Considering a Home Server, looking for advice

[cbanakis]

If its made by Western Digital, and it doesn't say "Enterprise" on it, it is either a green drive, or might as well be.

The Green Drive is a WD drive.

They did a real crappy job throwing it together.
(Very slow and unreliable)

Coincidently, this slow crappy drive uses less power than most decent drives, so Western Digital decided to call them Green. Like "Green" for the earth.

A green drive is sorta like taking a hybrid car to the race track.
You WILL lose, every time.

[jbrown96]

If its made by Western Digital, and it doesn't say "Enterprise" on it, it is either a green drive, or might as well be.

The Green Drive is a WD drive.

They did a real crappy job throwing it together.
(Very slow and unreliable)

Coincidently, this slow crappy drive uses less power than most decent drives, so Western Digital decided to call them Green. Like "Green" for the earth.

A green drive is sorta like taking a hybrid car to the race track.
You WILL lose, every time.

Any of the "power-saving" drives will do this, but the WDs are very bad.

The thing is that the drives don't actually fail. The RAID hardware/software thinks they do and marks them failed. You can just re-add them to the array, but they will fail again in a certain amount of time. Most people RMA them, but that's worthless because there's nothing wrong with it; they just aren't suited to RAID applications.
Just buy 7200rpm drives and you won't have to worry at all.

[Bucky Ball]

I'm not running RAID but have been using WD Green drives for ages. Never a problem.

[cbanakis]

IDK, my experience has caused me to be a hater when it comes to Western Digital.

I've even had 4 velociraptors fail on me, and they are supposed to be the cream of the crop.

Seagate 4 life

[ashikaga]

I'm not running RAID but have been using WD Green drives for ages. Never a problem.

To be clear - the issue here is not WD Green drives per se, it's that they are a bad choice for RAID. I only wish I'd realised this before I bought three of them! Fortunately it seems you can work around the issues.

re. Seagate vs WD, it seems to me that you can find plenty of anecdotal evidence on either side of the debate, depending on which brand of fanboy/girl you consult. I've personally oscillated back and forth several times over the years.

[cbanakis]

I guess I could agree with that.

My whole thing is that the Barracuda's and the Green drives are comparable in price, but as far as RAID goes NOT in performance.

The Barracuda's are good enough to run in RAID, and the Green drives are not.

Really, the only choices for building a RAID server are Seagate Barracuda's, Western Digital Black Drives, or Seagate Constellations.

The Most affordable being the Barracuda's as far as $ per Gigabyte goes.

But we are all in agreement to STAY AWAY from WD Green drives for whatever reason.

I do base my opinions on experience though, not being a "fan boy"

And I have gone through hundreds of hard drives over the years.

[cbanakis]

deamon_knight,

To answer more of your concerns.

It has been my experience that windows and linux to not get along so well when it comes to networking. (stable and reliable, yes, but not very fast)

I'm sure its possible to get it working right if you have the time/energy/knowledge...

Transfer speeds seem to be greatly diminished when going from one to the other, despite your network hardware.

I am forced to use Windows7 Media Center in my living room and bed room because I want full TV capture capabilities (Cable TV) AND the ability to access and play all my archived movies/tv shows from my file server.

I have spent an insane amount of time trying to find a linux based alternative to windows media center, and cannot find a single one that has all the functions I want/need.

I originally had Ubuntu running on my server, and saw 100mb+ transfer speeds to and from my Ubuntu desktop and laptop, but the windows machines were only seeing 10-30mb

Since the media centers are my main concern, I ended up running windows server 2008 on my server, and it works like a charm.

Except, now when I transfer to and from my desktop I have the slow 30mb speeds, but that is acceptable because desktop access is not my priority.

As far as I know, there is no practical way to bond 2 100mb lans.
But even if you could, it would still only be 200mb. (still kinda slow)

Even wireless N is more than double the speed of 10/100 now, so I would start by moving up to gigabit.

FYI, I only brought up wireless N as a speed example.
DO NOT USE WIRELESS N, LOL

Wireless is great for many things, like a laptop or a smart phone.

For on-line gaming, and HTPC's pulling data from a file server, you gotta get the wire.

I'm not sure what kind of video you plan on accessing over your network, but it was my experience that HD content barley worked at all till after the gigabit upgrade.

[garfonzo]

I might as well chime in since I run a system much to what you're looking for. I have a Ubuntu server in my garage with 3 hard drives totaling 1.1TB. This is just a big fat file server. I have multiple Windows computers in my home (no Ubuntu desktops).

I have a specific computer dedicated to watching movies and is connected to my HD Projector. This computer is just a Dell optiplex something or other, small, and quite. Fantastic for watching movies on.

My main desktop runs Windows media center for recording TV. When a show is recorded, I have "MCE Media Buddy" automatically convert the recorded TV to an AVI, send it to the server, and delete the original. That way my shows are all waiting to be watched from any computer in the house.

Since the computer connected to the projector is windows, I could use XBMC or something, but I prefer to just open up Windows Explorer, navigate to my movie/TV show of choice, and watch it via VLC. This is just faster without any frills and eye candy. Don't get me wrong, the eye candy is beautiful (and I tried XBMC) but I figure I'm there to watch a movie, not the eye candy. I'll admit that when I have friends over to watch a movie, I'll bust out XBMC to get the "OOooos" and "AAaaahhs". Fun!

What ties all the computers together is a Gigabit wired system I installed myself with CAT 5e cables. I can stream 1080p movies from my Ubuntu server to my movie computer without a glitch. I can jump forward in the movie, back, without hesitation. I use Samba on the Ubuntu box to "talk" to all the Windows computers. The transfer speeds from a Windows machine to the Ubuntu box aren't superb, ranging from 20-30MB/s (megabytes, not megabits).

Samba was a bit of a hassle to set up, but now that it is up, I don't need to touch it. As far as redundancy, every hard drive attached to my server has an "twin" which I copy all the data to once a week using rsync. This is automated through a cron job.

Anyway, that's my setup in a nutshell.

[deamon_knight]

Thanks guys, this is a lot of great info. cbanakis, wow, just wow. Thats WAY more than I'm aiming for, but thats also pretty cool. I'm Planning to ultimately have a network setup like this. 1 Gaming/Performance desktop running Win7. 1 File server, bittorrent etc. server, and 1 media center system. The gaming system needs to be Win7, but I'd like to have the Server as Linux based as the media center as Linux based (although my current Media Center is win XP) I'm currently replacing my Gaming system with a new one and a the old gaming system is available to be turned into a file server for this purpose.

I'd like to have a linux based media center (perhaps front end is a better description) and have most of the downloading, media storage and TV capture occurring on the file server and the media just being accessible/manageable from the media center. Now this puts a lot of demands on the file server. However, I'm not planning on upgrading the Media center system just yet, so I'm focusing on the file server.

As the file server goes, I plan to use software RAID to keep costs down, and I thought you could alter the timeout failure settings to allow for this. The "feature" in wester digital driver is called TLER, see here .

I'm not sure what analogous setting on seagate or hitachi drives are. I wasn't planning on using green WD drives, although their lower power consumption seems like it might make sense when you have several drives. It also appears that WesterDigital, and maybe others, disabled the ability to alter the timeouts on their consumer level drives to push sales of their enterprise disks.

If I just want a 4 disk RAID 5 array, or a two disk RAID 1 array, is this easy to setup using mdadm? Is there a walkthrough somewhere for trying to select the best settings, block size, etc. ?

[cbanakis]

TLER

OK, Western Digital drives are not locked, but they stopped distributing the TLER software, and deny ever having it.
Even though myself, and a few friends personally received the software directly from Western Digital in the past.

They also void your warranty if you RMA a modified drive. (Losers)

You can still get the TLER software if you hunt around online, and if your completely hellbent on Western Digital, I guess I could send it to you. (I'm sure I got in somewhere on this server, LOL)

Not sure about Hitachi, but Seagate Barracuda's just work, no tweaking necessary.

Of course Enterprise drives by any manufacturer are the ideal way to go for RAID. (But at what cost?)

Hard Drives

Seriously though, Western Digital Vs Seagate...

Western Digital loses in every application (excluding the VelociRaptor)

Ive also had more than too many VelociRaptors fail on me, but its worth dealing with for a 10k RPM SATA drive. (I Guess)

I'm not speaking as a Seagate fanboy.

As you can probably tell, I know a thing or two about hard drives.

I have probably gone through about 100 drives in the last 10 years.

Maxtor and Quantum were the absolute worst, next is Western Digital.

The best is probably somewhere between Hitachi, and Seagate overall.
But I don't have much experience with Hitachi, cause they have a very limited selection on drives, so Ive only had a few.

Also, Never owned a Samsung...

RAID

Not sure about command lines to create a RAID array, but in ubuntu you can easily setup a software raid in disk utility.

Just File/Create/RAID Array

The choose RAID5, and select the disks you want to use.