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Suggestion for a home file/backup server setup.
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Suggestion for a home file/backup server setup.

darkconzdarkconz Member
edited January 2013 in Help

Hi,

I am trying to setup a home server which has 2 purposes.

  1. Daily backup my 2 companies essential files.
  2. Act as a file server for my own home usage. Storing files and probably streaming videos from this server if possible.

I am thinking to put a 8 port RAID card in this server. 4 SATA drives in RAID 10 for home usage, and 4 SATA drives in RAID 10 for business backup. The home section RAID 10 may be over kill but there are some valuable photos and videos of my child and family which I like to have a good protection for.

I am not sure if I should purchase real server specification components (CPU/RAM/Mother board/HDD) or put in a more budget kind of components. I want to keep the cost down but if it requires server grade then I will go for it.

Also, which RAID card do you guys suggest? I've been eyeing on adaptec and LSI.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

Comments

  • sdotsensdotsen Member
    edited January 2013

    Agreed kind of overkill. I use an external drive to backup videos, music and photos. My important docs are encrypted and stored on S3.

  • I currently use Openmediavault in VMware for nfs/cifs share.. which is quite good and have had no problems (in VMware because it is on my main workstation, and I can have the shares/VM available no matter if I boot to Linux or W7 (vm autoloads on both OS'es); cifs share from VM is exactly the same). I used to use FreeNAS which was rock solid stable (on an old AMD K6 II 380Mhz Compaq w/ 384M RAM no less) until a disk failure (not FreeNAS's fault :)

  • @sdotsen said: I use an external drive to backup videos, music and photos. My important docs are encrypted and stored on S3.

    I could use the external harddrive but I like to store my companies' files on a RAID 10 server. I will use other cloud services to backup my backup my files on this server. This is part of the plan.

  • @twain said: I currently use Openmediavault in VMware for nfs/cifs share.. which is quite good and have had no problems (in VMware because it is on my main workstation, and I can have the shares/VM available no matter if I boot to Linux or W7 (vm autoloads on both OS'es); cifs share from VM is exactly the same). I used to use FreeNAS which was rock solid stable (on an old AMD K6 II 380Mhz Compaq w/ 384M RAM no less) until a disk failure (not FreeNAS's fault :)

    I was planning to use FreeNAS as the OS :) I am wondering if a low spec system plus a high end RAID card is a good way to go....

  • Take a look at the HP Microserver. I use one for my house with four 2TB drives and a OS drive in the top bay. Currently its running Windows 2008 R2 64bit and running software RAID5. I upgrade the memory to 16GB with some low profile memory modules.

    Power usage is around 50watts normally.

  • Having been there, done that many many times I finally opted to get an appliance. And I love it.

    Check out http://www.drobo.com/

    You can get the DroboFS reasonably priced w/o drives. Basically uses ZFS and does everything you need without having to think about it. You don't even have to mess around with mounting the drives - they slide right in like an old casette tape.

    Otherwise, although openfiler and so on have come along way I'd go with a similar 5 bay micro chassis and use FreeBSD+ZFS.

  • Do you have enough upload speed ?

  • @nocom
    I have 5mbps upload. The initial upload will take some time but after that, any incremental upload won't be an issue.

    @unused
    I use Qnap at work and I liked it. I thought of having an appliance too but having an 8 bay appliance cost just as much as building a server. You might say I don't need 8 but I like 2 sets of RAID 10's to keep company stuff and home stuff separate.

  • @darkconz - i hear you. Get two drobos - with 5 bays and raidz2 you get double disk failure protection and x 3tb plenty of space. Cost wise it could still be cheaper to build your own, you really don't need much in terms of cpu/ram. A single desktop level quad core w/ 4gb or 8gb if you're running upnp etc will handle a software raid setup just fine. (I'd really recommend the zfs route) otherwise you'd need even less with a raid card.

  • @unused, i want my invitation

  • I wouldn't call Drobos necessarily low end though :)

    I have self built setup at home with AMD desktop CPU, Asus desktop motherboard which supports ECC, 8GB ECC DDR3 RAM, Intel 8-port SATA controller and EON ZFS (https://sites.google.com/site/eonstorage/) running from a USB stick. 8x 2TB SATA drives are on raidz2 (raidz3 is now supported). Zero crashes during last 2.5 years and the system is running 24/7.

    Performance is great and system extremely stable, so I have been happy as a clam. You could use FreeBSD 9.0+ or FreeNAS too if OpenSolaris is too much of a learning curve :)

    Crab

  • @unused
    I am checking out the pricing. But I am still leaning towards building a rig unless the pricing is so much different.

    @Crab
    This EON on a USB stick, what if the USB stick corrupts or USB bus has some how gone wrong?

    One question which have bothered me for some time and I couldn't find a clear answer to. What if the hardware RAID card dies? Is the array reconstructable? Same thing if I use EON ZFS, what if the mobo dies? I guess this is where the 3rd, 4th, 5th sets of offsite backup comes in handy?

  • You can try 3 backup vps from different locations - cheaper and better.
    My 2 cent

  • Low end: HP Microserver roll your own NAS

    Mid tier: Synology 2 disk NAS

    Top end: Drobo :)

  • @nocom
    Each company is located at different location in the city and their upload speed is not the fastest in the world. This is why I want to centralize the daily backups at home first then re-upload them to 2 or 3 offsite locations. This is where the NAS comes in.

    @SharedHost
    HP Microserver might save me some money. I am doing some price checks. Thanks.

  • I guess going with ZFS file system eliminates the need for hardware RAID card right? At least this is what I understand on the ZFS wiki.

  • HP Microserver might save me some money. I am doing some price checks. Thanks.

    All the microservers I've ever bought came with rebates too. What country are you purchasing in?

  • I've used SME Server for myself and a few small businesses.

    wiki.contribs.org/Main_Page

    8.x is based on CentOS 5.x and 7.X is based on CentOS 4.x, we install 7.X on an old Celeron 667Mhz w/160GB disk and used it as a storage dump for a couple of years, although YMMV.

  • @darkconz said: I guess going with ZFS file system eliminates the need for hardware RAID card right? At least this is what I understand on the ZFS wiki.

    Yes- you wouldn't want to use it with HW raid since it can better control the hotswap/rebuild etc. (At most an HBA to expand # of drives etc)

    Zfs has come along way- I havent' seen anyone else talk about file system, but from a block level dedup + snapshot + resiliency with raidz2 + management I think it's a great choice for a backup server.

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    Is it only me that thinks a raid10 is overkill when talking backupstorage?

  • nunimnunim Member
    edited January 2013

    I've got a Netgear ReadyNas that I'm pretty satisfied with, cost me $200 or so without drives if I recall correctly. Added 4 2TB drives in Raid 5for 6TB of storage, it has a web interface and optional modules for things, one of them being bittorrent. My only complaint is it doesn't play well with PS3, but I blame that on PS3's god awful media center abilities.

  • Thanks guys for the suggestions. I think I have made up my mind. I am going to salvage one of the older PCs with Core 2 Duo and put 2 non raid PCIe controllers on there, then use FreeNAS. I think this is the cheapest solution and from what I understand, ZFS provides what hardware controllers can provide (I guess with some performance impact) but I will add in a cheap SSD to boost the performance a bit.

    Thank you all again.

  • @darkconz You can easily make backup of that usb stick so if the one you have dies, you have another one in place.

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