Hello! If any of you folks that are smarter/more experienced with setting up RAIDs/NAS wouldn’t mind giving me some advice, I would appreciate it.
Current PMS setup:
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate
CPU: AMD Athlon X2 270 3.4 GHz Dual Core
RAM: 4 Gb DDR3
Storage:
5x 4Tb WD Green HDD Pairs
2x 3Tb WD Green HDD Pairs
Total raw storage 52 Tb with 26 Tb usable space.
My library size:
~2900 Movies
~230 TV Shows
I have the HDDs in RAID 1 pairs via Windows Mirrored drives.
When I ran out of SATA ports on my motherboard, I purchased 2 SYBA PCI RAID Controller Cards and 1 SYB PCI-E RAID Controller Card for extra SATA ports.
I had an issue early on where I would have drives disappear but when I would pop them out, into a HDD dock, and run a scan on them, they were fine. I figured out the reason was that I only had one power supply for all those drives and had split some of the connections so much to make enough connections for all the drives that I was having a voltage drop and some of the drives weren’t getting power. After re-routing some splitters and upgrading my power supply, that issue was fixed.
This may seem like a primitive setup to you more experienced users but it was relatively cheap and easy to setup.
My questions:
Given my current setup, what suggestions would you give to maximize what I have with relatively low cost?
I have one drive in particular that won’t show up in the Partition page even though I’ve scanned it multiple times and it shows no errors.
Is there a way to definitively tell whether a HDD is bad or not?
Would I be better off buying a large PCI-E RAID Controller Card and using those SATA ports (as opposed to the ones on the motherboard) and using a hardware RAID via the RAID cards?
Any help/advice would be appreciated 
I know you said you want to keep the costs down but…
I suggest save, steal or borrow money and buy a 5 or 8 drive nas!!
@spikemixture said:
I know you said you want to keep the costs down but…
I suggest save, steal or borrow money and buy a 5 or 8 drive nas!!
I’d love to have a few of those big NAS servers! Sometimes I look through posts to see other users’ setups and drool over how nice some of those NAS servers are.
My suggestions:
16GB RAM minimum
Ditch Windows
RAID6/RAIDZ2 or don’t bother. You’re in for an unpleasant surprise if you lose a drive and try to rebuild, only to then get an URE incident from your existing data with no more redundancy.
There are SMART monitoring tools which might help you know if a drive is bad, not familiar with them on Windows since it makes a horrible server. My box emails me if a drive starts to fail.
@sremick said:
My suggestions:
16GB RAM minimum
Ditch Windows
RAID6/RAIDZ2 or don’t bother. You’re in for an unpleasant surprise if you lose a drive and try to rebuild, only to then get an URE incident from your existing data with no more redundancy.
There are SMART monitoring tools which might help you know if a drive is bad, not familiar with them on Windows since it makes a horrible server. My box emails me if a drive starts to fail.
Thanks for the reply!
What would you suggest aside from Windows for an OS?
From your signature specs it says you have FreeNAS.
What advantages are there from removing Windows?
Also, is there a remote desktop ability I could use? My server doesn’t have a monitor/keyboard/mouse permanently attached to save space so I just use RD to do maintenance on the server.
@mrspock128 said:
What would you suggest aside from Windows for an OS?
FreeBSD, Linux.
From your signature specs it says you have FreeNAS.
Yes, FreeNAS is turnkey NAS appliance software based on FreeBSD.
What advantages are there from removing Windows?
Stability, lower hardware requirements, better hardware usage, and a whole world of options and features with no equivalent on Windows. The things FreeNAS does with ZFS and a remote web GUI admin have no equivalent on Windows and I wouldn’t trust Windows even if it did.
Also, is there a remote desktop ability I could use? My server doesn’t have a monitor/keyboard/mouse permanently attached to save space so I just use RD to do maintenance on the server.
Depends on your solution. With FreeNAS, all remote management is via the web GUI. So it’s just browser-based. I can also SSH in if I need to (I don’t ever need to). If something acts up on a deeper level, I use IPMI. If I’m remote, I VPN into my router first. But it’s all set up so if anything of concern comes up, it emails me proactively so I really don’t need to go into the back-end interfaces hardly ever.
