HTPC Build Part 1: The Stuff

[AcuDefTechGuy]

Something like this:
Dell PowerEdge PERC 5i SAS 256MB RAID Controller with Cables Battery MX961 Z | eBay ?

Something like that. I bought from Amazon for about $30 each a few years ago.

 

[aberkowitz]

15 HDDs (2TB each HDD) + 1 SSD = 16 total hard drives

BD ripping about 1 hr per disc.

That's my experience too- generally 50-60 minutes for a title track with lossless audio and subtitles. DVDs take significantly less time, 12-18 minutes. TV Series on BD is my least favorite to rip- thankfully I have very few (Band of Brothers and 1 season of Mad Men), but I will be borrowing my dad's full series of the Sopranos on BD... 86 episodes could take WEEKS.

 

[itschris]

15 HDDs (2TB each HDD) + 1 SSD = 16 total hard drives

Onboard MB sata + Raid cards. Each Raid card has 4 sata ports. I bought them on Amazon. I think around $30 each card.

Raid 0.

Computer sees 16 drives.

BD ripping about 1 hr per disc.

Is the benefit of RAID 0 purely speed related? So with seein 16 drives instead one big logical drive, do you have to map multiple media directories...like have the media manager point to 15 different movie folders?

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

Is the benefit of RAID 0 purely speed related? So with seein 16 drives instead one big logical drive, do you have to map multiple media directories...like have the media manager point to 15 different movie folders?

It's just simpler for me. I don't feel the need to back up every original BD I buy. One digital copy in the NAS and the original BD is the "backup".

When I download BD 1080p/720p torrent (movies that I don't consider must-haves), the size is usually under 4GB each and I do back those up manually.

Bottom line, it doesn't take a lot of time to manually back up my movies. So I don't need RAID.

As far as XBMC, there is a movie folder for each HDD. 15 HDD = 15 movie folders. But if each HDD is like 2TB or 4TB, you probably won't be filling too many HDDs.

I also make my NAS and HTPC IP addresses static, instead of dynamic. Had to learn the hard way.

 

[itschris]

I guess then I'm not sure what the advantage is of having a RAID like your setup over just having a pile of drives just setup individually.

(Sent you a PM as well)

 

[jinjuku]

RAID:

0- Pure striping. Data is load balanced (striped) across the drives to increase speed an reduce latency. If one drive fails the entire RAID is fubar

1- Mirror. Equal number of drives. All drives are duplicate. You can have half the stack go out and you still have data

5- Parity array. X number of drives minus one for parity. So 5 3TB drives would be 15TB -1 3TB drive (of storage) for ~12TB of storage. One drive goes out you are fine. Two go out and you are toast.

Any RAID level above this is a play on 0/1/5

Example RAID 10 (it's RAID 1 plus RAID 0). That is two sets of mirrored drives then they are striped. RAID 6 is RAID 5 plus an additional Parity drive (so two in the raid can fail). Etc....


What AcuDefTechGuy is doing is JBOD (just a bunch of disks). You have stuff splattered across all of them and if you lose a drive you only lose what was on it. If we are talking about you having the physical DVD or BR you just replace the failed disk and re-rip.

The traditional value of a RAID is in the corporate sector: Speed, Redundancy, uptime since a good RAID controller can have the failed disk hotswapped and the controller can rebuild data and the server isn't downed.

 

[itschris]

I know what the RAID levels are, but don't see the benefit beyond a speed advantage. For feeding an HTPC, is it really critical? I thought the advantage was that you had multiple drives that could be read as one big logical drive and that if one failed, you could swap it out and the RAID would rebuild it all. Why not have say... 3 separate data hard drives and a routine for backing up your critical stuff...assuming you consider your actual CDs and BDs as a backup? What is the true benefit and purpose then? Really... Why not just have a case full of drives...not setup with RAID?

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

I know what the RAID levels are, but don't see the benefit beyond a speed advantage. For feeding an HTPC, is it really critical? I thought the advantage was that you had multiple drives that could be read as one big logical drive and that if one failed, you could swap it out and the RAID would rebuild it all. Why not have say... 3 separate data hard drives and a routine for backing up your critical stuff...assuming you consider your actual CDs and BDs as a backup? What is the true benefit and purpose then? Really... Why not just have a case full of drives...not setup with RAID?

With Data split out across 15 drives it's a matter of simple math - you have a higher chance of failure that one of 15 will fair. Raid will ensure SOME protection - at least of failure of one drive.
If I were building nas today I would without a doubt do freenas with zfs array z1 - aka roughly an equivalent of Raid 5. What I actually did is raid 50 (two raid z1 arrays and stripped between these) but I figure I will redo it quote soon to a simple z1 array of 6 drives...


There is also Raid 6 which is not exactly a combination of 0/1/5, but a tweaked version of 5 - same Idea but with double the parity bits. There are some advantages like easier to manage space, but there are disadvantages as well. As mentioned raid 0, while fastest - it's also most dangerous - and raid 5 seems like best of both words suffers from very slow writes - in fact raid 5 of 3 disks will have (much) slower writes than a single drive

 

[Sheep]

3 pages of jibber jabber and no pics?
I PITY THE FOOL WHO DON'T POST PICS!

SheepStar

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Just for you Sheep:

 

[panteragstk]

I've looked at FreeNAS and it looks nice, but I'm leaning toward UnRAID. Has the ability for dual drive parity, but if more than two drives die you only lose the data on the drives that are over the parity count (3 drive failures with dual parity, you lose one drive worth of data instead of everything). It isn't built for speed, but it does have plugins for xbmc, plex, couchpotato, headphones, sickbeard, sanzb, bittorrent, etc. Nice software, but it isn't free like FreeNAS.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

FreeNAS has ZFS and supports upto z3 - 3 drives parity - Volumes - Freenas
It also has plugins for same things (in jailed environment)
and it's free

 

[itschris]

With Data split out across 15 drives it's a matter of simple math - you have a higher chance of failure that one of 15 will fair. Raid will ensure SOME protection - at least of failure of one drive.
If I were building nas today I would without a doubt do freenas with zfs array z1 - aka roughly an equivalent of Raid 5. What I actually did is raid 50 (two raid z1 arrays and stripped between these) but I figure I will redo it quote soon to a simple z1 array of 6 drives...


There is also Raid 6 which is not exactly a combination of 0/1/5, but a tweaked version of 5 - same Idea but with double the parity bits. There are some advantages like easier to manage space, but there are disadvantages as well. As mentioned raid 0, while fastest - it's also most dangerous - and raid 5 seems like best of both words suffers from very slow writes - in fact raid 5 of 3 disks will have (much) slower writes than a single drive

Okay, so in a setup of non-critical data like movies... is there really a point? I mean let's say I have 6 drives in machine all full of BD Rips and I have XMBC just reading 6 different movie folders. If one drive go down, I just lose the movies on that drive. Not a huge deal in my world I guess. So you're saying that if I had a RAID 5, those moves on the failed drive would still be available because i'd have a 7th drive for parity... correct?

For me... I'm kinda not see the value and I really don't know what the advantage is of Accu's Raid 0 setup. I'm really trying to understand what the benefit is.

 

[jinjuku]

Okay, so in a setup of non-critical data like movies... is there really a point? I mean let's say I have 6 drives in machine all full of BD Rips and I have XMBC just reading 6 different movie folders. If one drive go down, I just lose the movies on that drive. Not a huge deal in my world I guess. So you're saying that if I had a RAID 5, those moves on the failed drive would still be available because i'd have a 7th drive for parity... correct?

For me... I'm kinda not see the value and I really don't know what the advantage is of Accu's Raid 0 setup. I'm really trying to understand what the benefit is.

Honestly just do JBOD and be done with it.

 

[jinjuku]

I know what the RAID levels are, but don't see the benefit beyond a speed advantage.

I posted the benefit for each RAID level. It's even in English

What you need to decide is if the benefit is for you. I run a 12 core/48GB RAM server as a Hypervisor. So I roll with Raid 6. I have 9 drives in the array with two for parity. For a total of 7 TB.

 

[itschris]

I posted the benefit for each RAID level. It's even in English

What you need to decide is if the benefit is for you. I run a 12 core/48GB RAM server as a Hypervisor. So I roll with Raid 6. I have 9 drives in the array with two for parity. For a total of 7 TB.

I get what it does and the benefit of what it does for data, but not for a particular setup... I guess that what I'm saying.

So RAID 5 - "5- Parity array. X number of drives minus one for parity. So 5 3TB drives would be 15TB -1 3TB drive (of storage) for ~12TB of storage. One drive goes out you are fine. Two go out and you are toast."

For a home setup, say an HTPC with movies and music, I'm seeing that the only benefit is that if one drive fails, all my movies will still be available as opposed to having the movies on the failed drive gone with it. If I'm willing to just re-rip my movies or if I have true backups, what does this do for me? And in this scenario... I really don't see what RAID 0 does for making things better. In fact, I think it's ton riskier.

If you have mulitple hd's, I don't know... say 6 - 3TB drives... do you have to have a RAID? I can see in a true server setting where you have multiple people needing to pull files and what not, where RAID 5 or 6 or 10 makes perfect sense.. you have to have the data available to a number of people at any given time.

But in my case, if the worse things that happens is I'll lose just the movies on that drive... I don't know... I don't see the value.

Perhaps I'm still missing the point and don't understand it fully. I'll go read some more on it.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Okay, so in a setup of non-critical data like movies... is there really a point? I mean let's say I have 6 drives in machine all full of BD Rips and I have XMBC just reading 6 different movie folders. If one drive go down, I just lose the movies on that drive. Not a huge deal in my world I guess. So you're saying that if I had a RAID 5, those moves on the failed drive would still be available because i'd have a 7th drive for parity... correct?

For me... I'm kinda not see the value and I really don't know what the advantage is of Accu's Raid 0 setup. I'm really trying to understand what the benefit is.

It would be annoying to re-rip the movies you lost .. I guess, but I guess if you don't care and don't mind extra management on xbmc then go jbod as Jin says

Raid 0 has a point then data on is very temporary - like a swap memory if needed and for records, ACD's "nas" is a jbod not raid 0

Edit: Just saw you intend to have a backup of ripped movies... On what hardware? LTO tapes?

 

[jinjuku]

I get what it does and the benefit of what it does for data, but not for a particular setup... I guess that what I'm saying.

For a home setup, say an HTPC with movies and music, I'm seeing that the only benefit is that if one drive fails, all my movies will still be available as opposed to having the movies on the failed drive gone with it. If I'm willing to just re-rip my movies or if I have true backups, what does this do for me? And in this scenario... I really don't see what RAID 0 does for making things better. In fact, I think it's ton riskier.

If you have mulitple hd's, I don't know... say 6 - 3TB drives... do you have to have a RAID? I can see in a true server setting where you have multiple people needing to pull files and what not, where RAID 5 or 6 or 10 makes perfect sense.. you have to have the data available to a number of people at any given time.

But in my case, if the worse things that happens is I'll lose just the movies on that drive... I don't know... I don't see the value.

Perhaps I'm still missing the point and don't understand it fully. I'll go read some more on it.

I'm not making a value proposition. I just wanted to put out the bare bones assessment of each RAID type and the end user can make the determination of what is best.

Honestly I think you are over thinking this and also I believe you answered your own question.

If you don't mind re-ripping movies that fail on a particular drive of a JBOD then RAID of any sort holds no value for you.

 

[Nemo128]

Man, I'm working on a build right now and I can only imagine the convos that are gonna start once I put up a build thread. =)

 

[itschris]

@jin I get it now... the light bulb went on. I kept looking at this from where I'm at now, not where I will be media data-wise. I'm really nowhere near needing a RAID. I have just over 1tb or so of music... That gets backed up to an external drive that goes in the safe. On a 3TB drive, you should be able to conservatively fit about 150 or so blu-rays assuming a combination of largely un-further-compressed MKVs with all the BS stripped out of the movie (15-20 gigs on average) and some other non-critical stuff compressed down to 2-5 gigs. I'm at 40 blu-rays. I have way to go, though I will be ramping up the buying once this built.

So I now see where you guys are coming from. Assuming at some point I have 3 HD's full of movies, for the cost of an extra HD, if one goes down, it's a non-event other than buying a new replacement drive... which I'd have to do anyway.

i think I was getting confused also with NAS. A NAS is just a sharable data store on your network... which can be a RAID or not. NAS makes sense near term, RAID makes sense a bit further down the road.