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Next Generation Server Build


amateurphotographer

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Hi

 

As the title suggests I am looking into my next generation home server build.

 

Currently have a G4500 Processor in an H110M-A motherboard which has worked flawlessly for the last two years and have no reason to think it will not continue but the 2 x 6Tb WD Red are going to be full by the end of the year.  Currently going through our DVD collection having got fed up of DVD discs failing and having to re-buy them, essentially all perfectly legal as we are keeping the DVD's so essentially it is archival purposes.

 

A solution will need to be found as I only have 1 SATA slot left on my motherboard, but thinking about jumping to a ASUS board with 6 x SATA slots and 2 x M.2 slots, 1 of which functions on PCI-e so allowing all 6 x SATA slots to function (circa £70).  CPU and RAM etc will all drop in so not a massive outlay.

 

Currently I am running on luck as I have 2 x 6TB which are a shared Drivepool using Stablebit Drivepool which again has worked flawlessly for 2 years but no physical backup just Drivepool doing 100% replication on the fly. 

 

The advice I am looking for relates primarily to backup etc as my current thinking is a M.2 drive for the operating system (Win10Pro) and slowly populate with 10TB either WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf but still need some convincing on the Seagate as they don't have a good reputation in our house.  I am thinking towards either running 3x10TB as a drive pool and then using something like sync-toy to backup to a 2nd 3x10TB drivepool.

 

Thanks for any thoughts and advice

 

Paul

 

 

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Well, it's not exactly clear what you're asking here.  I can make a guess, but....

 

That said, if you have PCI-e ports, you can add controller cards.  And specifically, if you have a PCI-e 8x slot (or 16x), then you could add a "SAS" HBA (controller) card to the system.   A good LSI card would get you 8+ ports, and support for large drives.  

 

This may be a simpler solution than switching out all of your hardware (requiring a reinstall, most likely). 

 

 

As for the storage: 

 

I have both Seagate NAS (the line has been rebranded as "IronWolf") and WD Reds.  Both are very reliable, and the Seagate drives generally run faster and cooler than the WD reds. 

Aside from the ST3000DM001 (and similar) line, Seagate drives are very reliable.  But it's also "when not if" a drive fails. All drives fail. Period. 

 

 

As for syncing the pool to another pool, that isn't a bad idea at all.   having a backup of your data is always a good idea. That way, if something catastrophic does happen, you have a second set of your data that can be restored from.  Though, it may be a good idea to run it in a different box,

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If it is for cold storage, so mainly write-once read-many, then you could consider the Seagate Archive HDDs. I believe 8TB are the largest (I have two of them for backup purposes) and they are way cheaper per TB.

 

Now write performance *can* be very bad. I think I just had a worst-case situation due to a restructuring of my Server storage (which is backed up to the Archives) and managed a 10MB/s write but this is a very distinct situation. A clean Archive HDD will get you anywhere between 60-180 MB/s write speed and assuming most writes will be less than 20GB you should get to the higher end of that. They read like crazy though (for spinners).

 

Where I buy my HDDs, a 10TB IronWolf will set you back EUR 439 whereas an 8TB Archive does 259. So 20TB IronWolf comes in at EUR 878 while 24TB Archives do EUR 777...(Although there is currently a discount on the 8TB Ironwolf at EUR 299).

 

I would also suggest to get something like an hot-swap bay, something like this http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=141. This allows you to backup up critical data (like the OS HDD and non-DVD data) to removable HDDs, allowing you to rotate backups offsite. This way you have protection against accidental deletes, system failure, theft and fire etc.

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Yup, the 8TB are the largest for the Seagate Archive drives.

 

Though, price per TB has changed, and the NAS drives are close to the same price as the Archive drives. So your use case may be more important here. 

But this absolutely depends on region (my info is for the US region, because that's where I'm located).

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Thanks Guys, apologies for the delay in getting back online.  Been too many photography events.

 

You both have hit my question on the head, my motherboard specification says:

 

1 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x1 (x16 mode) 
2 x PCIe 2.0 x1

 

https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/H110M-A/specifications/

 

I appreciate that this forum is for the drivepool but in all seriousness would I be better off not using it and just using Synctoy for example as a backup.  Our usage of the server is simply a home device so on a day to day basis there would be probably a couple of dozen files changed.  After a photographic event then yes we could be dumping several thousand RAW files but essentially the server is just a file server and I don't think we would see a different in the speed of accessing the harddrives etc if everything was on a drive.

 

Essentially I am in the place of thinking that if the files are mirrored in realtime then a faulty file will replicate so that just both drives have a faulty file and whilst I should have a backup drive (working on it) I am wondering if spending several hundred pounds on a harddrive to be a simple mirror is what is niggling my mind at the moment.

 

Thanks for any thoughts.

 

Paul

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I do not consider DP as a backup. It is a redundancy tool which enhances uptime. The cool thing, for me, is that should a drive fail then the Server will still be up and recovery, as in re-duplicate, is done easily which saves a lot of time compared to a recovery from a backup. But if the files are important (and surely some are) then a real backup is essential IMHO.

 

I don;t know Synctoy nor other backup tools, they may be suitable indeed.

 

Wrt to the faulty file, if two copies are written correctly and then on one HDD it gets corrupted somehow, then the corruption will not automatically replicate to the othet copy I would think. The question would really be which copy you retrieve once you try and load the file. Moreover, if you coupl DP with Scanner, then this partly mitigates such a circumustance, should it occur (which I think is extremely rare). But Chris should be able to provide more info.

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