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Looks nice :D I hope he has better results with Raid5 then me tho. I have reverted back to a dual drive NAS for stability after having raid 5 servers for a long

Looks nice :D I hope he has better results with Raid5 then me tho. I have reverted back to a dual drive NAS for stability after having raid 5 servers for a long time. Somehow IDE and SATA drives and raid cards don't cut it for me. I have lost my data so freaking often by corrupt arrays it's not fun anymore. The first server I had used a Promise card (Supertrak SX6000) card (with 4 * 80 GB drives) that gave me nothing but problems (very poor performance and corrupt arays about once every 2 months). It was running on a standard non-server mobo with a decent but standard PSU, so one of the components might have caused problems tho. The second was running on an Areca ARC-1210 card (with 8*320 Gb drives) on a tyan thunder dualxeon server mobo with an 850Watt Tagan server PSU and was put behind a 2200VA UPS. Even then the array seemed to dropout quite often and I have spend 100's of hours in total (updating drivers/firmware/OS'es, recovering lost data, replacing parts, cables, moving the server etc...) trying to get it to run decently. Eventually I just sold the whole damn thing and bought me a simple COnceptronic CH3SNAS with 2 1,5TB drives for the cash I sold the old server for. I have ever never had a single problem in the whole year i've had it and am very happy with the purchase. The performance is totally not comparable (600MB/Sec vs 20 MB/Sec), but even the slow NAS is sufficient enough for me (it streams HD movies just fine and my backups aren't TB's big anyways ;) ). Plus the power usage is literally 1/10th, it's very quiet and a lot easier to carry around and take with me if I need to. Maybe I just fail at fileservers, maybe I just had bad luck with 2 bad cards, but I'm not convinced a simple affordable RAID-5 solution means your data is safe. But I must admit I wouldn't mind having that self made NAS at my home tho, it looks cool :D Maybe one day i'll try again.... ;)

sandGorgon 16y ago
Next time do try ZFS on Fuse (linux userspace filesystem) - I have a 1TB setup and it works quite well. You could try making a RAIDZ volume and see how it goes.
- pielud 16y ago
  Have you had good luck with this? I'm running zfs on an open solaris server, but I hate solaris and would like to switch to linux. I never got the impression that zfs on fuse was stable enough to trust with all of my data.
  - enneff 16y ago
    I use ZFS under FreeBSD 8-RELEASE in a 6x1.5tb raidz2 (dual-parity) and it is rock solid. The benefit of running ZFS under FreeBSD over Linux is that you don't need to use FUSE, as ZFS has been really well integrated with FreeBSD's filesystem layer.
    - silasb 16y ago
      Would you mind writing up a tutorial. I am interesting in ZFS under FreeBSD, I have 8-Release downloaded and ready to go. Still working on getting the hardware up and running for it though. Are you using 64-bit? I heard ZFS loves 64-bit.
  - chronomex 16y ago
    I put my homedir under zfs-fuse for a while. When I migrated to jfs-on-raid5 (3x160G) some months later, a small but nontrivial fraction of my symlinks had turned into 0-length files with 0000 permissions. Various things sort of randomly broke, which was interesting. (Mostly unimportant things, such as ssh not being able to read authorized_keys.)
  - barrkel 16y ago
    I use Nexenta (my ZFS build is described here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794640 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794640 and here: http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/03/zfssolaris-as-nas.html http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/03/zfssolaris-as-nas.html). The nice thing about Nexenta is that it's an Debian/Ubuntu-style userland (the default install is console only I think, but that's the way I like it).
- StarLite 16y ago
  The problem wasn't really the filesystem I think. The card actualyl threw the disks out of the array and then refused to put them back in somehow.
  - Kadin 16y ago
    Were you doing the RAID using the card's drivers (BIOS softraid/fakeraid), or using regular software RAID? It seems odd that the controller would drop drives like that, but I would never trust the "RAID" features of low-end interface cards ... they're barely competent at exposing the drives as bare block devices to the OS as it is. I've had decent enough luck with the real hardware-RAID cards from Dell, but they are expensive and if I were building a new server today, given the price of CPU cores, I'm not sure it would be at all worth the cost and SPOF risk. I've never had a card fail but if it did, that would suck. Back in the SCSI/PentiumII era they were fairly nice though -- I have a PERC still running in a closet, doing RAID5 across 5 74GB SCSIs. Probably about time to pull the plug on it though ... those five drives probably burn through their replacement cost in electricity every few months.
  - dalore 16y ago
    You should look at using software RAID. The performance is not as bad as it once was. Plus you don't get a corrupt controller which tend to be proprietary.
jokull 16y ago
Software Raid-6 FTW.
- jokull 16y ago
  HN is very harsh!
lutorm 16y ago
Funny. I've used an ARC-1260 in a 10x500gb raid-6 array for several years and it has never gone down. I've RMAd probably 4 drives to WD under warranty. I've also had 2 software 5x1tb raid-5 arrays for about 2 years and they've never even lost a drive. Apparently WD improved their RE drives between the 500gb and 1tb versions, the difference in failure rate is huge.
johnohara 16y ago
"Eventually I just sold the whole damn thing..." Buyer beware.

sandGorgon 16y ago

Next time do try ZFS on Fuse (linux userspace filesystem) - I have a 1TB setup and it works quite well. You could try making a RAIDZ volume and see how it goes.

pielud 16y ago
Have you had good luck with this? I'm running zfs on an open solaris server, but I hate solaris and would like to switch to linux. I never got the impression that zfs on fuse was stable enough to trust with all of my data.
- enneff 16y ago
  I use ZFS under FreeBSD 8-RELEASE in a 6x1.5tb raidz2 (dual-parity) and it is rock solid. The benefit of running ZFS under FreeBSD over Linux is that you don't need to use FUSE, as ZFS has been really well integrated with FreeBSD's filesystem layer.
  - silasb 16y ago
    Would you mind writing up a tutorial. I am interesting in ZFS under FreeBSD, I have 8-Release downloaded and ready to go. Still working on getting the hardware up and running for it though. Are you using 64-bit? I heard ZFS loves 64-bit.
- chronomex 16y ago
  I put my homedir under zfs-fuse for a while. When I migrated to jfs-on-raid5 (3x160G) some months later, a small but nontrivial fraction of my symlinks had turned into 0-length files with 0000 permissions. Various things sort of randomly broke, which was interesting. (Mostly unimportant things, such as ssh not being able to read authorized_keys.)
- barrkel 16y ago
  I use Nexenta (my ZFS build is described here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794640 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794640 and here: http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/03/zfssolaris-as-nas.html http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/03/zfssolaris-as-nas.html). The nice thing about Nexenta is that it's an Debian/Ubuntu-style userland (the default install is console only I think, but that's the way I like it).
StarLite 16y ago
The problem wasn't really the filesystem I think. The card actualyl threw the disks out of the array and then refused to put them back in somehow.
- Kadin 16y ago
  Were you doing the RAID using the card's drivers (BIOS softraid/fakeraid), or using regular software RAID? It seems odd that the controller would drop drives like that, but I would never trust the "RAID" features of low-end interface cards ... they're barely competent at exposing the drives as bare block devices to the OS as it is. I've had decent enough luck with the real hardware-RAID cards from Dell, but they are expensive and if I were building a new server today, given the price of CPU cores, I'm not sure it would be at all worth the cost and SPOF risk. I've never had a card fail but if it did, that would suck. Back in the SCSI/PentiumII era they were fairly nice though -- I have a PERC still running in a closet, doing RAID5 across 5 74GB SCSIs. Probably about time to pull the plug on it though ... those five drives probably burn through their replacement cost in electricity every few months.
- dalore 16y ago
  You should look at using software RAID. The performance is not as bad as it once was. Plus you don't get a corrupt controller which tend to be proprietary.

jokull 16y ago

Software Raid-6 FTW.

jokull 16y ago
HN is very harsh!

lutorm 16y ago

Funny. I've used an ARC-1260 in a 10x500gb raid-6 array for several years and it has never gone down. I've RMAd probably 4 drives to WD under warranty. I've also had 2 software 5x1tb raid-5 arrays for about 2 years and they've never even lost a drive. Apparently WD improved their RE drives between the 500gb and 1tb versions, the difference in failure rate is huge.

johnohara 16y ago

"Eventually I just sold the whole damn thing..." Buyer beware.