Planning to Build a NAS or SAS Box

[mhumm2]

I have a rack system that i buit from scratch. System details under signature. I have a basic home network and I would like to add another rack-mounted box for data storage available to Media Tomb (DLNA server program).

What would be the easiest to do NAS or SAS. I'm leaning towards NAS because I think it's: easier to maintain, just as fast (performance) as SAS, and just as scalable as SAS.

I've never done anything like this so my assumption is to just basically build another computer with a bunch of SATA HDD. It's the network card that performs the magic because the whole computer will be attached to the network through a router or switch. How close did I hit the target? What kind of software do I need to interface the JBOD with the network?

Any help or advice is appreciated.

[oshunluvr]

If you're just adding storage to another computer; A NAS is easy and you just need to set up NFS and mount it on the client as the Media Tomb storage folder. Mine uses a low power Atom based mini-itx mobo with 6TB of storage. As I have other users on my system, the server also acts as a print/scanner server and torrent server as well as DLNA server.

Personally for the drives, I'd use BTRFS rather than RAID or LVM. It's easier to create, maintain, and expand and although still reported as "under development" - dibl and I have been using BTRFS daily for several years without issue.

[dibl]

It's easier to create, maintain, and expand and although still reported as "under development" - dibl and I have been using BTRFS daily for several years without issue.

No developer will ever put in writing "My software is stable." But, BTRFS is as stable as ext4 or any other filesystem. As they say in the wiki "BTRFS is stable on a stable system."

BTW, do not use a BTRFS fileystem for running a VM -- the performance is miserably slow for that particular combination.

[mhumm2]

Yep, Wiki even states that BTRFS is not longer unstable. I want to make sure I understand. BTRFS (what does it stand for?) is a file system like EXT3 and 4. So to use it, I would format a NAS HDD with BTRFS is that right? Why is BTRFS better for NAS than EXT3 or 4?

On the hardware side, I like your server solution Oshunluvr. I have an old mobo doing nothing right now. I don't remember how fast it is probably 600Mhz to 1Ghz. Am I right to assume the speed of the CPU itself is not as critical as the speed of the ethernet card installed?

[oshunluvr]

Re. CPU: Depends on what you're using it for. Just a file server? Then the bottle neck will be network first, drive interface second. My server is 1.6Ghz Atom. Plenty of power for my uses: Files, DLNA, backups, torrents, printers, etc.

Re. BTRFS: The filesystem format is stable, but the utilities are still under development. Whether or not it's better depends. It supports multiple devices, subvolumes, compression, snapshots, the list is long. EXT4 is only a slight improvement of EXT3 and was intended as a stop-gap measure until something better could be developed. But BTRFS is not yet perfect. For example, is performs very poorly with files requiring a lot of random writes like swap files or virtual machine drives.

[mhumm2]

Thanks oshunluvr. I think I'm slowly getting a handle on things. It looks like I need to better define my needs. The server I'm considering would be a file and maybe a print server as well. I don't even think I'd turn it on unless I needed access to the files or I needed to print something. No keyboard, no monitor (except for setup of course). It would be the primary DNLA source for Media Tomb since my Samsung Blu-ray players interface very nicely with MT. You mentioned "network first" as the bottleneck. Were you referring to hardware or software? For the software side it's just about the protocol is it not? Would I just use the network file system nfs as the network interface between the server (with BTRFS formatted drives) and my home network? On the hardware side, I was going to get a mobo with a built in NIC. Do you see any potential challenges for me?

[oshunluvr]

I meant "network first" as in it will be the slowest part of the communication. CPU/GPU/Hard drive interface are all faster. Nothing you've talked about is difficult except Media Tomb (I could never get it to stop crashing).

At the moment, I'm tired of my crappy PVR and am trying to get MythTv backend running on my server.

I run my server headless but it's on 24/7. There are 5 people here who use my network so the server is on full time. I rarely need to mess with it.