Media Server - Xserve + Xserve RAID? Cheaper alternatives, 10+ TB?
Hi all,
I'm trying to build a home media network, and need to decide how best to go about it.
The obvious solution seems to be to purchase an Apple Xserve with a fiber card + an Xserve RAID with about 10TB or more of storage.
Is there an equivalent solution for less money? This is going to be quite expensive, but I'd like to be able to catalog all my DVD's on the RAID array and access everything via Apple's new iTV from several different televisions (each with an iTV).
I've been considering buying a base level Xserve and Xserve RAID and adding drives and memory from third party sources such as OWC.
I also have a PC and a Quad G5 that could be devoted to 'server duty' as well, but it seems the new Xserve Intel is a better option.
Any suggestions or solutions?
Thanks in advance for any insight!
- Sarge
I'm trying to build a home media network, and need to decide how best to go about it.
The obvious solution seems to be to purchase an Apple Xserve with a fiber card + an Xserve RAID with about 10TB or more of storage.
Is there an equivalent solution for less money? This is going to be quite expensive, but I'd like to be able to catalog all my DVD's on the RAID array and access everything via Apple's new iTV from several different televisions (each with an iTV).
I've been considering buying a base level Xserve and Xserve RAID and adding drives and memory from third party sources such as OWC.
I also have a PC and a Quad G5 that could be devoted to 'server duty' as well, but it seems the new Xserve Intel is a better option.
Any suggestions or solutions?
Thanks in advance for any insight!
- Sarge
Comments
I'm trying to build a home media network, and need to decide how best to go about it.
The obvious solution seems to be to purchase an Apple Xserve with a fiber card + an Xserve RAID with about 10TB or more of storage.
Is there an equivalent solution for less money?
Yes, Xserve RAID is overkill for home use (and too expensive for any use, but we won't go there).
You could attach something like this to your G5: http://www.promise.com/product/produ...product_id=174
With 1TB drives and RAID 6 you'd get about 10TB. Or if you want even more space: http://www.promise.com/product/produ...product_id=160
I've been considering buying a base level Xserve and Xserve RAID and adding drives and memory from third party sources such as OWC.
You can't use third-party drives.
(and too expensive for any use, but we won't go there).
It's too expensive for home and small business, but it has been competitive for enterprise storage. A lot of non-Apple users have been buying them for storage on their computer clusters.
a) clarly indicates a drive going bad or gone bad without needing you to enter some config screen you'll likely never look at since this is a home system.
b) is reasonably easy to rebuild from a 1 or 2 drive failure.
Because assuming you've filled a few TB of drives rebuilding from scratch would greatly suck. If you can't get a RAID 6 setup you like go with RAID 1+0 although your disk prices will double. For a 10TB array with 1TB drives you've increased drive failure probability by an order of magnitude over a single disk.
I'd also make sure the iTV will play your collection...and you might want to consider Sony's 200 disc VGP-XL1B2 for $200-$400...of course given your collection you probably need all 5 of these...
You may want to get at least 1 anyways...I remember reading somewhere someone was working on a utility to batch rip from this thing...
Oh, here's the linky: http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/default.aspx Not yet but the developer is looking into it. Plus you can't stream from the changer yet so I guess you do need the RAID after all.
Vinea
... if you want even more space: http://www.promise.com/product/produ...product_id=160
Thanks much for the reply. I'm a neophyte at this, so any further direction is appreciated - to that end I assume I'd buy a SCSI card for the G5 and attach the Vtrak M500p that way? Would I use two U320 cards, or, well, how would the connection best be made to maximize throughput?
At $3900 for the enclosure and $4300 for 15 seagate 750GB SATA 300 drives (I can't find any 1TB SATA 300 drives???) I'm looking at $8200 shipped for a setup that stores just over 11TB of raw data, or, using RAID 6, just under 10TB, if I'm understanding how RAID 6 works.
I'd then connect that setup to the G5 using ONE or TWO (???) SCSI to PCI-X Host adapters.
Does this all sound correct?
Would I run OSX or OSX server on the quad G5? It's only mission would be to act as the home media server, with the rest of the network consisting of a Mac Pro, a MacBook, four iTV's, all run over the new 'n' wifi, with the Mac Pro and a PC w/ Win XP connected via RJ45.
Thanks in advance for any further insight!
Thanks much for the reply. I'm a neophyte at this, so any further direction is appreciated - to that end I assume I'd buy a SCSI card for the G5 and attach the Vtrak M500p that way? Would I use two U320 cards, or, well, how would the connection best be made to maximize throughput?
You would buy one card.
At $3900 for the enclosure and $4300 for 15 seagate 750GB SATA 300 drives (I can't find any 1TB SATA 300 drives???) I'm looking at $8200 shipped for a setup that stores just over 11TB of raw data, or, using RAID 6, just under 10TB, if I'm understanding how RAID 6 works.
Right. I would suggest RAID 6 and a hot spare, for 9TB of capacity.
I'd then connect that setup to the G5 using ONE or TWO (???) SCSI to PCI-X Host adapters.
Be sure to get the right kind of card. Some G5s have PCI Express, not PCI-X.
Would I run OSX or OSX server on the quad G5?
Regular OS X should be just as good. Actually, you might want to attach the RAID to your Mac Pro for even better performance.
Seems like you could build a DIY NAS for less. If you build using OpenSolaris you get ZFS and mount it via SAMBA or NFS.
$600 Promise SuperTrak EX12350 RAID
$200 COOLER MASTER Stacker 810 12-Bay
$250 300W mini redundant ATX power supply (PS-2)
$660 hot swap drive bays (11 x $60 - you can also go cheaper - ICY DOCK has a 3 in 2 bay internal hot-swap rack for around $85...avg build quality but allows you to free up 1 bay for an optical drive)
Leaves $1000 for MB with gigE, CPU, memory etc for $2700 "enclosure" price. Still saves you a grand and gives you another PC at the expense of assembly, trouble shooting, tuning and setup. You have fairly low performance requirements and both the prices and components are very conservative. Still, there's some tuning for OSX and NFS IIRC.
I think setting the OSX kernel parameter net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack to zero is the fix for NFS. You should get 25MB/sec at that point with no other tweaks and up to 30-40s by futzing with rwsize to 64K. SMB should be faster (35+MB/sec) but I don't recall if you can automount SMB shares.
I can't think it would take you more than a day to put this together once all the pieces arrive to get basic functionality. Depending on your desire to tinker this might be a way to go. There are a bunch of guides on building a fileserver on the net using linux, windows and maybe solaris. Of the three I'd personally try Solaris first since I like zfs.
http://blogs.sun.com/PlasticPixel/en...multi_terabyte
You can do raid-z2 on a JBOD array for RAID-6 equivalent protection without the expensive RAID-6 controller. Block error recovery occurs on the fly while disk reconstruct time is dependent on the space used. You could get the price of the "enclosure" part down fairly low. Under $2K for sure...and given that you have all your media still you don't need to worry about backups.
You might want a mirrored pool for more important files like photos and home movies.
Here's hoping Leopard gets ZFS.
I thought 1TB drives were still a few months out?
Another linky: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...8&page=1&pp=60
Vinea
Worse, even after you survive "infant mortality" on drives failure rates don't bottom but grow with time and worse than that failures occur in clusters. The probability of 2 drive failure within 1 hour is four times in the real world than seen in RAID estimates and double for 10 hours (your typical reconstruction window).
"For drives less than five years old, field replacement rates were larger than what the datasheet MTTF suggested by a factor of 2-10. For five to eight year old drives, field replacement rates were a factor of 30 higher than what the datasheet MTTF suggested."
Meh.
http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/t...tml/index.html
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
Yes, RAID-6 + spare (or zfs-z2 and spare) unless you enjoy rebuilding your multi-terrabyte collection from scratch if you're one of the unlucky ones with a two drive failure. One analyst says he say a shipping container of HDDs fall when being loaded on a dock when a chain broke. They simply attached a new chain and got it aboard ship. I'm gonna guess that batch of drives had a high infant mortality rate...
Vinea
Any suggestions or solutions?
Wait until the AppleTV is on the market if that is what the server is for.
It is hard to properly spec a system when you don't know exactly what it is for. It could turn out that all you need is a cheap NAS. Many network media players can play straight from a NAS. Some of the NASes have built-in / stripped-down media serving capabilities.
At this point, we simply don't know how AppleTV content is served. Thus, buying a server for the AppleTV seems a bit premature.
It could turn out that all you need is a cheap NAS.
I don't think there's such a thing as a cheap 10TB NAS (yet).
If you don't already have nearly that much media, start with a few standard drives, then migrate to larger arrays as needed. Even with an HDTV recorder, it takes quite a while to fill up that quickly. Hopefully with upcoming ZFS support, you can add drives without having to do file migration and repartitioning.