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File server question...

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  • T theoldfool

    I might add that one might want to be aware of SMR (slower write times) versus CMR drives when it comes to NAS or server drives, if you are going to be writing large amounts of data. Some vendors are using SMR which is slower. I use the plus drives from one of the manufacturers, supposed to be CMR. I think most, if not all, drives 6TB+ are CMR. There was much ado about this on truenas, it seems the zfs file system does not get along well with SMR drives. Don't know what file system Synology uses, never looked. We have a large one at a clients site, been running for 4 or 5 years without problems. I get an email from it every month, telling me it is happy.

    >64 Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.

    S Offline
    S Offline
    Storm blade
    wrote on last edited by
    #25

    Synology also does not like SMR drives, slows down writing a lot. It doesn't help that some vendors were selling SMR drives as 'For use in NAS'. I found all this out when trying to repopulate a donated Synology NAS with drives from my spares, and finding most of them were SMR.

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    • F Franc Morales

      Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.

      R Offline
      R Offline
      Ron Anders
      wrote on last edited by
      #26

      Yes. we have a windows 7 desktop that sit there at a static lan ip and is the central store for many things.

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      • F Franc Morales

        Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.

        R Offline
        R Offline
        Ron Anders
        wrote on last edited by
        #27

        Yes. we have a windows 7 desktop that sit there at a static lan ip and is the central store for many things. Including hosing a Home Automation stack that bridges some old x10 devices I have into the "alexa" pool of IOT devices scattered about.

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        • R Ron Anders

          Yes. we have a windows 7 desktop that sit there at a static lan ip and is the central store for many things. Including hosing a Home Automation stack that bridges some old x10 devices I have into the "alexa" pool of IOT devices scattered about.

          J Offline
          J Offline
          jeron1
          wrote on last edited by
          #28

          Ron Anders wrote:

          Including hosing a Home Automation stack that bridges...

          Sorry to hear. :)

          "the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment "Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst "I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle

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          • L Lost User

            trønderen wrote:

            Not getting it. Why should a storage capacity of +10 TB not work over USB?

            Dunno. Explain me why Heroes of the Storm lags when I run it from there? :) Router and external spinning HD are from the same era as USB2.

            Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.

            T Offline
            T Offline
            trønderen
            wrote on last edited by
            #29

            If everything is USB2 and not USB3, and you want to access 4K 60Hz video, you may be pushing USB2 limitations. You can't assume that those limitations apply to USB3 as well. They do not. When I got my first USB2 disk, twenty years ago, the disk was the bottleneck, not USB. But it wasn't really: In video editing, I was still on SD, 540*720 resolution, 25 fps, for which USB2 has plenty of capacity. I am not familiar with Heroes of the Storm, and have no idea what sort of data is transported from the disk, or to and from other units. So I can't tell why it lags. The bottleneck isn't necessarily the capacity of the USB line as such, it could be the software driving the interface. Or higher layers. You may use Task Manager or Resource Monitor to watch the disk load. At the "cable level", USB2 should be able to provide a little over 50 Mbytes/sec. If the traffic is significantly below this, it is not the fault of the physical USB2, but rather those processes using the USB interface.

            L 1 Reply Last reply
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            • OriginalGriffO OriginalGriff

              Seagate Blackarmor 4 bay, 16TB giving a storage space of 11.9TB in RAID 5 (you always lose some space with raid as it stores additional info for recovery when a HDD goes dead). I've had this one for 7 or 8 years and it's been no trouble at all (the HDD failure was on the previous 4TB NAS which was too full and too slow). Read speeds average around 85MByte/sec; Write is understandably slower at around 35MByte/sec. Sorry, I can't remember how much I paid!

              "I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

              F Offline
              F Offline
              Franc Morales
              wrote on last edited by
              #30

              You rock

              T 1 Reply Last reply
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              • S Slow Eddie

                I had a file server but it sits there unused, now. I too have a NAS. Like Griff's, it is a 4 bay 16TB Raid5 unit. It is a Raid+ with 4 4TB SSD drives. The usable is about the same as his. I too have had it for several years and don't remember the price. The NAS came without drives, and I bought the aforementioned Western Digital SSD drives. I am extremely pleased with it, and think you would be better going that route.

                ed

                F Offline
                F Offline
                Franc Morales
                wrote on last edited by
                #31

                Much appreciated

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                • T trønderen

                  If everything is USB2 and not USB3, and you want to access 4K 60Hz video, you may be pushing USB2 limitations. You can't assume that those limitations apply to USB3 as well. They do not. When I got my first USB2 disk, twenty years ago, the disk was the bottleneck, not USB. But it wasn't really: In video editing, I was still on SD, 540*720 resolution, 25 fps, for which USB2 has plenty of capacity. I am not familiar with Heroes of the Storm, and have no idea what sort of data is transported from the disk, or to and from other units. So I can't tell why it lags. The bottleneck isn't necessarily the capacity of the USB line as such, it could be the software driving the interface. Or higher layers. You may use Task Manager or Resource Monitor to watch the disk load. At the "cable level", USB2 should be able to provide a little over 50 Mbytes/sec. If the traffic is significantly below this, it is not the fault of the physical USB2, but rather those processes using the USB interface.

                  L Offline
                  L Offline
                  Lost User
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #32

                  trønderen wrote:

                  If everything is USB2 and not USB3

                  Most stuff here is.

                  trønderen wrote:

                  I am not familiar with Heroes of the Storm

                  A modern game, like Warcraft in terms of size.

                  trønderen wrote:

                  it is not the fault of the physical USB2, but rather those processes using the USB interface.

                  Did I mention it not a real PC but a router?

                  Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.

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                  • C Clumpco

                    I have a Windows 2012R2 headless server here with 4 x 4TB drives (SATA) and 4 x 3TB drives (SAS - cheap as chips on e-bay). Drives are on a Dell PERC H700 (needs a small physical mod to work in non-Dell machines) with battery backup. This server is fast and (apparently) highly reliable, the only failure I have had was one of the WD Red SATA drives that crapped out after about 1 year - the MegaRaid software sent me an alert and I did a cold-swap and it rebuilt nicely. The s/h SAS drives seem to be bullet-proof (they should be, they are enterprise quality IBM/Seagate). This is my first line of defense: All our important files are stored directly to the server plus all our media files (having a fast server is great when you are copying 50GB at a time). My workstations do a Macrium GFS backup to this server. There is also a NextCloud VM which shares folders and workspace with other (remote) family members. Additional to this server I have 2x4TB NAS (Netgear) which does a 'pull' backup of data from 3 workstations (documents, mail folder etc.) plus backups of the really important folders on the Windows 2012 server including 350GB of photos). This data is mirrored to Amazon Cloud Drive via a Netgear plug-in. The Windows server also host a few VMs, mainly old Windows builds and temporary Linux projects. The NAS is also used for backups of various Linux and Android devices via NFS shares. Overkill? Maybe, maybe not - but life would be a lot more complicated without the server.

                    So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

                    F Offline
                    F Offline
                    Franc Morales
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #33

                    Thanks

                    1 Reply Last reply
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                    • D Dan Neely

                      I have a Synology 1621 with 4x6TB drives in RAID5ish configuration as a backup/etc storage host. In most ways it's serious overkill for my needs, but is about the minimum spec level that supports a PCIe slot that I can stuff a 10GB network card into in a year or so when I build my new PC and upgrade my lan.

                      Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius

                      F Offline
                      F Offline
                      Franc Morales
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #34

                      Nice, thanks

                      1 Reply Last reply
                      0
                      • T theoldfool

                        I might add that one might want to be aware of SMR (slower write times) versus CMR drives when it comes to NAS or server drives, if you are going to be writing large amounts of data. Some vendors are using SMR which is slower. I use the plus drives from one of the manufacturers, supposed to be CMR. I think most, if not all, drives 6TB+ are CMR. There was much ado about this on truenas, it seems the zfs file system does not get along well with SMR drives. Don't know what file system Synology uses, never looked. We have a large one at a clients site, been running for 4 or 5 years without problems. I get an email from it every month, telling me it is happy.

                        >64 Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.

                        F Offline
                        F Offline
                        Franc Morales
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #35

                        Appreciated

                        1 Reply Last reply
                        0
                        • C Chris Copeland

                          Throwing a different hat into the ring, I have a custom built mini-ITX with 2x 8TB hard-drives installed. It runs on Ubuntu and uses mergerfs to create a custom mount point which Ubuntu reads as one drive. Planning on buying 2 more at some point, creating a second merged mount and use rsync to keep everything backed up! Love the little thing, running Docker containers and has a GTX 1050 Ti for transcoding my media files :)

                          [ MQ | Tor.NET | Mimick ]

                          F Offline
                          F Offline
                          Franc Morales
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #36

                          interesting, thanks

                          1 Reply Last reply
                          0
                          • S Storm blade

                            Synology also does not like SMR drives, slows down writing a lot. It doesn't help that some vendors were selling SMR drives as 'For use in NAS'. I found all this out when trying to repopulate a donated Synology NAS with drives from my spares, and finding most of them were SMR.

                            D Offline
                            D Offline
                            Dan Neely
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #37

                            SMR never should have been marketed to consumers at all. For datacenter scale write once archival storage it's limitations don't matter. Anywhere else they can be crippling at times.

                            Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius

                            1 Reply Last reply
                            0
                            • F Franc Morales

                              Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.

                              N Offline
                              N Offline
                              NG_AU
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #38

                              Yes

                              1 Reply Last reply
                              0
                              • F Franc Morales

                                Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.

                                C Offline
                                C Offline
                                chrisb44
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #39

                                Yes. I have an old Windows 10 box loaded with several drives and using "storage spaces" to provide data duplication. I use it as a file server and backup device for several laptops and the wife's desktop. One advantage storage spaces has over RAID is that the drives don't have to be the same size. I think that Synology have a similar system on their latest 4 drive NAS's.

                                F P 2 Replies Last reply
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                                • C chrisb44

                                  Yes. I have an old Windows 10 box loaded with several drives and using "storage spaces" to provide data duplication. I use it as a file server and backup device for several laptops and the wife's desktop. One advantage storage spaces has over RAID is that the drives don't have to be the same size. I think that Synology have a similar system on their latest 4 drive NAS's.

                                  F Offline
                                  F Offline
                                  Franc Morales
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #40

                                  thanks

                                  1 Reply Last reply
                                  0
                                  • F Franc Morales

                                    Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.

                                    M Offline
                                    M Offline
                                    Member 9167057
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #41

                                    My router got 2 USB3 ports and an SMB server so setting up a file server wasn't an expensive ordeal. I am pretty sure something more dedicated would yield more performance, but that doesn't matter for my use case. That use case being first and foremost backups. Regular, background backup jobs. My second use case is using this heap of backup as a UPnP server (which the router also provides) so my media collection is readily available while the main PC is not running. But backups alone are IMHO worth it.

                                    F 1 Reply Last reply
                                    0
                                    • F Franc Morales

                                      Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.

                                      W Offline
                                      W Offline
                                      Wizard of Sleeves
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #42

                                      Several, all Linux based.

                                      Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.

                                      1 Reply Last reply
                                      0
                                      • M Member 9167057

                                        My router got 2 USB3 ports and an SMB server so setting up a file server wasn't an expensive ordeal. I am pretty sure something more dedicated would yield more performance, but that doesn't matter for my use case. That use case being first and foremost backups. Regular, background backup jobs. My second use case is using this heap of backup as a UPnP server (which the router also provides) so my media collection is readily available while the main PC is not running. But backups alone are IMHO worth it.

                                        F Offline
                                        F Offline
                                        Franc Morales
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #43

                                        Appreciated.

                                        1 Reply Last reply
                                        0
                                        • C chrisb44

                                          Yes. I have an old Windows 10 box loaded with several drives and using "storage spaces" to provide data duplication. I use it as a file server and backup device for several laptops and the wife's desktop. One advantage storage spaces has over RAID is that the drives don't have to be the same size. I think that Synology have a similar system on their latest 4 drive NAS's.

                                          P Offline
                                          P Offline
                                          PSU Steve
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #44

                                          Me too - Win10 box with Storage Spaces. Around 3TB total with main folders for "official files" (an "office drive"), music, videos, software, sw dev projects. Been working just fine for years. The server gets backed up to an external drive daily. I do periodic ZIPs of the folders and copy them to DropBox for an offsite backup but I will probably look for a more automated solution soon.

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