Home Server Recommendations Part 1
Posted by Jaymz, February 12th, 2008 in Hardware, Home Server, Tech, WindowsThere’s been enough MacFaggotry on this site for most people to stomach, so lets get back on the other side of the fence for a bit and discuss one of my other favourite subjects - Windows Home Server.
As you all know, I participated in the beta of this thing, and wrote a couple of articles here and there about the behemoth of a fileserver I built for the thing. For those too lazy to click this link, I essentially built an Allendale based 1.6GHz system with 1GB of RAM, a single 500GB SATA300 hard drive, and nine 400GB SATA300 hard drives for an aggregate of 3.73TB of total storage capacity. She currently has about 1.6TB of data duplicated, taking up most of the space on the thing, the left over space being used for backups, downloaded files, my Technet library files (ISO’s, etc), software and driver library, and so forth. She has a big-ass case to handle it, and a hell of a lot of drives to boot.
However, such a setup wasn’t quite as ideal as I had first planned. With a rather unique case of having 10 drives, and 1.5TB of data spread across them, I’d hit quite a few snags. The first being performance, and the second being file permission stuff-ups. Furthermore, when the SYS volume started to die recently, it caused a bit of a dilemma due to the fact I had an additional RAID card in the thing, which would make reinstalling it successfully a bit of a bitch. In regards to that, I’ve managed to recover everything off onto two 1TB drives, and I’m going to have another crack at it again later on, using the same PC, housing, etc.. but this time, with a few minor changes.
So, that’s enough veering from the original purpose of this posting, which was to give a few recommendations on how build a good, reliable DIY Home Server setup. Before you start, however… there’s four very important pointers you should be aware of:
- Buy the biggest drive you can afford for your SYS volume
Basically, the way Home Server works is this: It takes your first drive, slaps a 20GB SYS volume on the beginning of the drive, and the rest of the drive becomes your initial DATA volume. From then on, any further DATA volumes basically “link” to the initial DATA volume, which gives you two side effects - free space as reported from anywhere else but the Home Server console is actually free space of the first DATA volume, and you can only copy files smaller than the available free space on the initial DATA volume at any given time. Furthermore, all your system backups are going to be put on the initial DATA volume first, so it’s within your interests to get the biggest drive you possibly can for your first DATA volume. If you have more than one volume, don’t worry about the first one filling up all the time - the Drive Migrator starts moving stuff off the first DATA volume, once it’s copied across (and we’ll discuss more about that service further down) - Keep your total amount of volumes low
I know it’s tempting to go crazy and slap drives in left right and center, now that even 1TB drives are easily affordable. Or even to go the route of buying more smaller drives to obtain the same space cheaper, but if you go crazy like I did and have 10 or more drives in this thing, you’ll find performance is going to crawl. With more physical drives in the thing, you’re giving Drive Migrator a hell of a lot more work to do, and you’ll forever see the “Balancing Storage” status in the Home Server console. The other issue is that if the drives are forever active, then they’re more likely to burn out and die quicker - just like what happened to my SYS volume in Konata. Try keep it to a maximum of 4 to 6 volumes. - Use the onboard SATA, and don’t bother with any RAID setups
Any IT professional worth their salt will tell you that RAID is not a backup solution. If you’re this conscientious about keeping your data secure, then you’ll go out and buy a little NAS box for syncing stuff on the Home Server shares that equates to the same storage capacity of the Home Server itself. My recommendation goes towards something like the N5200. Either that, or buy a Blu-ray burner or something. Home Server is usually resilient enough that even if your SYS volume goes down, you may lose your local computer backups, but as long as your data is duplicated across other volumes, it’ll be okay - and even some data that isn’t duplicated usually comes out alright as well. In my experience, having to use specialized drivers for SATA drives tends to make this kind of recovery much more difficult. Hence, if you’re choosing a motherboard - an Intel one with 4 to 8 SATA ports is generally recommended, because even without the Intel chipset drivers installed, it can still see all the drives attached perfectly fine. Don’t bother using the onboard RAID functions of said Intel chipsets - it’ll only make data recovery much more difficult in future. - When removing a drive, wait a day or two before removing any more
Not sure if this was resolved in the final release, but in the release candidates, I took it upon myself to test removing two drives from the storage array and immediately replacing them with two larger drives. I removed one drive first, ensured that all my data was still there (it was), then added the first of the two new drives. When I removed the second drive straight after this, it told me again that no data would be lost, but straight after doing so, found it took a sizeable chunk of data with it upon removal - despite having plenty of space across all drives to migrate the data across. Thankfully, I had backups to restore from. So, ever since then, my personal rule has been to wait a day or two before removing any other drive after I’ve removed one already. If it doesn’t say “Storage Balanced” in Home Server, I wait some more.
So, those are essentially my own personal findings after having used the thing for a good year or so. Aside from the fourth rule, it’s mostly all related to DIY setups - as Home Server OEMs tend to keep things fairly simple. So… what should a DIY Home Server look like in terms of hardware? Despite what some people say, it’s best to not go with a second hand PC, or some old server bits off eBay if you intend to rely on this thing, and have it on all night long. For something reliable and sturdy, you’re going to want new parts under warranty, and ideally all from the same shop, to make RMA processes easier, in the event that you get a bad component. No manufacturer has a perfect track record on having a faulty unit slip past QA, and into the hands of the consumer.
So.. we’re buying new bits. What do we want first? Well, you’ll need to look at where you’re packing all of this stuff into, and where it’s going to go. You’ve also got to take into account that WHS gives you the ability to add and remove drives fairly easily over the course of your Home Server’s life, so some form of external drive caddy system is preferred. For me, I have three particular cases with their own specific benefits that make them ideal for Home Server solutions.
For the most practical case, you can’t go wrong with a Coolermaster iTower 930. It already has a 4 SATA drive enclosure built into the case, allowing you quick and easy access to the drives. If you go by my above rules, and just get 4 enormous drives, as opposed to a stack of smaller but cheaper drives, then this case is a fantastic choice for your DIY Home Server.
For something a little cooler and sleeker, the Coolermaster Cosmos 1010 isn’t too bad, either. It’s got more expandability in terms of hard drive bays - 6, instead of 4, but you lose the easy access to them that the iTower 930 provides - unless you go with an internal drive bay in the 5.25 bays.
Finally, if you’re crazy like I am, you’ll go with a Stacker solution like the CM Stacker 831 that I have - well, not like I have, because I have the normal one, and this appears to be an SE edition or something. Regardless of which, if you slap three SATA backplanes into this like my personal favourite - the SNT 3141, which occupies three 5.25 bays to give you 4 SATA drives per enclosure, you can load your Home Server up with up to 12 drives that are very easy to get to. I can’t recommend a big solution like this if you’re using WHS, however.. as Drive Migrator appears to be rather unforgiving with performance and reliability when it’s given so many damn volumes to look after. Once I sort out all my crap, the next Home Server will be 4 to 6 drives only.
While it wasn’t my intention to make this article a two-parter, I think this is getting a tad too long for keeping people’s attentions, so stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll discuss more about what sort of architecture to go for, what makes a good Home Server motherboard and CPU, and how to go beyond a simple backup and file dump, and do some cooler things - like automated torrent downloads (without data corruption), DHCP serving, and so forth.
14 Responses to “Home Server Recommendations Part 1”
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Hello and welcome to Respect Sakura, yet another shitty blog under the premise of being an animu blog, when it's really just about Jaymz's tech leanings, spending habits and crack-inspired ramblings on topics noone cares about. Oh, and that other guy posts stuff sometimes, too.
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It sounds to me like WHS needs even more voodoo to make it work than previous Windows server incarnations. My file server running Server 2003 has run rock solid for the past 3 years without a format or defrag. Certainly, it only has 6 data drives serving animu, images, music and pretty much everything else I have excluding from games but it has been essentially a zero maintainence machine from day one. WHS sounds like a step in the wrong direction when you need to limit the number of drives you can stick in the machine because of a feature of the operating system, or wait an arbitrary number of days because it lies to you about the state of the data on individual drives.
Once you have everything set up, how reliable is it?
Perhaps my “rules” are giving too bad an impression on WHS. There’s nothing stopping you from throwing 10, 20, or 100 drives at the thing - just that there’s a large performance detriment in doing so, as it’s really just designed as an OEM solution with 4-6 drives.
The benefit to using WHS is that a). It’s cheaper than 2003 Server, and b). It has a backup system that shits all over any other network backup solution I’ve seen. We use the latest version of Backup Exec, and the artist formerly known as LiveState (We’ll miss ya, PowerQuest :(), which does a nifty image-to-san-then-backup-to-tape system, which works fairly well, but if WHS’s backup solution had an enterprise edition with a few more options, I’d certainly be pushing for it at work.
But if client backups aren’t your thing, then WHS really hasn’t much else to offer over a free Linux or BSD NAS solution, or in your case, 2003 Server. Once it’s in place, the core is really just 2003 Server anyways, so the reliability depends on good hardware. If your system runs 2K3 fine now, it’ll do WHS pretty much the same.
The 10 user limit is annoying… WHS backup has already saved me twice!
I tried xosoft’s wansync before and got corrupt VHD (virtual server’s virtual hard disk), WHS has no problem with this…
Case 1: Windows 2003 Server in colo on the other side of the world… Guess how it feels when the raid died and the *** 24/7 engineers on site couldn’t do anything. Luckily I have hamachi whs backup :) 15GB MySQL and 4 Virtual Servers saved - no need to say more. So whs can be used in some ’small business’ backup scenarios.
Case 2: my laptop crashed. It took a while till I find out that I have to replaced the hdd (I got spare 2.5″ disks) or repartition/format the system drive (bitlocker). WHS backup see it as raw partition - hope this will be fixed in next version.
HP warns all WHS customers the following information:
You should not directly open and/or edit files that are stored on the MediaSmart Server while doing any other activity such as large data transfers or media streaming. If you are doing a large data transfer or streaming and need to edit a file on the server, you should first copy the file over to a PC and then open it for editing.
There are a few key applications that Microsoft has identified that can cause this issue when files are opened and edited directly from the server. However to be safe, HP recommends that you not open/edit files directly from the server until this fix is delivered.
Windows Home Server’s Drive Extender technology causes data corruption.
http://www.support.microsoft.com/kb/946676
* Windows Vista Photo Gallery
* Windows Live Photo Gallery
* Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
* Microsoft Office OneNote 2003
* Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
* Microsoft Money 2007
* SyncToy 2.0 Beta
* Various Bittorrent applications
* Intuit Quicken
* QuickBooks
Microsoft states, “Windows Home Server simplifies your family’s documents, photos, videos and music, storing them in one shared location”. Interesting because, it’s NOT organizing your data, it’s WHS requiring all your data to be stored in WHS for sharing! Which doesn’t allow for your data while stored in WHS to be edit by your PC client/s because of KB 946676 data corruption flaw of the WHS Drive Extender Technology. WHS defeats the purpose of having a server, as all your data must be static rather than dynamic.
Yes.. yes.. the infamous data corruption bug. It never effected me, because I primarily used WHS for storing video files, software installers and drivers, and other such files that I don’t actually have a need to write to. BitTorrent can be set up on WHS, but you have to do so in a specific way which I’ll elaborate on more in part 2.
I’ll be frank. The fileserver aspects aren’t so great with WHS, and if that’s ultimately what you’re after - look at something like FreeNAS. What makes it awesome is the backup facility for XP and Vista client boxes (and even Server 2003 boxes as well, but shh.. don’t remind Microsoft).
My line of reasoning is that document files and crap like that are generally aren’t that big, so they can pretty much stay on the client PCs (and get backed up safely). Plus, Microsoft have always stated in the past that if you keep Outlook PSTs on a network drive, then you’re in risk of corrupting them. Plus, there’s a fix coming for the drive-extender-will-eat-your-files-and-then-your-firstborn-child bug, so it’s not like MS said “Hey, lets make a feature that will fuck up all the users files! That’ll teach them for dissing Windows ME!” and purposely made it this way.
I keep hearing about this SYS drive ‘thing’. How the 1st drive in the system should be the largest, yada yada. Can somebody PLEASE put some REAL statistics to these claims? What size drive were you trying to use as the 1st drive? What size drives were you using as the additional drives? What’s the spindle speed of these drives?
I can’t imagine a reputable vendor building a WHS server with a hodge-podge of 4GB, 5400rpm drives. I know the HP units come with one or two 500GB drives. So, in a dual drive system, the 1st drive ends up with 480GB of free DATA space, and with the second drive the total system free space is 980GB. Can anybody tell us what happens when a 1TB drive is added as drive #3? What happens if a 1.5TB drive (when available) is added as the 4th drive? What about even larger drives added to the USB ports?
So, as to this claim that the 1st drive should be the largest drive, is there a point when that notion becomes just plain wrong? Has anyone actually tried to find the maximum limits to this system? At what point does this OS just give up the ghost trying to support an ever expanding DATA space?
If WHS is designed to require a drive shuffle and system restore whenever a larger drive is to be added to the system, then I think MS needs to head back to the drawing board. No ‘home’ user is going to bother with that kind of nonsense. Nor should they be required to.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Okay, to best answer your question as to what this all comes out to, take a look at this image.
Basically, from the end user point of view - when they slap a second, third and fourth drive into the system, it just adds to the total storage pool. Drives don’t have to be of the same size at all, it just adds to the total storage pool. The “biggest drive should be your system” rule is for DIY builds, when you first set the thing up. If you go with an OEM solution, you’re stuck with whatever initial drive the OEM gives you.
The reason behind the largest-drive rule is simple: when you have multiple drives, anything you copy to the server is placed on the initial data drive (the first drive in the system, minus 20GB for the SYS volume), and a service called Drive Migrator then moves that data off onto another drive, and makes a link on that first drive, to fool the system into believing it’s still all one volume, when in reality - it isn’t.
I’m not sure what the real limits of WHS are, but when you have 10 drives, and are nearing about 90% or more capacity being used, that’s when your drives start going nuts, Drive Migrator becomes obsessive-compulsive, and performance really starts to dip.
Nice article. I don’t think it’ll get me back to WHS anytime soon though.
I tried out WHS in the Release Candidate stage mainly because I wanted to add the automated remote access and backups to my fileserver (which was previously running Gentoo Linux). Unfortunately, automated backups never worked for me for some reason. Despite the fact I was running Vista on my desktop, it would just get to around 10% and then claim the computer was turned off mid backup (despite the fact I’ve turned the shitty automatic sleep options off). I think I got it to back up my laptop once, then it never worked again. And then a few days later it claims the backup database was corrupted and didn’t leave me with any easy option to repair.
Funnily enough, the backups worked better than the remote access, which I in fact couldn’t get to work at all. Mainly because my IPCop firewall doesn’t have a UPnP feature, and WHS provides no facilities for manual port forwarding. Even when I tried with a UPnP capable router (Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT), remote access was still a no-go.
So now I had a fileserver which was slow and always thrashing the hard drives trying to “balance” them (of which I had about 5 or 6 from memory at the time). I had to live in fear of the data corruption bug popping up with some obscure program, and none of the features I actually needed from WHS actually worked. So at this point it was banished from my server and once again replaced with Linux, which - surprise surprise - just worked. The only problem I’ve had is a software RAID 1 array mysteriously dropping out over the weekend, but a quick reboot revived it to the point where I could make a full backup of the drive. I suspect the cheap Silicon Image controller is at fault (though it’s only acting as a straight SATA controller with Linux doing the RAID work through mdadm).
By the way, I meant to ask what SATA cages are in your server, and how much were they Jaymz?
Actually, nevermind, I just re-read the article. :P
But by your own admission, these things happened in the beta, right? I hate to play the “that shit never happened to me, and everything worked perfectly” game, but it’s really how it is. The only issues I had were to do with the fileserver aspect.
In regards to the port forwarding shenanigans of Home Server, you can manually port forward the required ports for remote desktop. In fact, I’m pretty sure the system will give you the necessary ports to forward if it finds it can’t do it itself.
It was actually the Release Candidate 2 from memory. And I’ve been in previous Windows betas: these sort of bugs, especially the data corruption bugs, should be fixed weeeellllll before it hits Release Candidate stage. There’s no denying WHS was rushed.
Anyway, I’m aware the ports could be forwarded manually, but it just never worked for me. No matter what I tried. Call me stupid, but I could not get WHS to “just work”, yet Linux somehow does. Go figure. :)
I’ll always remain open to changes though. If Microsoft can fix the few nagging issues I had with WHS, then I’d probably go back. The management console was rather slick, and I like all the concepts in theory. But the release candidates just never quite delivered what Microsoft was promising IMO.