Media Server Build

[adk highlander]

Ok it looks like I have all my parts to start my build. I want to thank krzywica for all his help on my hardware selections (even though I changed a couple last minute)

I have been needing extra storage for my music for a while but wanted to add a way to store all my movies if I was going to take the plunge. I kicked around the idea of a little Windows Home Server device with not video card that was a NAS on steroids but I would still have to rip my movies on a separate machine and it did not have the storage size or redundancy I was looking for.

So after seeing krzywica and warps servers (not even going to mention that behemoth that AcudefTechguy calls a NAS) and thought that was the route I wanted to go. I will still have to get the C-200 popcorn hours to use as a front end but I figure I have a little time to build this and rip all my stuff.

I do IS work during my day job so I had hoped to use some spare parts around the office to keep the price down. That was a failure. After all was said and done the only parts I was able to use were the Core Duo 1.8ghz processor and 4GB of RAM.

Specs:

Intel Core Duo 1.8ghz
4GB RAM
3 - 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green Drives (4th to be added soon)
RocketRaid 2710 PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SATA Controller Card RAID 5
Intel MOBO
iStarUSA 4u rackmount server case
ASUS Blu-ray drive
Windows Server 2003

I am planning on ripping everything to MKV files to be organized by YAMJ.

Any of you that have one of these please let me know anything you did that you should not have or pointers for what formats you use for your ripped media. For my music I still plan to use my Fireball for a front end for now and see where things go in the future.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Good luck and make sure to disable TLER on these green drives or you'll trash each drive once a month
I never done it myself, but since it's looks like you're already purchased the drives you have no choice

links:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1191548
http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/thread/602903.aspx
http://blog.agdunn.net/?p=208

Best place to get WDTLER tool is WD support. Getting it from file sharing services = risk
Some folks reported better success vs changing to 0 (disabling it) changing it to value like 600 (sec)

I also seen somewhere info about turning the green drives effectively into "Blue", not sure where now.. I'll look later

 

[adk highlander]

Hmm figures there would be an issue with the drives. I already had one to start with so I grabbed two more. I have been so concerned with other parts I never considered that there could be an issue using this drives in an array.

This is the first RAID 5 setup I have built so I was bound to have some kind of issue. The drives that look like they cannot be used in an array are the black drives not the green drives.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Hmm figures there would be an issue with the drives. I already had one to start with so I grabbed two more. I have been so concerned with other parts I never considered that there could be an issue using this drives in an array.

This is the first RAID 5 setup I have built so I was bound to have some kind of issue. The drives that look like they cannot be used in an array are the black drives not the green drives.

Same applies to green drives even more since they have even tougher energy savings than the black drives and raid controllers don't know how to handle these long outages from disks thus declaring them dead.

My colleague bought a synergy nas and used 4x 1.5 tb wd green drives and trashed 3 of them within less than half year....

Just saying....


http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=141652
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/251076-32-raid-issues-western-digital-hard-disk

 

[adk highlander]

Yup I've found more info about the greens being a bad idea. Does this apply to RAID 1 as well or just RAID 5? I think I may be able to return/exchange two of them. It is kind of annoying because you would want green drives in a home system like this to save some energy and that ends up being the downfall to this application.

Any luck with the conversion of green to blue?

 

[adk highlander]

I've set up RMA's for the two drives that I can return. I did a bit more research and am going with the Samsung F4 drives. Good performance, pricing and reliability for what I have found.

Big thanks to BoredSysAdmin for catching this for me.

 

[krzywica]

Yup I've found more info about the greens being a bad idea. Does this apply to RAID 1 as well or just RAID 5? I think I may be able to return/exchange two of them. It is kind of annoying because you would want green drives in a home system like this to save some energy and that ends up being the downfall to this application.

Any luck with the conversion of green to blue?

The RAID card has built in power savings that you can customize. Nice to see you are getting your build kicked off, I wish I would have asked you the model of the drives as I could have saved you some trouble....you never want to use "green" drives in any multidrive array. There are many reasons for this but the easiest way to explain it is that these types of drives have power saving features that will actually slow or stop the drives when not being accessed. This causes issues as there is no way for the drives to spin up and slow down in any type of order that the RAID controller can predict or control. This causes timeouts and false positives for drive failures as Bored mentioned.

Suggestions for the build would be....build the OS, first thing you do after the OS boots initially is enable remote desktop and go work on the thing from the comfort of your couch or study. Lemme know if you need any help!

 

[adk highlander]

The drives were all my fault. I never mentioned them because I just never thought they would be an issue. Nothing in their spec said anything about this issue.

I've got all the parts installed and the other drives just showed up. I brought the box with me to the office to take advantage of the T1 to do all the Windows updates. Had a bit of fun during the OS install because the version of Server 2003 does not support the processor and gave me the fun blue screen. A simple BIOS adjustment got me back on my way.

I will take some pics of the box with everything installed. Now to unpack the drives and get ready to build the array.

 

[its phillip]

I definitely need to build a server or something. I've got like 13TB worth of drives, and only 2x2TB are mirrored in a little nas box

 

[adk highlander]

I definitely need to build a server or something. I've got like 13TB worth of drives, and only 2x2TB are mirrored in a little nas box

Wow and 2TB more on the way. What is the new drive going in?

 

[its phillip]

I'll probably just buy another dock since I'm too lazy to swap it with one of the internal drives One of these days I'll get around to building a media server.

 

[jinjuku]

Good luck and make sure to disable TLER on these green drives or you'll trash each drive once a month
I never done it myself, but since it's looks like you're already purchased the drives you have no choice

links:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1191548
http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/thread/602903.aspx
http://blog.agdunn.net/?p=208

Best place to get WDTLER tool is WD support. Getting it from file sharing services = risk
Some folks reported better success vs changing to 0 (disabling it) changing it to value like 600 (sec)

I also seen somewhere info about turning the green drives effectively into "Blue", not sure where now.. I'll look later

WD permanently disabled TLER options on everything excepting their RE series. It is BS.

The waters are extremely murky on whether or not you can do this on any non R class products from any of the vendors (Seagate, WD, Samsung, etc...).

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

WD permanently disabled TLER options on everything excepting their RE series. It is BS.

The waters are extremely murky on whether or not you can do this on any non R class products from any of the vendors (Seagate, WD, Samsung, etc...).

What's the source for the info? Thou I'm not surprised.

 

[adk highlander]

I have the server built, OS installed, RAID Array created and formatted. With the 4 2TB drives in RAID 5 I have 5.7TB of free space.

I have an itchy trigger finger today so I may order my PCH C-200 today as well.

All and all the build went well. The only issues I had were a not fully seated RAM chip causing it not to boot initially and the processor issue I mentioned earlier.

Oh this thing is freaking LOUD! I am ordering two new fans to go on the Mobo for exhaust in the back. Any one know a small device I can use to control the 3 80mm fans that are in the center of the case? I've seen some that go in a bay but I just want a temp sensor that will control speed.

I'm going to start installing software an YAMJ later today. I forgot to bring in a disc to rip. I'm still a little on the fence about ISO vs. MKV. Everything I've read says that if I do the MKV correct it will be a smaller file but not loose any quality. I don't want any BS just the movie.

I did not take pics during the build but here is the finished product:

Front:

Inside top 1:

Inside top 2:

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

Looks really nice!

My NAS is a lot more simple though - no RAID or anything like that.

I'm a very basic simple person.

I use ISO files, but only just the main movie titles - not the entire disc.

I use PDVD10 Ultra software for movie playback to get TrueHD/DTS-HD MA.

Since it's loud, I guess it's going in the closet or some other room?

 

[BMXTRIX]

Let us know how it all goes. I was hoping to already have a WHS machine built up with about 4 or so TB to start ripping BDs. I intend to connect the WHS machine to a Dune HD 3.0 media server for a 12 foot interface, but will have to wait to see what my budget can afford me on this as it hasn't been as good of a year as prior years for me.

I'm really anxious to get a full BD interface solution online in my home.

 

[adk highlander]

AccuDefTechGuy: So that monster NAS is not running any kind of RAID redundancy? How are you doing back ups? How are they configured (as separate drives)? From the pics it looks like you have at least one RAID card.

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

AccuDefTechGuy: So that monster NAS is not running any kind of RAID redundancy? How are you doing back ups? How are they configured (as separate drives)? From the pics it looks like you have at least one RAID card.

I have 2 RAID cards, but nothing is configured for RAID.

I'm just using those RAID cards for the SATA connections.

Each of the twelve 2TB HDD is a separate drive.

If it's a movie I really like, then I will manually copy to 2 HDDs. If the movie is a masterpiece, I will copy to 3 HDDs. If it's just good, I will keep the one copy.

If it sucks, I will delete it forever.

I don't want to have 2 copies of every single movie since most movies are not that great.

 

[krzywica]

Let us know how it all goes. I was hoping to already have a WHS machine built up with about 4 or so TB to start ripping BDs. I intend to connect the WHS machine to a Dune HD 3.0 media server for a 12 foot interface, but will have to wait to see what my budget can afford me on this as it hasn't been as good of a year as prior years for me.

I'm really anxious to get a full BD interface solution online in my home.

I checked out the Dune stuff as well and while Zappiti is a nice easy to use tool it doesn't have the community development or tweakability of YAMJ. The Popcorn Hour 200 series has come a LONG way since its inception and 99% of the bugs are fixed. If you want to save some money check out the C-200's and YAMJ, I know your a Crestron programmer so I'm sure you won't have issues with the configuration aspect. It really is hard to explain how good looking and easy to use this setup is unless you see it in person.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

WD permanently disabled TLER options on everything excepting their RE series. It is BS.

Hmmm, Apparently jinjuku is right - Looks like WD did disable this about a year ago. So no more tler enabling on the new drives. The extra $150 for the tler seems like pretty hefty price to pay

I wonder how long till hardware raid controllers will support tler-less drives ?