Hello peoples, you probably havent seen me for about six months because i've been completely swamped with RL requirements and had no money to spend on even the greatest deals until certain other problems were solved first... well i'm finally in film school proper and so now it's back to what I originally came here for.
My most immediate projects are two servers i'm going to be building. After the six month timeout, rereading some things including where misunderstandings occurred, and re-thinking about what I need to do, a few things have changed or been refined but not all that much. I'm open for suggestions on any part though of my two builds, RAT-RAIT and Bitbucket:
Build’s Name: RAT-RAIT
Operating System/ Storage Platform: Windows 7 (for now, dual boot/learning linux) / SnapRAID
CPU: Clarksdale i3 dual core
Motherboard: Biostar SLI
Chassis: dual ATX (two cases bolted together)
Drives: decased used 3TB Seagates (from their external drives), at least 12
RAM: 4-8GB
Add-in Cards: TBD - which SAS HBA undecided (as is dual HBA's vs SAS Expander)
Power Supply: something by Antec or even two of them
Other Bits: Ultrium LTO6 or LTO7 drive using LTO6 tapes (probably external), mild VMware experiments (single remote session only)
The purpose of the RAT is a server meant to create and restore SnapRAID whole volume parity files, and to write and read both these and the data they come from to a series of LTO6 Ultrium tape sets (on an LTO6/7 drive). I tried to explain some of what I was trying to do before without much luck, but the purpose isn't as important - because i'll be experimenting for a bit "with what looks like it should work, on paper" anyways and if it works will be making a video explaining it all. Just treat it as a server with a tape drive for backup. The server in general is a backup server - other computers will put data on here for backup, which periodically gets written to tape for offline archival. Powered up and down when needed.
The use of hardware is partly what I have laying around (lots of 3tb Seagates, the mobo, cpu, ram, etc) making it a net zero cost but other hardware can be suggested. I'm waiting for LTO8 drives to finally come out onto market, after which I hope the price of LTO6 drives will drop by a few hundred dollars, but one way or another I want to get SAS HBA's and LTO drive before the end of December if I can.
Occasional use as an 'overflow' NAS when necessary (if not room on the Bitbucket) like for video editing or if the higher performance is worth it.
Build’s Name: Bitbucket
Operating System/ Storage Platform: Windows 7 (for now, dual boot/learning linux) / SnapRAID
CPU: Intel Atom
Motherboard: Nvidia Ion
Chassis: normal tower ATX (for now)
Drives: 2x Seagate 8TB decased 'Archive' shingled, 4-6x Seagate 3TB decased older drives (eventually upgraded to other 8tb), Bluray/DVD drive
RAM: 2-4GB
Add-in Cards: TBD - which SAS HBA undecided
Power Supply: probably Antec Basiq 350 or so, I have one laying around unused. Well okay I have at least five laying around unused.
This is meant to be my low wattage 24/7 always on 24-64TB server. This is NOT a high performance server. Multipurpose include:
- general read only media for the house (ie streaming data to a couple TV's and PC's),
- video server for editing workstation (if doing something performance intensive i'll move the data to the workstation beforehand, then push the processed result back afterwards)
- backup server (intend to have several PC's send hard drive backups using the FOG project) Introduction - FOG Project
- dedicated downloading box from a 25Mbps connection, for like if i'm using Usenet, scheduled FTP, mirroring youtube files, torrents I suppose if I ever do them (rather plan to be able to even if i dont do/able to handle such fragmented workloads)
- mild home automation experiments, security/surveillance footage recording, and similar (things like supported by MythTV/Pluto, ZoneMinder, Motion, etc - when finally on linux)
25mbit doesnt need alot of performance so i'm thinking an Atom is fine. Shingled drives are iffy for sustained writing or at least rewriting i'm told but I was hoping to put all the read only media (like DVD media images) on there and backing up large chunks of files at once, and putting data which likes to constantly trickle in data and write all day like Usenet on the 3TB units. Open to suggestions on what strategy is most appropriate for which drive type though - like those backup images.
Concerning both i'd kind of like to use hardware I already have around for obvious reasons but can buy replacement hardware if the situation really would benefit from it. Probably buying a pair of 3tb drives and perhaps pair of 8tb drives new but the rest to be already used Seagate externals i'm repurposing and using up until they die. All data will be mirrored upon creation and written to tape when volumes fill up anyways so not as worried over a single point of failure. In the future there will be other/better projects, this is just to get me through "for now". I want to eventually play around with virtualized OS sessions and such with remote logins but that either wont happen or will be limited to one session only for testing probably off the RAT RAIT dual core box as I learn the ins and outs. Eventually Bitbucket will probably be replaced with a more competent 4-12 core server as video editing and processing needs grow.
My most immediate projects are two servers i'm going to be building. After the six month timeout, rereading some things including where misunderstandings occurred, and re-thinking about what I need to do, a few things have changed or been refined but not all that much. I'm open for suggestions on any part though of my two builds, RAT-RAIT and Bitbucket:
Build’s Name: RAT-RAIT
Operating System/ Storage Platform: Windows 7 (for now, dual boot/learning linux) / SnapRAID
CPU: Clarksdale i3 dual core
Motherboard: Biostar SLI
Chassis: dual ATX (two cases bolted together)
Drives: decased used 3TB Seagates (from their external drives), at least 12
RAM: 4-8GB
Add-in Cards: TBD - which SAS HBA undecided (as is dual HBA's vs SAS Expander)
Power Supply: something by Antec or even two of them
Other Bits: Ultrium LTO6 or LTO7 drive using LTO6 tapes (probably external), mild VMware experiments (single remote session only)
The purpose of the RAT is a server meant to create and restore SnapRAID whole volume parity files, and to write and read both these and the data they come from to a series of LTO6 Ultrium tape sets (on an LTO6/7 drive). I tried to explain some of what I was trying to do before without much luck, but the purpose isn't as important - because i'll be experimenting for a bit "with what looks like it should work, on paper" anyways and if it works will be making a video explaining it all. Just treat it as a server with a tape drive for backup. The server in general is a backup server - other computers will put data on here for backup, which periodically gets written to tape for offline archival. Powered up and down when needed.
The use of hardware is partly what I have laying around (lots of 3tb Seagates, the mobo, cpu, ram, etc) making it a net zero cost but other hardware can be suggested. I'm waiting for LTO8 drives to finally come out onto market, after which I hope the price of LTO6 drives will drop by a few hundred dollars, but one way or another I want to get SAS HBA's and LTO drive before the end of December if I can.
Occasional use as an 'overflow' NAS when necessary (if not room on the Bitbucket) like for video editing or if the higher performance is worth it.
Build’s Name: Bitbucket
Operating System/ Storage Platform: Windows 7 (for now, dual boot/learning linux) / SnapRAID
CPU: Intel Atom
Motherboard: Nvidia Ion
Chassis: normal tower ATX (for now)
Drives: 2x Seagate 8TB decased 'Archive' shingled, 4-6x Seagate 3TB decased older drives (eventually upgraded to other 8tb), Bluray/DVD drive
RAM: 2-4GB
Add-in Cards: TBD - which SAS HBA undecided
Power Supply: probably Antec Basiq 350 or so, I have one laying around unused. Well okay I have at least five laying around unused.
This is meant to be my low wattage 24/7 always on 24-64TB server. This is NOT a high performance server. Multipurpose include:
- general read only media for the house (ie streaming data to a couple TV's and PC's),
- video server for editing workstation (if doing something performance intensive i'll move the data to the workstation beforehand, then push the processed result back afterwards)
- backup server (intend to have several PC's send hard drive backups using the FOG project) Introduction - FOG Project
- dedicated downloading box from a 25Mbps connection, for like if i'm using Usenet, scheduled FTP, mirroring youtube files, torrents I suppose if I ever do them (rather plan to be able to even if i dont do/able to handle such fragmented workloads)
- mild home automation experiments, security/surveillance footage recording, and similar (things like supported by MythTV/Pluto, ZoneMinder, Motion, etc - when finally on linux)
25mbit doesnt need alot of performance so i'm thinking an Atom is fine. Shingled drives are iffy for sustained writing or at least rewriting i'm told but I was hoping to put all the read only media (like DVD media images) on there and backing up large chunks of files at once, and putting data which likes to constantly trickle in data and write all day like Usenet on the 3TB units. Open to suggestions on what strategy is most appropriate for which drive type though - like those backup images.
Concerning both i'd kind of like to use hardware I already have around for obvious reasons but can buy replacement hardware if the situation really would benefit from it. Probably buying a pair of 3tb drives and perhaps pair of 8tb drives new but the rest to be already used Seagate externals i'm repurposing and using up until they die. All data will be mirrored upon creation and written to tape when volumes fill up anyways so not as worried over a single point of failure. In the future there will be other/better projects, this is just to get me through "for now". I want to eventually play around with virtualized OS sessions and such with remote logins but that either wont happen or will be limited to one session only for testing probably off the RAT RAIT dual core box as I learn the ins and outs. Eventually Bitbucket will probably be replaced with a more competent 4-12 core server as video editing and processing needs grow.
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