My unRAID Servers (83TB Total)

These are my home servers, they are mainly used for storing Blu-rays/DVDs and streaming content to my popcorn hour or any other device in the house. The popcorn hour supports all codecs (DTS-HD, TrueHD, etc) and also can natively play ISO containers without having the user manually mount them, making it easy to watch everything in my home theater. I rip out menus and extras using DVDFab to save space, leaving the main movies/episodes in ISO format with no compression. I could go on and on about why I choose ISO instead of MKV, but the main reason is that it just works 100% of the time.

The drives tend to run at about 32-40C and can barely be heard from a couple feet away. Drives are spun down if they haven't been accessed in over an hour, making power consumption around 155W for both servers combined. Drives only spin up if I am accessing them, which is usually only 1-2 at a time, so they don't increase my power bill all that much.

I'm using 1 parity drive to backup up to 23 data drives on each server. It does not stripe data, so writes are around 20-35MB/s without a cache drive, and reads will be based on each individual disk (usually 90+ MB/s). With a cache drive, my writes average about 80 MB/s, however this new data is not protected until the cache drive moves the files to the array (Automatically happens on a weekly basis). Since data is not striped, it's virtually impossible to lose all data. If one drive fails, you can rebuild it. If two drives fail, you only lose data on those two drives. It also has other benefits such as being able to freely change the motherboard, processor, RAM, and any other hardware in the system without worrying about losing data or breaking your array. I've been using unRAID for about 5 years and have not lost any data. I've had a few hard drive failures and successfully rebuilt each time.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

---

Server Components
Data Drives (Server 1): 13x 3TB Western Digital Green (WD30EZRX)
Data Drives (Server 2): 4x 3TB Western Digital Green (WD30EZRX), 12x 2TB Western Digital Green (WD20EARS)
Parity Drives: 2x 3TB Western Digital Green (WD30EZRX)
Cache Drives: 2x 1TB Western Digital Black (WD1002FAEX)
SAS Cards: 6x Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8
CPUs: 2x Intel i3-2120 (3.3GHz)
Motherboards: 2x Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O
Memory: 2x 8GB Kingston (DDR3 1333)
Power Supplies: 2x Corsair AX850
Cases: 2x Norco 4224 with 120mm Bracket
Fans: 6x Noctua NF-P12, 4x Noctua NF-R8
Operating Systems: 2x unRAID 5.0

Home Theater (Servers are streamed to this over the local network)
TV: 55" Sony HX929
Receiver: Denon 4311CI
Speakers: 2x Klipsch RF-82, 1x Klipsch RC-62, 4x Klipsch RS-52
Subwoofer: SVS 20-39PCi
Other: Xbox 360 (Slim), Popcorn Hour A-400, Harmony 900 Remote

Misc
UPS: 3x CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD (Servers, Home Theater, and Networking)
Software: AnyDVD HD, DVDFab, YAMJ with Eversion Skin

---

To see my old server's thread, click here. Please keep all questions in the new thread.
Edited by Murlocke - 1/18/13 at 7:04am

The hardware without the drives is about $1000-$1200 per server, case being the most expensive part of each. I probably paid about $35 per TB ($105/3TB) because of bulk purchases, so probably around $2905 on hard drives. I would say ~$2500 per server would be in the ballpark. I didn't build these over night, I've been adding hard drives to them for around 4 years now.

It's up to the user if he wants to add that many data disks. You don't lose all data in the rare case you have 2 drive failures at the same time, like you do with other RAID solutions. It will support dual parity in the future for people that want 2 drive failures. unRAID is not designed for businesses, it's designed for home users. I agree that 1 parity for 23 data disks is very risky for a business that could lose millions if they lost critical data, but for a home user, it's usually more than enough. If I had 2 drives fail I would need to replace at most, 6TB of data (Which is around 200 blu-rays) and in the ~4 years of using unRAID I have not had it happen yet. I like these odds much better than having over 20TB of space used for parity, most home users do not need that excessive protection in my opinion. Replacing 200 movies would be a headache, but it wouldn't be the end of the world, and it would cost nearly twice as much to get this much usable space on something like ZFS because you'd never add this many drives to a striped array.

Cache drives act as a middle man, when transferring 30-50GB files to the server, they need to fit on the cache drive until it moves them over (You set how often you want to do this, I have mine set weekly). I constantly transfer 500+ GB to the server so it wouldn't work well. An SSD would also be limited by my gigabit network anyway, and a 1TB black is much more affordable.
Edited by Murlocke - 7/15/12 at 11:55am