File server question...
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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!
You rock
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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
Much appreciated
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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.
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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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
Thanks
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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
Nice, thanks
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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.
Appreciated
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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 :)
interesting, thanks
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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.
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
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Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.
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Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.
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.
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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.
thanks
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Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.
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.
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Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.
Several, all Linux based.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
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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.
Appreciated.
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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.
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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Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.
I had a cheap NAS to store family files, especially photos and videos. But, in the process of getting everybody their own laptops, I neglected to store copies for a while and regularly back it up, the NAS crashed, and we lost about 4 years of photos. So now, I simply keep such things in a backup USB drive and chips. No more NAS for me.
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Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.
I have an old headless system with front hot-swappable drive bays, running Windows 7 and a bunch of file shares. I keep referring to it as my home NAS--which is undoubtedly a misnomer, but that's exactly how it's used. Whether it's "worth it" depends on how you use it. I mostly use it to host files that would otherwise be spread across the Downloads and Documents folders of a bunch of individual machines. I try to avoid that and dump everything onto the system with the file share. It's also my installer archive. New machine needs an app or an ISO of a CD/DVD? With proper organization, that I've worked out over decades, I can find just about anything within 10 seconds just browsing the file system. Windows Search is slower than that.
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Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.
I have my own server in my home-office. Its a great assist in testing development for client-server or web applications...
Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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You rock
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Do any of you have a file server in your home LAN? If so, is it worth it? Opinions, recommendations, etc would be appreciated.
I assume you've gone over the arguments for why you might even need a server. There are many ways to add storage and to share storage over the network that don't involve a dedicated server. I'd like to toss in that having a dedicated server in some sort of RAID configuration that can recover from the catastrophic failure of a single drive does NOT mean you don't need to do backups. You can lose all the data on any kind of server either from some sort of physical catastrophe (fire, flood, earthquake) or from external attack (ransom ware). The only way to recover from those things is to have offline, preferably offsite, backups. I had a WDC MyCloud EX2 for many years. Two 4GB HDDs, mirrored, for 4GB of usable storage. It was adequate for holding bulk data that was not used a lot (videos, etc.), data that I wanted to share on the network independent of any of the computers, and daily online backups of all my computers. It was slow and only had room for two hard drives. But it was inexpensive. I ultimately out-grew that device and recently upgraded to a Synology DS920+ with four 4GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration for 12GB of usable storage. The Synology is much faster and more capable (lots more optional and add-on features). But it was expensive and had a steeper learning curve for taking full advantage of it. You can get a MyCloud for under $400 with disks included. If you want something more capable with slots for more disks, I'd recommend one of the Synology servers. In that case, you're looking at somewhere around $1200 and up. If you feel so inclined and think it's within your abilities, building your own server from an older computer you have lying around is probably the cheapest way to go. You don't need a lot of processing power or memory for a server. But pulling all the components together to make it work is time consuming.
