NAS Disk Volume partitioning advice please

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › NAS Disk Volume partitioning advice please

1 | 2 | 3

441 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509143 19-Aug-2011 18:09

blur: Hi Allen

A couple more questions (if you don't mind!) as this seems to be somewhere where I'd like to end up with my media collection.

Ok, understand you have a stand-alone NAS with total of 12TB, configured with RAID-5 (parity), giving (approx) 9TB usable.

7.5 usable with 5% reserved space

Can you tell me (and this may be an obvious questions by the very name - NETWORK Attached Storage), how you intend to connect to this with your HTPC? Network is the obvious thing - so can you tell me a little more about your network? Switched Gigabit? etc.

Just bought an 8 port Asus Gigabit switch from Alphacity for around $105 incl gst & freight. Replaced my 10/100 switch.

The other thing, is what sort of storage do you have on your HTPC itself? This is the system partition I mean, and is this the drive that you intend to use to record television on, or will this be stored on the NAS also?

My PC is in the lounge beside the TV and the second head on the video card drives the TV using Windows 7 Pro media centre. I have a 1TB WD caviar black SataIII WD1002FAEX as OS drive and 2TB WD Caviar Black 2001FASS which had documents, photos, some media and TV recording. Have put all the docs & media onto the NAS, not sure about TV recording yet, probably leave it on HDD?
In my Cinema room I have a TViX M6500 media player that has a 1.5 TB internal and had a 1.5 TB external USB drive. The media has been moved to the NAS. I have created an NFS share on the NAS for the TVix to access media. The TViX can record DTT TV so I'll leave it's internal drive in it with a copy of my music files on it.
I also have an Oppo BD player, Samsung phone, and network enabled Yamaha receiver which are all DLNA capable. I'll have a play with DLNA but most media playback will be via the TViX.

I've just ordered a 120GB SSD drive for my system partition, and would ideally like a NAS sitting somewhere that can hold my media. At this stage it will just be a 2TB drive sitting IN my HTPC, but I'd like to get it out of there for acoustic and thermal reasons. This drive is a WD Caviar Black, and these tend to be quite hot and noisy.

My WD caviar black FAEX is noisy and has 62 reallocated sectors. It is randomly freezing the PC when all C drive activity stops sometimes for several minutes. The Caviar black FASS has been good.
I'm about to raise an RMA for the FAEX. It'a 11 months old. WD have confirmed that it is failing.

Hope that answers your questions

Regards Allen.

AllenG

441 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509145 19-Aug-2011 18:15

Ragnor: Fair enough, custom builds do take a fair bit of time and tweaking.

Depending on what version they have implemented: Snapshots, deduplication, data verification integrity (that avoids the RAID5 write hole problem) etc.

You can read more about ZFS here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Cool.

I guess I can't migrate from one to the other without starting again?

RAID5 write hole problem?

AllenG

441 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509154 19-Aug-2011 18:29

Ragnor: Fair enough, custom builds do take a fair bit of time and tweaking.

Depending on what version they have implemented: Snapshots, deduplication, data verification integrity (that avoids the RAID5 write hole problem) etc.

You can read more about ZFS here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

I'll have a look.

Quick Google search says 4200pro has ZFS-fuse, Says it is slow and problematic on N4200. Not sure about the Pro.

Currently using Raid5/Ext4

Raid 5 Hole?

AllenG

441 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509177 19-Aug-2011 19:29

blur:
We spent money on going to DTT for the HTPC. The frustrating is that she thinks it's a waste because she claims she can't tell the difference!!!

Hi Blur, I've got a Hauppauge HVR4400 with Sat & DTT connected (also get SBS, Nine, Gem, Go on Sat). Gives me two concurrent tuners/recordings. Works well except media centre has stuttering video on the DTT H.264 tv in media centre. ATI Radeon HD5770 and also tried an Nvidea GT 220 card which is better but not perfect.

I'll sort out my C drive freezing issue first. May be issues with pagefile becoming inaccessable. That may fix the stuttering video. If not, I'll try recording and buffering to the NAS. media centre buffers 5 seconds (adjustable) for network playback I believe.

Allen.

AllenG

441 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509181 19-Aug-2011 19:39

nakedmolerat:
i highly recommend thecus. i have had it for a year now (mine is the original n4200 ).

I have a newb NAS question please.

I copied an entire usb HDD to the usbcopy folder which has a public share. I have created Media, Pictures, Documents, Downloads, & Backup root folders and shared them.

When I move files from the usbcopy folder to another folder (using windows) it looks like it is rewriting the files to the new location rather than just changing the path to the file. Saying around 4 hours to move 700MB @ 47MB/s

Is there any way to quickly move files between shares or is each share treated as a separate volume by windows. Windows is using SMB shares. I can't install NFS at the moment Add/Remove windows features is broken.

Allen.

Ragnor

8222 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#509234 19-Aug-2011 22:03

AllenG:

Raid 5 Hole?

http://www.raid-recovery-guide.com/raid5-write-hole.aspx

http://boink.superatomic.com/2009/04/25/the-raid-5-write-hole/

nakedmolerat

4629 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#509274 20-Aug-2011 07:51

AllenG:
nakedmolerat:
i highly recommend thecus. i have had it for a year now (mine is the original n4200 ).

I have a newb NAS question please.

I copied an entire usb HDD to the usbcopy folder which has a public share. I have created Media, Pictures, Documents, Downloads, & Backup root folders and shared them.

When I move files from the usbcopy folder to another folder (using windows) it looks like it is rewriting the files to the new location rather than just changing the path to the file. Saying around 4 hours to move 700MB @ 47MB/s

Is there any way to quickly move files between shares or is each share treated as a separate volume by windows. Windows is using SMB shares. I can't install NFS at the moment Add/Remove windows features is broken.

Allen.

whenever you move files between the 'main' folders, it has to go through your computer. ie File A on /usb/ folder -> desktop -> rewrite File A /music/ folder. you can skip it from going via your dekstop by using PHPFILEMGR module. install the module, enable it, and use it to move/copy files between the folders. http://www.futterknecht.at/

Sharesies

Trade NZ and US shares and funds with Sharesies (affiliate link).

AllenG

441 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509280 20-Aug-2011 08:37

nakedmolerat: you can skip it from going via your dekstop by using PHPFILEMGR module. install the module, enable it, and use it to move/copy files between the folders. http://www.futterknecht.at/

Cheers for that. Does this module still have to "copy" the file or does it just change the FAT entry?

Allen.

AllenG

441 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509328 20-Aug-2011 13:07

nakedmolerat:
i highly recommend thecus. i have had it for a year now (mine is the original n4200 ).

Some more NAS newb questions if you don't mind?

I have copied most of my documents and media from the PC, media player and external drive to the NAS. I am starting to tidy up the folder structure and sort the files. I am having a few strange things happen that I hope you or someone else can give me a quick answer for?

Raid5/EXT4 Win7 pro 64bit sharing with smb shares. The SMB shares are all public.

1. I have an empty folder on my "Media" share media\audio\playlist that was copied from C drive. When I try to delete it I get "You require permissions from Unix User\root to make changes to this folder.
Trying to change permissions or ownership gives an "access denied" error

2.I have an MKV file that when I try to delete it it says "This action cannot be completed because the file is open in Windows Explorer" As far as I can tell it isn't.

3. when I try to move files between folders in the same smb share I am regularly getting an error "The action couldn't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program" As far as I can tell it isn't. Trying again some time later and it succeeds. This happens if I drag and drop or copy and past between two open windows explorer windows. or within the same window?

Any clues on how to sort these?

Some of these files were copied from folders that were included in windows Music & Videos libraries.

Regards Allen.

AllenG

441 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509332 20-Aug-2011 13:18

nakedmolerat: PHPFILEMGR module. install the module, enable it, and use it to move/copy files between the folders. http://www.futterknecht.at/

Which version, the N5200_PHPFILEMGR_2.00.03 one? I cant see one specifically for N4200?

I have installed the N5200 one and the install succeeded but it has a yellow "!" warning withthe following help message "The warning sign has indicated this module may not work properly due to the old FW version." Is this safe to use on my firmware version 5.00.04?

Regards Allen.

PANiCnz

990 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509342 20-Aug-2011 13:27

Why not just compose one reply? More likely people will read it and answer your questions. Four post in a row is just a PITA.

AllenG

441 posts

Ultimate Geek

#509344 20-Aug-2011 13:36

PANiCnz: Why not just compose one reply? More likely people will read it and answer your questions. Four post in a row is just a PITA.

By the time I have tried something out and have a new question editing of the post has timed out (15 mins Edit: 10 minutes!). I must ask Mauricio why editing timeout is so short. Now that is a PITA.

Allen.

Kilack

527 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#514235 31-Aug-2011 09:25

Interesting thread. I was running a server in the basement, was just a bunch of ramdon disks in a windows box using all the sata ports and even the ata ports that this mboard had.
Recently "upgraded" to a dedicated NAS that only does NAS, it is running unraid which is fine as I don't need fast write speeds.

Now thinking about going with ZFS due to far better data integrity.
I looked at freenas which makes things very easy but its based on freebsd and from all the reviews on speed I have read FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS is _really_ slow compared to on solaris. So I am probably going to go with solaris, either indianna or solaris 11 express.
The Nappit UI looks great and can run on any of the solaris dirivitves..
(http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1573272)

I am amazed ZFS is quite unheard of really, it seems to be leagues ahead of other file systems and superior to even hardware raid. It's only downside for home users is the lack of flexibility in being able to increase raid sets etc... so you might have to buy a bunch of disks at a time to increase your storage space....

I have zero experience with solaris but it seems zfs is worth it for peace of mind, bad thing about solaris is bad hardware support, wont support my aoc mv8 cards... sigh.. so had to order some aoc lsi based cards...

I went a bit crazy and had a norco 4224 arrive at my door yesterday, damn its big... had to hurry it down to the basement before the wife saw it...

Anyway, anyone using zfs on solaris or even on freebsd, have you found speeds on freebsd to be slow?

Ragnor

8222 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#514424 31-Aug-2011 12:43

Check this thread on gpforums, dstruktiv built a DIY NAS using FreeNas 8 and ZFS... he had some trouble to begin with but ended up with results ~70MB/s

http://www.gpforums.co.nz/showthread.php?s=&threadid=427056

blur

384 posts

Ultimate Geek

#514453 31-Aug-2011 13:30

Ragnor: Check this thread on gpforums, dstruktiv built a DIY NAS using FreeNas 8 and ZFS... he had some trouble to begin with but ended up with results ~70MB/s

http://www.gpforums.co.nz/showthread.php?s=&threadid=427056

I'm not sure I see the point of a DIY NAS when they are so cheap to buy. I mean to say, why try to re-invent the wheel? The one (and only) advantage that I can see might be the ability to have up to say 8 drives, or what even your motherboard is able to handle, but that seems about all.

(... holds breath and waits to be shot down in flames...)

My HTPC - Case Antec Fusion Remote, MOBO Intel DH67BLB3, CPU Intel Core i5-2400S 2.5 GHz, RAM 8GB DDR3 1333, HDD 120Gig Corsair Force Series 3 SSD system | WD Caviar Black 2TB data, Tuners Black Gold BGT3595 dual DVB-S/S2, dual DVB-T, Video nVIDIA GeForce GT 520, 1024MB, Sound Intel® High Definition Audio (onboard), OS Windows 7 x64

1 | 2 | 3