LOW powered home server

[Daweo]

Hello guys,

I am completelly new here. I have read some topics, but still I have not found any answer to my questions.
All I want is to run home server with 4 hdd (maybe more if possible) connected to raid 5.
Device should be used as a file server for 2-3 users at home, if possible, it sholud be able to stream video from IPTV.

The most important is to have average power consumption as less as possible. I can imagine that real dayly usage is about 8 hours, during the rest time, I expect that device can go to "hybernation" status and it will wake up when I need something from there. Also I would like to have 2nd network card on it.

I have seen one configuration with power consumption 35-50w with 5hdd created by jfr2006.

As I have Gb network at home, I would like to see at least 80 percent of ist speed is used during big file transfers.

What I have seen is also information, that for 1TB I should have 1GB of ram... this scares me as I want to 4x 2TB drives in that raid 5.


I was impressed by motherboards equipped wit CPU - BGA socket http://www.czc.cz/socket-bga-zakladni-desky/produkty specially product http://www.czc.cz/asus-c60m1-i-amd-hudson-m1/120535/produkt but really my doubts are, does it have power enough to run raid 5 and can I expect total power consumption up to maximum 50W when speed during writing/reading will be above 70mB/s?



Thanks to all for any advice

 

[Stephens]

- Read the FreeNAS documentation if you haven't.

- Read the cyberjock ZFS primer.

- Google "FreeNAS c60" -- Personally I thought the E35M1-I I used was a reasonable tradeoff between cost, power usage, and performance. I've been completely happy with it with the exception that it doesn't have the on-board support for encryption. Using low power drives, I can have 21 watts when the drives are sleep and 61 when all 6 are running. This will partially depend on the power supply you get (a small efficient one is better than one that's too big or inefficient). I'm not the biggest fan of the C60, but then there are people who aren't fans of my E35M1-I (E350).

- Google "FreeNAS (Hibernate or Sleep)" and "FreeNAS WOL"

- Really consider using RAID-Z2 (RAID-6 equivalent) instead of RAID-Z1 (RAID-5 equivalent). I know it's more money, but I doubt you'll be sorry.

- Read the Googles. I'm not sure if 80MB/s is reasonable for a C60. Some will tell you not to expect a RealTek chip to give you that. I don't buy into that. I will say the RealTek places more strain on your system which can lower speeds, especially on a CPU as limited as the C60. The combination of C60 and RealTek isn't a high performance option.

- Plan on having 8-16GB in your system. 16GB RAM will take more power, but will perform better, especially when you're talking simultaneous users.

I don't know what you mean by streaming video from IPTV. Good luck.

 

[joeschmuck]

I would have to say that everyone is looking to low power but to be honest, most 4, 5, or 6 drive systems don't pull a lot of power if you build it right, even with an Intel i3 or i5 CPU and 16 GB RAM you are not going to pull much. Your hard drives will pull power when they start and then less while they spin. A modern Intel CPU will only draw as much power as it needs when it needs it. Unless you have a very specific need to be at a specific wattage, I'd try to pick the system that is quiet if you plan to have it in an occupied area where noise is an issue. The video is a big power hungry item so if you find onboard video or can remove the video card, that could shave off 20+ watts of consumption.

I don't know how to support IPTV with FreeNAS, FreeNAS 8 is not a media center PC so if that is one of your requirements, I think you will be looking elsewhere.

 

[Daweo]

So first of all thanks to all for reply.

1. for now I am reading manual + I installed freenas to virtual machine to test how it works. For now I am really fighting with it but this is probably evey beginning. Well the most strange stuff for me is that when I connected 7 1gb disks, I extended them via virtual modification but still freenas should recognize change of divices. at least I hope in that.

2. I will search for cyberjock ZFS primer on this forum, but for now I was unlucky.. but I am still little bit lost at this forum

3. FreeNAS c60 - as far as I have checked, it looks good, but 60W scares me litle bit... however, if it is max consumption and at least 15 can go down with 2 disks down I am happy with this solution. For sure powersuply is part which must be selected with some thinking - but I am not sure 300-350W bronze is good or bad (example Fortron FSP350-60GHN 350W ) . And now I have realized, that you have bord I am interested in .

4. For now I was able to create stripping drive (I am not sure for now, how to create raid z1 /z2 when I created 1 one drive just for test (but it had 1/3 of capacity of the drive for unknown reason) and after that I added another drive. But this I will find out with manual (I hope)).

5. I do not udnerstand you with - reasonable 80mB over realtek - about that C60 I have seen 60-80mB/s so its well good for me. Still I will add one other lan card as I need to have 2 lines from NAS - one to router, second to different device. - http://fortysomethinggeek.blogspot.cz/2012/08/freenas-low-power-amd-e-350-lian-li-pc.html

6. streaming video over IPTV - my internet provider is sending me cable TV over lan... but this I will figured out if I need it.

7. 8GB is planned for sure... as I have read in one paper - there is not enough RAM in your NAS

8. that case is nice one

9. joeschmuck: That is actually the reason, why I have selected bord which I selected - everything is onboard.

 

[cyberjock]

Personally, I'm not sure if you can build a system that uses less than 50w idle while also transferring data at 80% of rated Gb speeds. The first machine I built that was capable of saturating Gb LAN also ran 49watts idle with no hard drives. Of course, I was reusing some old hardware at the same time so efficiency wasn't the thought for every single piece of hardware and I didn't look at any AMD processors. I've been burned with extremely poor AMD performance in the past and I'll never trust them again until I have a free system with an AMD processor that I can see with my own eyes performs as well as an Intel equivalent. I have friends that swear by AMD and I'll let them have their AMDs, but they're not for me.

 

[Daweo]

cyberjock: to be hones, from past I have really bad experience with all intel solutions :/ in laptops and desktops... well core i5 little bit changed my oppinion, but laptop with core duo which I have is terrible.

But at this moment I am frustrated. I added 4 hhd to vmware, I have restored original setting and I have see all with 5.2gb. Great, but when I try to create drive - via Volume manager, I see that it has 5.2GB. Great, however after disk creation, I see only 3,9GB. Where 1,3GB left? Simillar situation happened when I added 4 disks with 5gb to raid-z - I saw only 8.8GB. WHY?

 

[joeschmuck]

cyberjock: to be hones, from past I have really bad experience with all intel solutions :/ in laptops and desktops... well core i5 little bit changed my oppinion, but laptop with core duo which I have is terrible.

But at this moment I am frustrated. I added 4 hhd to vmware, I have restored original setting and I have see all with 5.2gb. Great, but when I try to create drive - via Volume manager, I see that it has 5.2GB. Great, however after disk creation, I see only 3,9GB. Where 1,3GB left? Simillar situation happened when I added 4 disks with 5gb to raid-z - I saw only 8.8GB. WHY?

You are better off going with an intel solution in my opinion but it's up to you.

As for the pool size, you need to read the forums some and just search on your problem as it's been asked a thousand times before. In a nut shell, it's called overhead plus it doesn't look like you took into account the 2GB swap partition for each drive. You have read the manual, right?

 

[Daweo]

OK guys, I have checked forum and also manual, but still I did not find any answer to my question. First of all, I decided to start nas with only 2 disks and when I need more space, I just want to add new hard drive. So no raids. Second - one drive from those 2 should be almost always used (and responding for requests) and the another one should sleep almost all the time and should be used only 1-2 times during the week for backuping.

I have found about RSYNC, but if I undrerstand correctly, it cannot simply create backup to different drive but to different machine.

1. is there possibility to have scheduled backups? like on windows I have incremental backup. But I do not want to create single file with name "backup". I would like to have weekly synchronized 2 drives when one is as I wrote only backup for the primary one. So result is I can loose only those data, which are not synchronized from last week. and in case of troubles, I just simply start to use this disk as primary one and add second one and immediatelly create duplication of files. - Now I remmember - its called planned synchronization

2. I would like also to use something like Jbod or DFS which is on MS servers? - disk extension, but in case of disk failure, I would like to see data which are on the not broken disk until I replace the broken disk and I copy remaining data back so at least some data will be still available. Moreower I want to use different size disks (but I have read, that its not reccomended) - I am not sure how to exaclty write it down.
I tried it probably wrongly - Storage -> Volume manager -> I selected volume to extend + disk and I have pressed add volume.
The Result, which I see is in volume status:
disk1
stripe
da1p2
da3p2
da3p2

is it normal stripe? so when one disk is down, everything is lost? At least what I tried it finished with this bad result :/ But for my good luck, when I connected drive back, rebooted machine, it worked again... still I do not like this behaviour...

But based on my checks... I am afraid, this cannot be solved with freenas :/ If I am wrong, please correct me.

 

[cyberjock]

cyberjock: to be hones, from past I have really bad experience with all intel solutions :/ in laptops and desktops... well core i5 little bit changed my oppinion, but laptop with core duo which I have is terrible.

Funny you mention the Core Duo. I had a Core Duo(Not Core 2 Duo which was MUCH more powerful for the same power and CPU frequency) and I was watching 1080p videos on my laptop without a hitch. It had a 17" monitor. But it wasn't friendly for travel because it was so big, so I bought the AMD laptop I referred to when I said the last AMD laptop burned me. While the AMD laptop was 2 years newer than the Core Duo laptop it should have been able to handle 720p without a hitch, it didn't. There was no watching anything in HD with it plugged in or not. It would stutter like crazy like a VHS tape that went back an forth from FF to PLAY while the audio was completely fine. Why did I buy the laptop? So I could take some HD movies with me when I traveled for work and watch them. In essence, I had a laptop that couldn't do the one single thing I wanted it to do. Tried to take it back and "I'm sorry, you didn't return it within 3 days.. you'll have to contact HP." Their IT customer service told me that the laptop shouldn't be doing what it was(no duh!), but they saw it for themselves. They wanted to charge me $85 for them to see if the could fix it, but weren't going to make the guarantee so I didn't spend the money. The crappy part.. if you went to HPs website they actually had a bullet on their website to "watch HD video flawlessly". There were TONS of forum threads of people that had my problem and no fix. I even went so far to reinstall Windows and setup the power management myself to try to prevent it from going to sleep to much. No dice. This will sound very cocky, but I was convinced that after my week+ of experimenting and reading that if I couldn't get it to work it likely couldn't be fixed. To nobody's surprise, the issue was never fixed and I never actually used the laptop again. It still had the "new computer" smell a year later when I sold it to a friend that only wanted to be able to surf the internet.

That was the last time I will ever buy AMD, CPU or otherwise, until I have complete proof with my own eyes that it will perform adequately for my intended function. The fact that a CPU was 2 years newer, had more RAM, higher CPU frequency, better 3D video card, etc there is no doubt that laptop should have performed. In fact, I gave the Core Duo laptop to a friend last year and she loves it. She watches movies in bed on that laptop and it's still going strong more than 6 years later!

But at this moment I am frustrated. I added 4 hhd to vmware, I have restored original setting and I have see all with 5.2gb. Great, but when I try to create drive - via Volume manager, I see that it has 5.2GB. Great, however after disk creation, I see only 3,9GB. Where 1,3GB left? Simillar situation happened when I added 4 disks with 5gb to raid-z - I saw only 8.8GB. WHY?

With drive that small lots of small things steal space. On a 1TB+ drive you won't notice a few GB missing. On a drive that small you'll notice it because it will represent a significant portion of the disk. This has been answered so frequently I can't even remember what all it uses the space for. Search the forums if you really want to know the answer. But its not recommended you try to "free" up the disk space.

 

[Stephens]

But based on my checks... I am afraid, this cannot be solved with freenas :/ If I am wrong, please correct me.

As you've outlined your needs, I don't think FreeNAS is your best option. What benefits do you expect to obtain from using FreeNAS? Take a look at ZFS vs SnapRAID vs unRAID vs FlexRAID vs Storage Spaces.

 

[Daweo]

Hello Stephens,

well honestly I supposed I need nas, but you know, when you start to think deeply you will find out, that you do not need for example raid5 and similar stuffs.
I wanted low powerconsumption + backup solution, and thanks to the guys here I was forced to think. Honestly at least your forum give me some light inside building of low power "data place". What I have to say, I am little bit dissapointed from some behaviour of freenas - like slow refresh of information about health / degraded status, or painting of grafs, but on the other hand, this seems to me as a solution, which will work without big work of admin.

As I mentioned - I tried everything virtually for now, so I do not have any real experience. But I must say, here si visible who wants do give other people some help hand, who wants to give working solution. Maybe its not only me, who can imagine working solution as I already wrote, becase you do not need always online mirroring, you do not need always all disks to be started or all features. As you may know, even at basic school, when you are starting to learn about IT, you are told that backuping is really important. For sure - you can burn CD/DVD or BluRay disk, or you can store it on some "server". Maybe my solution is close to the PC with external hdd and I am not against this, however if you want to have lets say some secure storage place at home where you want to store your photos from holiday, movies which you created with your girlfriend and you want to be sure, you will have them almost forewer, I think my solution is good. Specially, when you are not really glued to one hw configuration.

System like freenas is from my point of view everything I need - some small OS on pen drive with web interface, where everything si set up. you are using apple at home? no problem just one service to be started. You have only win? no problem... and so.

Well honestly 2nd think what made me dissapointed is, that your solution is not for me :/


Well why I supposed I need freenas? As I told, I supposed I need NAS with 4 bays. When I counted price, for everything and I finished at around 1000€, I started to check for different solution and thats how I have found freenas. I have downloaded it, tried in virtual machine and started to think how it works. For basics stuffs manual is not needed. Its also quiet easy to virtually replace disks without any hint or reading manual, but then I started to check "details" like - why in the hell when I add 3gb disk, I can use only one GB? What I did wrongly? So I repeated everything again and I have seen same result. So I have started to check forum fastly and I have checked little bit one PDF about volumes where I got at least 2 times info that there is never enough ram . After and seeing 2-3 configuration here - which were described, but not too deeply I write first message here. For sure its important to read everything alway first before asking question.
Still there are some things I have not find out even with reading of a manual. For example Synology Hybrid Raid works with 2 hdd like raid 1 but when you add one or 2 more drives, it switches itself to raid 5. As I understand this solution cannot do such thing. But isnt it good benefit, when you allow it as a admin... I really do not like to see, that device is trying to be smarter than its admin

For sure I will check deeply that snapraid, but when I fastly check, I am not sure it meets requirements - it creates raid as I understand it, second recovery of data is not so easy as I would like to see. But its possible, there is no othere easier method like I want. I ll try when I have more time winserver and its DFS how it actually works in my possible scenarios. I know that linux is good, but I am not good at linux... well I am bad at it... but maybe litle bit better than end - user .


About my laptop problem with CPU from intel - I have checked it better and its core 2 duo T5250 which really made me sad. It was cheap laptop, and I did wrong choice. I should take laptop with AMD and nvidia card instead of intel ati solution. With mistake, everyone learns. and if mistake is expensive..... you know it

Just one think - when I was thinking why I have 1GB of disk space instead of 3GB, I took that disk as a real one, formated to FAT/NTFS where some place is stolen because of GB/GiB but it never was so bad

 

[cyberjock]

About my laptop problem with CPU from intel - I have checked it better and its core 2 duo T5250 which really made me sad. It was cheap laptop, and I did wrong choice. I should take laptop with AMD and nvidia card instead of intel ati solution. With mistake, everyone learns. and if mistake is expensive..... you know it \

All of the Core 2 Duo CPUs are around 6-7 years old. If you just bought it that would definitely explain your dissatisfaction. I think I got mine in early 2006, but might have been early 2007. Intel doesn't list a price because they aren't manufacturered anymore. Desktop Core 2 Duos can still do great 3D gaming with a newer video card. They are fairly powerful for their age, but definitely not a power-house.

 

[Daweo]

no no... laptop is already 5 years old but at that time when I compared AMD at similar price, it looks to me faster ...but never mind... still I need to solve my data solution