know what exactly you got for that price ?

i plan a visit to pantip next weekend ....

I will also have a look at this flexraid thing... i saw it existence a few weeks ago but didn't really look further then the wikipedia page and that mentioned that it was still in experimental phase

so guess it is time to visit the official website

anyway if you could let us know what you get for the 21000 bath then i can talk with the guy to get the same

Edited November 30, 2010 by sacretagent

[PattayaPete]

It was just the case although that includes the sixteen hot swap drive trays and backplane setup with fans and wiring. Motherboard and power supply not included. It was the only one he had but he told me he could order another one if required. He had several other server cases but the Chenbro was by far the best option for me.