DescentBB

So right now in my Media Center PC/Server I have 2 1 TB drives in RAID 1, and currently I have a little less then 200 GB left in the thing, from adding movies, tv shows, music etc onto it. Right now I have this mobo in it

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813187021

And 4 GB of RAM and a AMD 4600+ for the CPU, I have Windows 7 loaded on a 400 GB IDE drive on it, eventually will swap it with a SATA drive, that was just a spare drive I had around.

So it has 4 SATA ports and can support RAID 0 and 1. So my current plans are when it gets full to get 2 2 TB drives and leave it in RAID 1 for redundancy. But just to toss it out to you guys, any other ideas on the most bang for my buck to increase my storage without getting a new mobo/cpu for my media server?

Generally speaking the best way to do a HTPC is to have a small, quiet and low power drive in it, and offload all your storage on to a gigabit LAN NAS box in a closet somewhere with a huge (but also made of low power drives) RAID5 in it. That way all the noise and heat from the hard drive array is away from the HTPC that you want to be quiet.

My brother has a 6 TB RAID5 NAS on his network for his HTPCs, and another 6 TB RAID5 in his encoding machine that mirrors the NAS for redundancy. The HTPCs themselves don't even have hard drives, they run entirely off flash memory.

I second what Krom said. I run a Qnap NAS box with 4x 2TB drives in it - been running for a couple months now, very fast.

Yeah right now I am planning on moving the direction of having a low powered HTPC, and a NAS for data, the machine that is my current HTPC was my old gaming rig, and surprisingly it is pretty quiet.

So as of right now until I can get the money to move to that kind of setup? Would you say my best bet is to move to 2 2 TB drives, maybe 3 TB drives? Right now I won't be able to get it till more around Christmas time, so just looking at my options.

Krom: What is the make/Model of the NAS Box your brother uses?
I have been looking for a solution for a while - what he has sounds good.

My brother tried a couple appliance type NAS boxes but they are pretty awful so he built his own system for it in the end. He uses FreeNAS 8 embedded ( http://freenas.org/ ) off of an ancient 256 MB flash card to build a software RAID which is WAY safer and more reliable than BIOS RAID that comes with most motherboards and when paired with a decent CPU at or over 1 GHz will usually be even faster than BIOS RAID anyway.

Think: Budget processor in a desktop motherboard with a bunch of SATA ports, 2 GB of RAM, an efficient PSU (350w would be plenty) in a decent case with a lots of HDD bays and very good ventilation, and a dirt cheap thumb drive. Probably about $100-150 for the board, processor and memory, then another $100 for the PSU and case. Keeping the drives at a good operating temperature is important, so keep some well placed fans around. Either a fancy case with all the bays / cooling you need, or since it'll be in a closet / basement somewhere anyway: gut a cheap case and mod the fans in.

If you are completely stuck on an appliance, keep in mind all the offerings under $500 are going to outright suck and that price is before you even get the drives for them. But what you need to keep an eye out for are:
Gigabit LAN is an absolute requirement, unless you *like* file transfers that are about as fun as ripping your fingernails out with splintered wood while on pain enhancers (also applies to home built systems, don't waste a dime on 100 mbit)
4-Bay minimum
Support for SMB/CIFS if they’re gonna share to windows devices
Support for DLNA/uPnP for talking to set-top boxes
Support for rSync (server and client), and HTTP(s)/FTP/SCP for easier management of content & backups

Thats exactly what im running into - all the appliance types out there are horrid.

I have been looking to build my own, and will be using This to keep the drives cool.

The Board i am going with has Dual Gigabit LAN, and the Cisco Gigabit LAN switch has the ability to bind two ports together for 2gb of throughput. I already have a Core2Duo Mobile CPU out of a dead laptop running at 2.8ghz, and 4gb of DDR2 memory (out of the same dead laptop) that will go in this board.

Was going to go with hardware RAID, but you say software is better?

Thanks for the links!

For a NAS box software RAID is definitely better. It generally confuses people a bit because its hard to grasp the concept that software would be faster than hardware, but in this case if you isolate the RAID/disk performance it actually is faster in software. Although it is better to say that the difference is software RAID causes higher CPU utilization than hardware RAID. But with a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo doing the heavy lifting it is very likely the RAID will outperform hardware / bios RAIDs simply because a C2D at that speed is so much more powerful than the embedded processing that hardware RAIDs have. It just costs more CPU time away from other tasks, but since it is a NAS the CPU doesn't have any other tasks to do anyway, so there is no point to offloading it in the first place.

And the other thing to keep in mind is that hardware RAIDs that come with motherboards and stuff are actually pretty poor implementations, they are only really good for RAID0 which abandons all data redundancy by default. From a safety perspective in a NAS box like that software RAID is light years ahead of most hardware types *(unless you spent a fortune on the controllers, but those are more software RAID with embedded processors offloading all the work since that is the only real way to do it). The short of it is that affordable hardware RAID is dangerous and unreliable. I've seen enough people with hardware RAID5 or RAID1 have a single drive failure bring down the array and destroy data, so I wouldn't trust the implementations anymore.

That being the case - the System im running now has two SATA ports, but I do not think it supports Hardware RAID.
Dumb question - but can you have software RAID even in the absence of Hardware RAID support? Seems like you could but ive never even attempted it.

Yes... that's the idea.

Yes, additionally software RAID can ignore some of the limitations that hardware RAID has, like you can have a RAID and include an IDE drive along with some SATA drives all in the same array, software doesn't care how it is connected as long as it can access the disk (size/shape limits still apply though, can't mix different sized drives into a array/etc). Granted, even if it is possible there are still some things that wouldn't make much sense, like using a USB or firewire drive in an array.

So Krom, let me pick your brain on this, so I get what your saying as far as the software RAID and using FreeNAS for the software RAID setup.

So for me, right now I don't have a spare box to a free NAS setup, and a dedicated box for a HTPC. So right now, would you suggest ditching the hardware RAID and using a Windows based software RAID? Right now if that is the case, I am pretty skeptical on that, main reason, about 4 years back, I was doing tech support for Iomega, and they had some NAS's that ran Server 2003 some of them Server 2000, that had if I remember right a 40 or so GB partition that had the OS installed on it, that was mirrored on drives 0 and 1, and then the rest of the partitions, were used in a software RAID 5. And the main issue I ran into, was if people had a bad windows update or something that hit and screwed up the OS, well with the OS getting screwed up, a lot of the time it would also screw up the RAID 5 setup.

Which is why I am also guessing your probably suggesting to use FreeNAS or something along those lines, since its not really a OS that can get corrupted from updates etc.

My brother uses a Windows managed RAID5 for the backup array which is in his desktop computer (Windows 7 Pro booting from a 120 GB SSD). Granted it is the backup array, so everything is mirrored in the primary NAS box if it were to fail. He used to have it at a BIOS level from his RAID card, but it got annoying when one of the drives started acting up so he switched to a software managed stripe which let him see / run S.M.A.R.T. tests on the individual drives. A BIOS managed array appears to the OS as just a big 8 TB volume and you can't test the drives, where as a software managed array appears as the individual drives to the OS and all the drive diagnostics will still work.

The one advantage to keep in mind for when the RAID is directly in the host machine is that a 4 drive array with modern drives could easily push upwards of 500 MB/sec sequential speeds, which you won't see out of a NAS box unless you do everything with 10 gigabit LAN.