File storage server

[Trev]

If you don't want to run Windows, don't want to configure the latest version of Samba, and don't care whether or not your file server is 100% SMB-compatible or performs well in a high-bandwidth, low-latency environment (most consumer NAS products do not), then just invest $150-$300 in an off-the-shelf NAS solution from Iomega, Seagate, or some other vendor. But, you probably want other nice features like UPnP, mDNS (Bonjour), etc.

[pyrre]

@ Trev
I just run 2000 server and converted disks to dynamic disks.
In that matter all disks were spanned as one logical volume. however. If i wish to remove one disk from the volume i break it apart and loose ALL data. UNWANTED.
From earlier experiences I do not want do mount drives in folders. I have had problems of data corruption at some point.
This last time i tried 2000 server it had problems with data transfer rates. It was not able to stream data over gigabit Ethernet to my mediacentre xbox.
Freenas did, on the same hardware.

I have now installed ubuntu 8.04 on my server.
Will in the next days try use LVM filsesystem and see how it works out.
A friend of mine standing in the same position as me, wanting to build e cheap end easy to expand fileserver is testing linuxbased openfiler. If ubuntu does not work out for me i will try open filer as well...
If  freeNAS was stable running vinum volume manager I would have choset it..

EDIT:
Messed up with the different types of volume managers... :-)

[persia]

So you're going with Linux.  I would have chosen a different distro, did you compare distros or just went with the flavour of the month?

[Trev]

@pyrre

Yeah, spanned volumes aren't ideal (I think I commented on the limitations somewhere in that old message). You could have partitioned the individual disks and mounted them as directories, however:

C:\Data\MyFristDrive -> \Device\HarddiskVolume1
C:\Data\MySecondDrive -> \Device\HarddiskVolume2
etc.

Whether or not Windows 2000 (or any other OS) performs well using SMB/CIFS over GbE depends on the TCP/IP configuration of both the client and the server (in particular, the requisite receive window size, e.g. 1,000,000 bytes for GbE with 1ms RTT--Google "bandwidth delay product"), MTU (Windows limits the MTU to the host requirements RFC minimum when it can't do path MTU discovery across a router), which version of SMB/CIFS is used by the client, and the overall speed of the system.

Windows 2000 does not tune itself for high-speed networks out of the box. You have to do a bit of tweaking to get it there. The same can be said of most TCP/IP stacks.

Without reading from cache, you're probably not going to fill a GbE link using a single disk, especially an older model spinning at 5400 RPM.

You want a file system that allows its internal structure to be distributed among disks and loaded/unloaded as disks join/leave a disk group, dynamically updating information like display information like directory listings and free space at the same time.

EDIT: And rather than implement a NAS, you may want to look into SAN hosts (iSCSI or ATAoE over GbE is probably the cheapest access method) and cluster file systems, i.e. file systems that appear local to and can be accessed by disparate hosts simultaneously. That coupled with dynamic attaching/detaching of physical disks would be ideal, I suppose.

EDIT2: Hmmm. GlusterFS http://www.gluster.org/. Check out the aggregation feature, which really stems from their decentralized approach. Looks very promising.

[motorollin]

Drobo

We had one of these for some time and it's absolutely brilliant. It warns you when the array is getting full. You just pull out a disk and it carries on working (but loses redundancy). Plug another drive in, and it rebuilds the redundancy with the new disk. All of this is on the fly. There's a video somewhere (maybe on that site I linked to above) which shows it doing all of this while playing a video from the drive. It never misses a frame while the disks are being swapped in and out.

[Trev]

Drobo sounds very cool (and looks cool, too), but the drives are still part of an array, and it has more overhead than RAID5....

[motorollin]

Trev wrote:
Drobo sounds very cool (and looks cool, too), but the drives are still part of an array

Yes, but the disks don't have to be matched. You can stick any size drive in there and it will work.

Trev wrote:
and it has more overhead than RAID5....

In terms of the capacity required for redundancy?

[Trev]

Yes, but the disks don't have to be matched. You can stick any size drive in there and it will work.

You can use any size disk in an array on most array controllers, but the largest logical disk size will be n times the size of the smallest disk (or the largest amount of equal available space across all disks). A lot of array controllers are very flexible, too. Let's say you have three 500GB disks and three 250GB disks. You could create one 1TB array (3x500GB) and one 500GB array (3x250GB), one 1.25TB array (6x250GB) and one 500GB array (3x250GB from the unused half of the 500GB disks), etc., so there are ways to maximize your available storage.

Logical disks can usually be expanded and converted to different RAID levels as well. How the new storage is made available to the user depends on the file system and operating environment.

In terms of the capacity required for redundancy?

Yeah. But it's still a very cool product, especially from an ease of use standpoint. If you think of it in terms of wasted storage when using different sized disks versus wasted storage when using same sized disks in a RAID5 array, then the Drobo has a lot to offer.

[pyrre]

Or, you could just show 4 1.5TB disks in the controller...
one at the time..

[bloodline]

I've just opted for the easy route... And bought a couple of TB S-ATA drives... They are only £70... I plan to try an dump all the random odd sized ATA disks that I currently have...

[pyrre]

@ bloodline

What do you mean by dump?
As in trowing them away?

[bloodline]

 

pyrre wrote:
@ bloodline

What do you mean by dump?
As in trowing them away?

No, I'll archive some stuff on them and put them in a cupboard. I'm not sure how much longer I'll have any mobos with P-ATA interfaces on... I'll have to keep one around I guess... :-(

[motorollin]

bloodline wrote:
I'm not sure how much longer I'll have any mobos with P-ATA interfaces on... I'll have to keep one around I guess... :-(

Use an Amiga! :-D

[bloodline]

motorollin wrote:

bloodline wrote:
I'm not sure how much longer I'll have any mobos with P-ATA interfaces on... I'll have to keep one around I guess... :-(

Use an Amiga! :-D

:-D not sure how my little A1200 will cope with my assorted array of old HD's ranging from 30gig to 300gig... All soon to be formatted HFS+...

I will keep an old PATA->USB2 converter around should I need to recover any data stored on the drives... At the moment I also have a pair of 80gig drives in a raid0... Using some weird Nvidia raid BIOS feature... That will have to be deraided :-/

[motorollin]

bloodline wrote:


:-D not sure how my little A1200 will cope with my assorted array of old HD's ranging from 30gig to 300gig... All soon to be formatted HFS+...

I will keep an old PATA->USB2 converter around should I need to recover any data stored on the drives...

Coward! :-P

[pyrre]

I have two PCI pata controllers...
Will invest in some more... just to be sure.
However, as long as the PIII survives I'll always have a pata controller to extract files from pata disks...