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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nubie - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
It is an ITX board, not a Micro-ATX board.Small thermal, power and physical footprint come to mind as reasons.
I am just sad that it doesn't have a PCI-E connector, which would allow for RAID add-in cards.
mindless1 - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
An ITX board uses no less power than a full sized counterpart with the same chipsets, or rather if there is a difference it's from trivial things kinda useful in a server like an additional chip for more drive ports.An ITX board has worse thermals due to using same amount of power but having less heatsinking area, and often fewer stages in the VRM circuit. Note 65W TDP max, it's literally running near max capacity with many modern CPUs at full load.
However, a E5200 /etc is quite overkill for a file server. Even a Pentium III 1GHz is, unless you're doing software raid other than level 1, but there's the other issue of PIII era systems not having other desirable features like SATA, GbE not sitting on the PCI bus.
Lack of PCI-E 4X or better and limited # of hard drive support is definitely a weakness, as is use of the anemic PSU. Sacrificing a small % efficiency to use a higher capacity PSU is a good tradeoff for something so integral to your computing as a fileserver on 24/7, and that unlike desktop PCs probably won't need replaced for several years if it doesn't break prematurely or have crippling BIOS HDD size limitations.
mindless1 - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
An ITX board uses no less power than a full sized counterpart with the same chipsets, or rather if there is a difference it's from trivial things kinda useful in a server like an additional chip for more drive ports.An ITX board has worse thermals due to using same amount of power but having less heatsinking area, and often fewer stages in the VRM circuit. Note 65W TDP max, it's literally running near max capacity with many modern CPUs at full load.
However, a E5200 /etc is quite overkill for a file server. Even a Pentium III 1GHz is, unless you're doing software raid other than level 1, but there's the other issue of PIII era systems not having other desirable features like SATA, GbE not sitting on the PCI bus.
Lack of PCI-E 4X or better and limited # of hard drive support is definitely a weakness, as is use of the anemic PSU. Sacrificing a small % efficiency to use a higher capacity PSU is a good tradeoff for something so integral to your computing as a fileserver on 24/7, and that unlike desktop PCs probably won't need replaced for several years if it doesn't break prematurely or have crippling BIOS HDD size limitations.
strikeback03 - Friday, December 4, 2009 - link
If you also let your server transcode movies for you for storage then you would want more processor capability though.thechucklesstart - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
I have to ask you, what features do you want from home server that exist in the standard edition?As for running Windows Home Server over FreeBSD, here are my reasons for choosing WHS:
A) Security. The number 1 reason why a server operating system is insecure today is Misconfiguration. I don't have the knowledge or time to double check everything I set up is configured securely. With WHS, the configuration is already done my Microsoft, I don't touch a thing.
B) Ease of use. I don't have to figure out the obscure way my router handles port forwarding, it is handled through uPnP and again, I don't touch a thing. Windows Home Server Addons also add some really nice abilities like auto DVD ripping.
C) Virtual Machines. I have messed with Xen, and I just didn't care for the creation and handling of Virtual Machines on Xen (not to mention it didn't support one of my networking cards, but that doesn't really matter). Virtual Server 2005 handles things much smoother (although, it too could greatly be improved).
D) Easy upgrading. Adding a new disk and having all of your shares have extra space is nice, again with no configuration. Removing a disk is pretty easy too, just tell WHS which disk to remove and... done.
E) Backup Software. The WHS connector software is the best backup software I have used. I'm not saying there isn't better, I am just saying I haven't found it.
While all of these things are done easily under FreeBSD and Linux (or other operating systems for that matter). They are all pretty easy to do under WHS.
1) The one thing I found that was not so easy to get setup is using my server as a Mercurial (hg) source code repository. Diagnosing my problems were particularly difficult because it appeared to work when I acted as the intermediary over SSH.
2) Also for my Linux machines, I use rsync to back up to my WHS as well. I am also planning on use rsync to back up my WHS to another server, once it gets set up. But getting rsync set up was no walk in the park either (but much easier than Mercurial)
Both of these would have been easier to set up under a *nix environment. However, now that they are set up, I will not have to mess with them for quite some time.
For the record copssh > FreeSSHd.
brshoemak - Friday, December 4, 2009 - link
I am a fan of WHS also - but to be fair there is no way you can honestly list 'Security' in the first bullet point and 'uPnP' directly after it. There are multiple security vulnerabilities posted about uPnP and too many chances for external sources to compromise your network if uPnP is open and closing ports in your firewall without your knowledge. Your WHS server may be safe but what about the other PC's on your network. I love WHS, but I will take a proper (and controlled) static firewall any day.jigglywiggly - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Also before people say FAKERAID, well yes it is fakeread, but at least I can manage it from the BIOS, and transferring it to a different motherboard (ich9-10) based, it will function as RAID perfectly, no need to configure the OS.dagamer34 - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
It's called a HOME server for a reason. You aren't SUPPOSED to know that info. If you want to setup a Linux box or an actual Windows Server 2003/2008 box, be my guest, but simplicity usually trumps all. And we have to remember that your needs are different from everyone else's needs (and lets remind people that 99% of people aren't like the people on AnandTech, but they still have 97-99% of the money).pcfxer - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
FreeNAS has a web GUI and it is tailored for exactly this job. Oh and it supports ZFS, Microsoft will NEVER support ZFS...EVER.jigglywiggly - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Simplicity does not trump all, you are sacrificing a lot of features. Let's not forget that the BSDS, Linux, are free.Still, you have a point on simplicity, but then you might as well just use Windows Vista home, or XP home, and right click a folder and hit "share".