This is amazing. How much dollar value would you say is one of these servers, hard drives included?

 

So UnRAID can only do 1 disk for parity?? Seems like that's cutting it close for 24 drives or am I missing something...?
Also, why not use SSD's for cache drives?
Man I thought my clients 48TB (38TB with parity and formatted) was big....

 

Sweet setup

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doomtomb

This is amazing. How much dollar value would you say is one of these servers, hard drives included?

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.
Quote:

Originally Posted by swat565

So UnRAID can only do 1 disk for parity?? Seems like that's cutting it close for 24 drives or am I missing something...?
Also, why not use SSD's for cache drives?
Man I thought my clients 48TB (38TB with parity and formatted) was big....

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.

 

Can you configure it to use more parities?

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by 3930K

Can you configure it to use more parities?

Murlocke just answered that question in his post above.

 

Thats impressive...

I'm actually going in the other direction...

It seems every 6-8 months I screw up something so bad I lose all my RIPS and Recorded TV...LOL

Pretty soon I'll Folding, Streaming, and Browsing the Internet and nothing else.

 

I was an admirer from afar in your past thread as well and it is a true joy to see those machines of yours. They are magnificent!

For the sake of satisfying my curiosity, may I ask how you organise your data? I assume you have two separate servers for the sake of enabling extreme future expandability, but you presumably keep different sort of content on each server.

 

Do you think you will incorporate the new wd red drives? What would you say your failure rate has been with greens.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Murlocke

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.

Gotcha answered my "real world" question about it. I'd move over to this for my personal NAS as it seems its best for home use when you need max storage space, but I also use my NAS for VMware lab I have, and that still needs speed.
Yea different environments defiantly. They needed a wee bit more speed

It was a ZFS based array, set up as a two x8 drive raid 5 arrays stripped.

We were getting 1600MB/s reads internally on the server

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chokladkakan

I was an admirer from afar in your past thread as well and it is a true joy to see those machines of yours. They are magnificent!
For the sake of satisfying my curiosity, may I ask how you organise your data? I assume you have two separate servers for the sake of enabling extreme future expandability, but you presumably keep different sort of content on each server.

Movies on one, TV shows on other. I have YAMJ scan both directories and create a single jukebox, and then my popcorn hour uses that. On the YAMJ skin, everything is merged together so it looks like one big server.
Quote:

Originally Posted by absoluteloki89

Do you think you will incorporate the new wd red drives? What would you say your failure rate has been with greens.

I will probably starting using red drives in the future, they are faster and use the same amount of power.

I've had around 2-3 green drives fail over the last 4 years or so, not complete fails, but there were SMART errors so I replaced them. Given the amount of drives I have on 24/7, that's pretty good IMO.

 

I was looking around to post a question about starting my own server with a few TB, with the ability to be accessed outdoors.

I think I'm losing it when looking at your setup... I saw your 52TB unRAID server thread a few months ago and was already amazed back then o: but now you post this. Great job there

. Must've been a big pile of work !

 

Would these work well with a HTPC?

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ollii

I was looking around to post a question about starting my own server with a few TB, with the ability to be accessed outdoors.
I think I'm losing it when looking at your setup... I saw your 52TB unRAID server thread a few months ago and was already amazed back then o: but now you post this. Great job there

. Must've been a big pile of work !

I posted pictures right after I built them, i'm still in a big pile of work, going to be a good 2-3 weeks of work to get all my data organized. I have about 20TB of transfers to do, and i'm having some SAS driver errors in the syslog that are causing certain things to hang. I'm 99% sure it's software related because other people have reported the same issues with some of the newest unRAID builds. This is what I get for going extreme.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 3930K

Would these work well with a HTPC?

It runs on a modified linux kernel so it's hard to get other programs to work with it internally. There's a community that has some programs working, but overall unRAID is really only designed to share files over the local network to other devices/computers. I don't think unRAID itself could be an HTPC, but you could definitely build an HTPC (minus hard drives) and have it connect to the unRAID servers. That's pretty much how i'm doing it, but i'm using a popcorn hour instead of an HTPC. For most people, it's going to be cheaper/easier to just put a few hard drives into an HTPC.

Since you already have a computer that is plenty capable of being an HTPC, you could just set up XBMC or something on your current computer and have that access the unRAID servers too. If you don't care about poster/fanart/etc, you can just access the files themselves in windows and watch them via something like VLC or MPC-HC (assuming you aren't using ISOs, then you would need something like PowerDVD).

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Murlocke

I posted pictures right after I built them, i'm still in a big pile of work, going to be a good 2-3 weeks of work to get all my data organized. I have about 20TB of transfers to do, and i'm having some SAS driver errors in the syslog that are causing certain things to hang. I'm 99% sure it's software related because other people have reported the same issues with some of the newest unRAID builds. This is what I get for going extreme.

oh lawd, good luck I guess x) it will pay off in the end

. I just began my server thread

if you've got some free time, welcome to reply. I ask lots of different questions out of pure interest before starting one. Knowledge goes first ;p your experience would probably be most helpful on a thread like mine! Btw, did you get your drives with some benefits/promos/temporary price decreases? You've got a crazy amount of drives...

Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!

the thread

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ollii

oh lawd, good luck I guess x) it will pay off in the end

. I just began my server thread

if you've got some free time, welcome to reply. I ask lots of different questions out of pure interest before starting one. Knowledge goes first ;p your experience would probably be most helpful on a thread like mine! Btw, did you get your drives with some benefits/promos/temporary price decreases? You've got a crazy amount of drives...

Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!

the thread

I paid $100/3TB via a business connection for my recent drives. Most of my earlier drives were bought pre-flood so it was more like $125/3TB.

 

Love the servers

I can't wait until I build my own. You've inspired me

Great pics!

 

How much of that 83tb is used? Nice setup btw!

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Slayem

How much of that 83tb is used? Nice setup btw!

About 50TB of it.

I am able to expand to about 130TB without replacing drives at the moment, don't think i'll be having any space issues soon. I still need to pay off the servers though, went a tad over budget because I got a good bulk purchase deal on some 3TBs.

 

haha, yeah that's some pricey equipment! Do you store your blu-rays as iso rips? If you convert them to mkv can i ask what converter you use?

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Slayem

haha, yeah that's some pricey equipment! Do you store your blu-rays as iso rips? If you convert them to mkv can i ask what converter you use?

I keep them as ISO, but remove the extras/menus still. Haven't had much luck with MKV, even if I keep the quality at 100% and don't transcode, I seem to have more problems with getting them to work. Seems like half of the programs that "convert" them to MKV mess up A/V sync or something else on ~30% of the content. I'm fairly confident i've tried all the major programs. ISO just works and it's a simple 1 step solution to remove things from it in DVDFab. If you have a device that supports playing ISOs natively, it seems like the way to go. Mounting them for PowerDVD or something would get annoying very fast. I know even XBMC supports natively playing BD ISOs now, no need to mount them. I see more and more people using ISO instead of MKV lately... but MKV is still definitely way more popular at the moment.

I look at it this way. My ISOs, even with the extras removed, is still the original movie/subtitles/audio for the main feature, completely unconverted. After you go to MKV, you can't go back to ISO. However you can go from ISO to virtually anything. It seems like a more future proof solution, but I know lots of people that would disagree. I constantly get told "ISO files, really?!".

 

Well I'm subbed to this thread now.

 

Yeah i havent had luck with mkv's eiether, the sound is always slightly off no matter what program i try. ISO's just work!

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Murlocke

I paid $100/3TB via a business connection for my recent drives. Most of my earlier drives were bought pre-flood so it was more like $125/3TB.

Oh that explains a bit, but it's still a massive amount of drives! what amount of TB's are you aiming at? ;p

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Murlocke

I keep them as ISO, but remove the extras/menus still. Haven't had much luck with MKV, even if I keep the quality at 100% and don't transcode, I seem to have more problems with getting them to work. Seems like half of the programs that "convert" them to MKV mess up A/V sync or something else on ~30% of the content. I'm fairly confident i've tried all the major programs. ISO just works and it's a simple 1 step solution to remove things from it in DVDFab. If you have a device that supports playing ISOs natively, it seems like the way to go. Mounting them for PowerDVD or something would get annoying very fast. I know even XBMC supports natively playing BD ISOs now, no need to mount them. I see more and more people using ISO instead of MKV lately... but MKV is still definitely way more popular at the moment.
I look at it this way. My ISOs, even with the extras removed, is still the original movie/subtitles/audio for the main feature, completely unconverted. After you go to MKV, you can't go back to ISO. However you can go from ISO to virtually anything. It seems like a more future proof solution, but I know lots of people that would disagree. I constantly get told "ISO files, really?!".

Seems to me like the best process for "converting" to MKV without encoding is to use the command line utilities and so on rather than a program which will attempt to "convert" the ISO in one go. After ripping the Blu-ray, use eac3to to extract the parts you want to keep, then I think I used mkvmerge to pop them all back together again. It's been a while since I did it but I didn't have any issues with it.

There's no point you trying to use MKVs though - if it ain't broke, don't fix it

I don't know what you mean about not being able to go from MKV to anything else though. MKV is just a container like ISO - you can extract the files from one whenever you like.