Home Servers, Network Storage and the Case House
by Loyd Case on December 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Here at the Case House, we’re pretty sophisticated home users, as you might imagine. Even if you ignore me, for a moment, there are my two daughters. Elizabeth (now at UCLA) and Emily (who is a sophomore in high school) are both tech savvy users. Elizabeth is best thought of as a power user, particularly when it comes to cell phones and laptops. She’s also a gifted digital photographer and expert Photoshop user (as it applies to photography.)
Emily is more of a power Internet user and gamer. Facebook is always open on her system, as is iTunes. She users her iPod Classic as much for games as for music, and she’s been known to boot up some pretty serious PC games – Titan Quest, Neverwinter Nights 2 and others.
My wife, on the other hand, will tell you she’s not particularly tech savvy. In one sense, she’s right. I had to set up Harmony One universal remote or she would have never figured out the home theater. She still looks to me for basic hardware support, like setting up her work laptop for dual displays whenever she disconnects and reconnects the laptop. In other ways, though, she’s a sophisticated user of tech, building web pages for her company, initiating and managing teleconferencing sites and designing corporate training curricula.
On top of that, we’re all multi-PC users. Elizabeth has both a full featured laptop and netbook. Emily can be found using the communal living room laptop for homework, sometimes more so than the desktop PC in her room.
As for me – I want access to media, music, benchmarking apps, game patches and other useful software from any location in the house. Keeping my PC on 24/7 really isn’t the right answer: network storage is.
What Do You Mean “Network Storage?”
The situation with network storage isn’t as simple as it should be. There exist a spectrum of choices, depending on what you actually need:
- Small, single drive systems that attach to your network and simply become another hard drive to your PC, albeit slower.
- Network attached storage (NAS) devices that offer additional flexibility, including automated backups, USB printer access through the network and some degree of user account control.
- Media savvy NAS boxes that build on basic NAS capability, then add plugin capability. For example, the ReadyNAS from Netgear offers the ability to run a Slimserver plugin, letting you access digital music stored on the server with Logitech SqueezeBox digital media adapters.
- Interesting convergence devices that are both NAS boxes and media servers, like the Mediagate line of hardware, or Western Digital’s WD TV.
- PC based servers. These can range from consumer oriented Windows Home Servers to full on multicore hardware running Windows Server 2003 or one of the many Linux
distros.
- The final solution is cloud storage – something that’s still new to a lot of home users, and exists in multiple implementations and at varying cost structures.
In an ideal world, you’d assess your needs and pick the network storage technology that suits your needs. In the Case House, most of our network storage needs have been ably handled by one of the original ReadyNAS 600 systems, built and sold by Infrant prior to its acquisition by Netgear. The system originally shipped with 1TB of storage (four 250GB drives), set up in RAID 5 mode.
After several years, the oddball paddlewheel cooling fan began to die, so I replaced both the fan and PSU, while simultaneously upgrading the hard drives to four 500GB drives (2TB total, about 1.6TB usable in RAID 5.) The ReadyNAS has since been working fine, humming quietly in the basement lab storage area, giving me no problems and doing its job.
So naturally, I wanted something different.
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rrinker - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
I have no problem transferring 8-12GB HD movie files from my desktop to the WHS box over gig ethernet. It's as fast as any other network I've worked with (ie, clients' datacenters and so forth). I have no issues streaming HD movies through my Popcorn Hour,a dn that only connects at 100Mb.When the next version of WHS comes out, hopefully it will be based on 2008, so with Vista and Win7 clients you can use SMB2 whichw ill be ever faster. And if you absolutely must, you can install NFS on WHS and use NFS instead of SMB.
Bigaxe - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
The author only spent $184 for his home server, if I read correctly. Just the cost of the case and CPU. Everything else he already had, including the Enterprise Drives. Sure with a quick login to Technet for a copy of WHS, less then $200 in with taxes is a pretty good deal.Like us all we build what works for us, our own needs. Great to read each article and compare for ourselves.
bob4432 - Saturday, December 5, 2009 - link
just take a class at a community college and get server2k8 for free....darkslyde - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
haha i guess someone beat me to it. i was gonna mention the same thing that loyd had parts lying around.honestly, if it wasnt for HP's add-ins for the WHS, i wouldnt even touch it. the atom based ones are limited with drives and runs HOT. the other ones are blah compared to the horsepower you can achieve from one that's made from scratch, but then again, the HP add-ins are too indispensable.
i'm actually revamping my htpc to just piggy back from a whs. WHS = media monster. lets see an all-in-one distro do that.
custom back-up of all media (sync, contribute, etc), my movies + anydvd/clonedvd, on-the-fly encoding for xbox/ps3/extenders, video encoding, tv-recording, squeezebox server, remote jukebox, etc.
maybe i'll skip out on gift giving this holiday season and just use all that money for setup...bah, humbug!
Minion4Hire - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Wouldn't the four 500GBs in the ReadyNAS come to less than 1.4TBs total and not 1.6TBs? Only 1.36TBs should be available for actual bulk storage considering one drive's worth of data is needed for parity information, which would leave 1.5 trillion bytes before you factor in the whole binary-decimal debacle, and then you still have to account for the overhead of your file system.Not to get picky or anything....... =P
pjkenned - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
That is darn expensive for a WHS like that! Spent a bit too much for 2TB drives I think. I'm actually running a 15 drive WHS (1.5TB Raid 6 + horspare with Raid 1 OS drive) off of an Adaptec 31605. I really do like WHS, especially with the add-ins. MyMovies + WHS + Win 7 Media Center is great!All that said, unless you are going for a lot of physical drive space (where the loss from WHS duplication becomes sub-optimal), the HP MediaSmart boxes really are a step above the rest.
mcnabney - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
I actually did the math before my build. The 1.5TB Seagate are cheap enough that it is actually cheaper to just buy more drives to get the same capacity as an array and skip buying the expensive RAID controller.It sounds like you have only 12 drives in your main array - so you only get about 15TB total storage. You could do the same thing with five extra drives (at a cost under $500), but would not require the $950 Adaptec controller. That would save almost $500 and allow you to keep your backed-up data at another location (which is far safer) and only leave ten drives powered in your case (less power and take up less room). That, and running a RAID means ALL of the drives spin everytime data is needed. WHS normally just spins the drive that is in use. Just FYI. My 18TB cost under $1400.
MadMan007 - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Yeah he pretty well shafted himself by buying (perhaps on impulse?) a 2-drive ITX case. ITX is fine but the case cost more than a mATX tower+quality PSU. It's the limitation to two HDs that screwed him, he was stuck getting 2TB drives which are terribly overpriced in $/GB and on top of that he will need a new case or an external eSATA expander to add more drives.Nice article in general but the details of the build just made me frown.
MadMan007 - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Well, maybe it's just the 7200RPM WD 2TB drives which are overpriced. In any case being able to expand a WHS box easily is one of the major advantages but starting out with full drive bays negates that advantage.TheBeagle - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Your total cost was approximately $100.00 TOO MUCH - for substantially less. However, for about $870.00, you could have bought (from Newegg @ $600.00 - no sales tax, free shipping) a brand new HP ex495 Windows Home Server (which comes with a 1.5 TB drive), and also added 3 more 1.5 TB drives (Seagate 7200.11 @ $90.00 each), and had a WHS (with a warranty), including the latest HP 3.0 software (which is fabulous), that has a total storage capacity of 6 TB. Now THAT HP unit is a bargain and a damn good WHS - but your WHS pales by comparison!