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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
87 Comments
View All Comments
nilepez - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Bull. Give linux 100 normal PC users. Give another 100 WHS. One thing is certain: more will be successful with WHS than *nix.And to be clear, normal users don't work in IT (though I know plenty of people under that broad umbrella that couldn't set up either).
mcnabney - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
The backup features for Windows clients makes Home Server a no-brainer. I get full backup capability for seven Windows machines of various flavors without duplicating information since the same data is only stored once instead of for each backed-up system. Plus with the easy and secure remote access, loads of easy to use apps, automated backup, easy streaming, and selective data duplication - the choice is obvious. WHS is by far Microsoft's best work for a targeted need.piroroadkill - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Vista and XP don't support software raid of the box, do they?jdjbuffalo - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Yes they do support software RAID.HanSolo71 - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Smaller then my rig by a long shot, for my NAS i use a IBM Xseries 225, and its over 26" long, although i do have only 3 drives in it that soon will be 7, with 6 being 1.5TB drives in RAID 5mcnabney - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Hah!My Home Server laughs at your puny rig.
An old Armour+ case - free
Low power AthlonX2 chip on an microATX MB ~$100
1GB of DDR2 left sitting around - free
extra SATA controller ~$30
550W Corsair PS ~ $60
Connectors/cables from Monoprice ~ $20
Extra fans and cages ~ $35
TWELVE 1.5TB seagate drive ~ $83 each (thanks Dell!) = $990
WHS OEM license ~ $85
So $1320 provided 18TB of storage
Why yes, I do stream media to all seven PCs in my home. At the same time without a hitch. And my laptops over the Internet. And store tens of thousands of pictures. And all of my movies. Plus all of the home movies. For my entire extended family. Oh, and I store offsite bare drives for backup purposes so I only use folder duplication for data that has not been copied offsite.
RAID =/ backup or security and I don't care about 'up-time'
The box can already saturate gigabit ethernet
Never had a drive fail in the past 18 months... yet.
Server has only shut down to install updates - never crashed
And it only sucks ~50 watts out of the wall when actually doing something
Inglix - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
50w? Really? I mean the all the drives spun up would take 100w with a 100% efficient power supply. I know that's not a typical situation but at idle WHS isn't the best at leaving them alone. Even with just one spun up disk that would be difficult with a 550w psu...I do congratulate you on keeping offsite backups and not thinking WHS duplication is good enough though!
3DoubleD - Friday, December 4, 2009 - link
12 * 1.5 TB = 18 TB... you can't have 18 TB of storage if you hope to backup any data. I'm sorry, but you have far less storage than you admit/realize. If you duplicate every file you only have 9 TB of storage. You mentioned you don't duplicate everything, but you will always have far less than 18 TB storage unless you backup none of your data.Unraid is the ultimate NAS storage. If you are tech savvy enough to be reading this article, you can handle Unraid. It is a striped down version of Slackware with added functionality for data parity and easy networking. You have one parity drive that is the size of your largest disk in your array. You can have up to 16 disks in you array. So in the case of "Mr. Home Server laughs at your puny rig" he would have 1 1.5TB parity drive and 11 1.5TB data drives for a total storage space of 16.5TB, all completely parity protected. If a drive fails, go buy a new 1.5TB hdd, add it to the array, and the disk is rebuilt from parity.
Data can be allocated to the drive by user shares. You can assign shares such as "Movies", "Pictures", "Documents", "Backups", ect. Each share can be added to Windows as a network drive. You can assign specific rules for data allocation in each share to the drives in your array (eg. keep data on one drive, fill one drive at a time, keep the same amount of free space on each drive in the array,ect.). All setup is done via browser user interface (it's really easy).
As with all parity protection systems, this doesn't protect against user error (data deletion). It also doesn't allow for multiple drive failures, but it allows you to recover the data from the remaining drives as they are in a linux friendly file format. However, it offers a superior way to maintain a NAS that parity protects your data in addition to being easily expandable (need more space? Just add a drive to the array). If you want to include bigger drives, you just replace the parity drive with a bigger drive, rebuilt the parity, and then add the old parity drive to the array. From then on you can incorporate the size of the new parity drive into your array. It is the poor man's RAID server. I've had one for nearly a year and I can't imagine my network without it.
WHS is great if you have no idea what you are doing, but much better options exist.
kkwst2 - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
Holy Crap, just what wanted to hear, one more troll who has clearly never spent any time with WHS go on about how you can do so much more with a NAS unit.The author of the article clearly has used NAS extensively. I've used NAS extensively. Beyond being easier to maintain, WHS allows you to do things you simply cannot do with NAS. I've no need to regurgitate it here, either read up on it or go away.
If you think 1 out of 12 drives for a parity drive gives you data protection then you are a fool. With that many drives, the likelihood of 2 drive failures is certainly not insignificant.
To recap: 1) I know what I'm doing, and WHS is still the best option for my home. 2) I would stop giving out advice, when your concept of data security is very flawed. 3) Read more, rant less.
3DoubleD - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 - link
Dude, if two of your drives failed simultaneously you would lose data too. The same is true with a RAID, except you lose all of your data. WHS and Unraid both can sustain multiple drive failures and only lose some data. The chances of a two drive failure is low (ridiculously tiny). If you have multiple drives failing it's probably a power supply failure and you are screwed anyway. Or maybe it's because you are not so smart and bought 12 of the same drive at the same time (all from the same production line). I never buy two drives at the same time. I buy them as I need it which saves me money and lowers my risk for multiple drive failures. Finally, if you have super important data, you should have another backup, just in case. The bottom line - Unraid gives you the same data security for way less investment and storage space. I hope you enjoyed my "rant" and good luck with wasting almost half your storage space.