My Windows based NAS using Flexraid - haisaikat

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haisaikat said:
Has anyone used Toshiba 2.5 inch SATA drives before?

Toshiba 3.5 Inch SATA 2TB 7200RPM Internal Desktop Hard Drive DKTIN2TB7200 - www.hydshop.in

It seems that for 2TB drives in 6K INR range only Toshiba is offering 3 years warranty against WD Greens offering 2 years only.

Regarding the WD Greens there is something I read that its Intellipark feature reduces power consumption by putting the HDD to standby after 8 secs of inactivity and this can in turn reduce the life of the hard disk unless modified Fix For Wd**ea*s Green Drives Intellipark Found? - Hard Drive's, SSD's, Controllers - HomeServerShow Forums

Also the latest from WD, the Red series seems still not available in India and WD claims them to be ideal for NAS drives WD Red
Click to expand...

I could not find the Red series either. I tried the WD 3tb ones (EZRX), and they seem to have a high failure rate. Two out of four failed for me. I am now going to try out the 4tb Seagate Hdd ripped from Backup Plus enclosure.
 
Here is some more update, although I do not do torrent downloading yet utorrent is my favourite in this case being lightweight and free of any spyware. If anyone is planning to build a Windows NAS and planning to run utorrent in it then there is no need to login to the NAS box (even via RDC) to add or control torrents. uTorrent has a setting in its Preferences to enable a lightweight WEB GUI which has practically all the feature support of the windows UI and can be opened from any browser on the same network may be another laptop or a tab or even a cell phone browser. Some screenshots below

Enabling the WEB GUI, note that I have posted the setting page from the WEB UI but first time one needs to do this from the window UI. The Web UI can be accessed as http://<host>:<port>/gui
ut3d.png


Adding a Torrent from Web UI
ut2.png


Controlling a torrent by the context menu (right click)
ut1w.png
 
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I use the same torrent on my music-pc to download. A very nice interface to add/delete torrents and also to see the progress of downloading. I run this on my music-pc with windows 7 64bit OS.

Thanks
 
That is great to know manniraj, using this torrent downloader gives way above flexibility over the built in torrent add-on of my old DNS323 NAS where downloads could not be prioritized and no individual torrent level setting.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that for anroid devices there is a utorrent remote app which lets you monitor your utorrent downloads at home anytime from anywhere as long as you have a bare minimum GPRS connection

https://remote.utorrent.com/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.utorrent.web&hl=en
 
Here are the results of running the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit, ran from a GBLan connected Laptop via the router's switch with the NAS. I mapped a shared folder on the NAS drive on the laptop and began the test. Had only 82 GB free on the NAS drive.

HD Video Playback - 1 Stream
image001ds.png


HD Video Playback - 2 Streams
image003xo.png


HD Video Playback - 4 Streams
image005gu.png


HD Video Recording - 1 Stream
image007g.png


HD Video 1 Stream Recording + 1 Stream Playback
image009o.png


Content Creation
image011hb.png


Office Productivity
image013w.png


File Copy to NAS
image015o.png


File Copy from NAS
image017n.png


Directory Copy to NAS
image019e.png


Directory Copy from NAS
image021rq.png


Photo Album
image023o.png
 
I have finally settled with Serviio as the UPNP Media Server for my NAS since its free version serves almost all purpose including on the fly transcoding of video and audio and makes everything play on my Panasonic Viera Plasma TV (although Panasonic manual says Twonky but I faced some severe problems with Twonky for ffmpeg transcoding). Now I turn on my HTPC only if needed and for all casual viewing like TV Shows or Music Videos or SD Movies I am using the TV-s built in DLNA player.

I will post later (either here or on a separate thread) on the features of Serviio and its comparison with Twonky and Media Monkey that I had tried.
 
haisaikat said:
Introduction
After months of research and planning I have finally been able to put up my Windows based Home NAS. I would like to thank above all sam for all the inspirational writings in his Unraid NAS thread which made my mind change to come out from a boxed off-the-shelf NAS to a custom built NAS.

My main reasons for going towards a custom NAS were below
1. Ability to hook up USB drives to the NAS
2. Having a NAS where some storage places would be fixed like internal drives and some part would be mobile like in the USB drives which would be handy to carry everywhere (new arrivals)
3. Higher data throughput, helpful if you do a lot of copying in and out of NAS
4. Ability to run any UPNP Media Server of choice with media transcoding for supporting more variety of UPNP clients.
5. Better management options

Hardware Components

Motherboard: ASUS M5A88-M (INR 5539 from Flipkart)
Earlier I thought would go for a mini-itx based solution but looking at the price tags for high featured mini-itx boards I dropped the idea. Same applies for not going with Intel boards, the ones having 4+ sata ports are costlier than comparative AMD boards. I chose this specific board since it was the cheapest having 6 SATA-III ports and also supports a host of processors (recent ones as well as old ones). Also it has USB 3.0 ports. Thankfully the motherboard came with two stock SATA III cables which otherwise seems very scarce in India to procure easily.

Processor: AMD 3.2 GHz AM3 Athlon II 260(INR 3299 from Flipkart)
Just whatever I found fits my bill, dual core, 64 bit and low cost. Also found on flipkart reviews that this runs comparatively cool.

RAM: Corsair XMS3 4 GB 1333MHz (INR 1100 from amazon.com carried back by one friend returning from US)
Wanted small budget 4GB RAMS and could not find anything less cheaper in DDR3 platform.

PSU: Cooler Master Gx 450 (INR 3502 from Flipkart)
It is 80 plus bronze certified 450 Watts single rail PSU, bought hoping to serve it would be fit for longer runs.

Disk Drives: I had two 1TB Seagate 7200 RPM drives in my old DND 323 purchased around 2 years back so ended up using them as one data drive and one parity drive. I also had one 1 TB external drive which is now holding some share of the files from the old 1 TB internal drives. I have plans to purchase next month when I have slightly more budget the Cavier Green 1 TB pack of 3 on flipkart if that carries some discount but otherwise would buy 2 new 2TB Cavier greens from flipkart. For now I can live with these. I also had one 32GB Transcend SSD purchased from one of our HFV FM that I am using as System drive for OS.

Cabinet: I reused my 2001 purchased old Pentium 3 cabinet which was lying unused and somewhat big considering the old times but considering my low budget should be good for now. Otherwise I had the following new cabinets on my list like NZXT Tempest Evo, Thermaltake M9, Thermaltake V6 but seems most of the shops do not keep them be it online or local and some of them are being phased out may be to make way for more costlier ones. Nevertheless I will keep looking for some future options in due course.
My old cabinet had 3 5.25 inch drive bays where I inserted one Cooler Master 4 in 3 Drive cage module (purchased locally for INR 1250) that comes with a fan (air intake) and can host 4 drives and on the rear side of the cabinet I fitted a cooler master 80mm fan (purchased locally for INR 125) to act as exhaust. Cable management is npt so good in this old cabinet hence not posting any of those ugly images.

Followed the motherboard manual step by step to fit all the components, most difficult was fitting the CPU cooler and the motherboard IO shield at the back but managed in the end.
Click to expand...

So two people read the same forums and came to the same conclusion regarding an ideal NAS.

I built a NAS with the following config

AMD FX 4100 3.6 Ghz
Asus M5A88-M motherboard
WD Caviar Blue 500 GB HDD
Seagate Barracuda 3 TB HDD x 2
Corsair CMPSU-600CX
Corsair Vengeance DDR3 4 GB
NZXT Source 210 Elite
(all except for the NZXT bought from flipkart)

The NZXT was chosen because it has 8x3.5" drive bays. It also has 3x5.25" bays. Of course, the M5A88-M only has 6 SATA ports, so I am still figuring out how to accommodate more than 6 drives

I installed Windows 7 on the 500 GB and installed FlexRaid
I used one 3 TB as a parity drive and the other for storage. I already had 2x2TB drives from an older computer, which are also used for storage.
But I did not do storage pooling like haisaikat did. I wanted to keep drives separate - one for movies, one for tvshows and so on. All the 3 drives are shared

I have the NAS connected by LAN cable to my WiFi N router.
My HTPC is connected to the network using WiFi

The reasons for using a Windows based config was exactly the same as haisaikat's - no time or energy to learn Unix and the flexibility of Windows. You can use torrents or JDownloader or media server or an SQL server if you so wanted :)

My data speeds over WiFi are nowhere close to what you get over Gigabit LAN. I get about 6 Mbps between the HTPC and the NAS. It works perfectly for streaming 720p or 1080p

I had been toying with the idea of a media server. Thanks for the heads up on Serviio. Will give it a shot.

[Edit] Today morning I was copying something to the laptop and I got speeds of 8 Mbps [/Edit]
 
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Congrats grunthos, enjoy your new machine and do post some pics.

Regarding your other points my take below
1. You can expand for more sata ports b adding a separate pci e raid card with more sata ports. I guess you can also decide to keep some of the drives mobile by using usb ports. Also pay attention to hard disk temperature control.

2. If you are still using the trial flexraid then remeber that if you do purchase the license, it takes upto a week for them to email the key.

3. Remember that a media server should be chosen depending on the clients it needs to serve, in my case it was serviio since it was best in terms of making my pana tv play almost all videos. Otherwise twonky is also good. Same for plex.

Sent from my Veedee E10 using Tapatalk 2
 
haisaikat said:
Congrats grunthos, enjoy your new machine and do post some pics.

Regarding your other points my take below
1. You can expand for more sata ports b adding a separate pci e raid card with more sata ports. I guess you can also decide to keep some of the drives mobile by using usb ports. Also pay attention to hard disk temperature control.

2. If you are still using the trial flexraid then remeber that if you do purchase the license, it takes upto a week for them to email the key.

3. Remember that a media server should be chosen depending on the clients it needs to serve, in my case it was serviio since it was best in terms of making my pana tv play almost all videos. Otherwise twonky is also good. Same for plex.

Sent from my Veedee E10 using Tapatalk 2
Click to expand...

Hey,
I actually built my rig around end of Aug. Its been a sweet 4 months so far

1. Thanks for the info about PCI-E card with SATA ports. Right now I have used only about 4.5 GB out of my 7GB plugged in, so I dont need the extra SATA ports in a hurry

2. I bought Flexraid from day ONE. I lost two hard drives in crashes within 2 weeks of each other (I was being a cheapo and using the PSU that came with my old noname case, which wasnt able to power the 3 drives). Data from one was recovered at okayish cost. The other one needed to recovered destructively - platter by platter - which was working out too expensive, and I lost all the data on it. That spurred me to build the whole NAS with data backup built in - I am not taking chances with data again. (I also learnt my lesson and used good components and a powerful PSU)

3. Since my primary mode of consumption is an HTPC (running XBMC over Win7), I dont really need a media server. Its more a cool thing to try out - or maybe it will be a thing to show off to friends when they are over at our place. Fortunately me and wife are usually on the same page as to what to watch in the evenings :D , so the HTPC works out really well

Serviio is trawling through my library as we speak. Once its done refreshing, I will check it if it works as it should

What software do you use to track hard drive temperatures ?
 
For measuring hdd temperature you can use the options given in flexraid control panel. Those are more than sufficient. Check the last two images on my first post of this thread

However for read or write throughput tests try Intel NAS Performance Toolkit, my results are in this post



Sent from my Galaxy Pro Duos via Tapatalk
 
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haisaikat said:
I have been a windows guy since beginning and do not have the time in today's busy life to learn unix commands (even if from the excellant and extensive support forums) to do something out of the way and not supported by the Unraid GUI or any of its addons off-the-shelf

1. auto share of USB connected drives without any configuration

2. use any media server without thinking whether there will be portability issues

3. use custom transcoding for media server support if required, at least research can be done easily, on unix platform there will be N tweaks on adding n lines in n files (at least to a unix noob like me). On some forums the start line is like below when it comes to add-ons "It is IMPORTANT to note that all of the projects and scripts below are UNOFFICIAL and possibly UNSUPPORTED". I know many of them do work and have excellant community support but I have to learn unix to tweak them if required and if possible. Please note that I have also used DLink DNS 323 NAS for many years which is also run on a UNIX based OS and I have struggled to tweak it beyond what is offered off-the-shelf.

4. If I want a custom access protocol like FTP etc that I need to implement and is not natively supported by OS I can very well get the best user friendly freeware on net supported on my Windows platform and start using it, no worries on compatibilities and features offered since I have a plenty to chose from.

5. I can re-use the same box for other purposes like running media conversion, media ripping, streaming file downloader (youtube, etc) without dedicating the PC box completely.

6. Last but not the least, in Flexraid if I remove it, I get back my data in the underlying physical drives / partitions in NTFS formatted filesystem ready to be read / backed up easily which is not the case with Unraid.

Please also note, I do not mean to hurt sentiments of Unraid or UNIX lovers since I followed sam-s thread to come to this point who has made his journey on UNIX and Unraid only
Click to expand...

No question of hurting any sentiments Bro, absolutely valid points, and I support you on this all the way. Finally one member with me on the DIY NAS family. I have been waiting for like ages for some member from Hifi to join me in the DIY NAS catagory (DIY HTPC loads but not DIY NAS).

I would like to add or infact confirm few points in addition to what you wrote ...

1. Native USB drive support is not out of the box provided by unraid, so thats one supposedly questionable drawback. but for me it was not an issue as I used to connect my USB drive to USB 3 port of my laptop or PC and then access it via Unraid (on Cat5e), giving me blazing copy speeds.(50MBps + all the time)

2. There was no compatibility issue with any media server I installed. I used PLEX, Serviio and SqueezeBox server all worked in one simple go. However SBS is the one I stuck, coz of its performance and compatibility.

Video streaming is something I do not do on internet (i.e from out side my LAN), so PLEX and Serviio took a back seat. for Audio streaming SBS worked best.

3. Custom transcoding did require to install LAME on Unraid and yes it did require to run few commands on Unix command line, but tweaking was simple as that was done via SBS itself.

4. FTP and infact SFPT are natively supported by Unraid. no configurations required, but yes I agree with you on the other aspect of TP plgins requiring the same Unix familiarity.

5. Absolutely valid points, Unraid is headless server (infact most of NAS boxes are) so you cannot use it for anything else except for what it offers as a NAS media box (Synology Diskstation simply excels in this department.)

I am in the process of writing a comprehensive review and product dissection of my next NAS project which is a prebuilt NAS by Synology (DS 413j) and I must say, infact request and insist people looking for a NAS to build (who do not want to take DIY route), to wait for my insight on that product. It is simply mind-blowing. The level of things and out of the box customization DSM 4.1 on DS offers is purely commendable, and most of it would take ages n ages to configure on any DIY NAS.

Plus there are things you can do with DS, which I could not even dream of achieving on my Unraid. Wait for it ...... :)

haisaikat said:
I have finally settled with Serviio as the UPNP Media Server for my NAS since its free version serves almost all purpose including on the fly transcoding of video and audio and makes everything play on my Panasonic Viera Plasma TV (although Panasonic manual says Twonky but I faced some severe problems with Twonky for ffmpeg transcoding). Now I turn on my HTPC only if needed and for all casual viewing like TV Shows or Music Videos or SD Movies I am using the TV-s built in DLNA player.

I will post later (either here or on a separate thread) on the features of Serviio and its comparison with Twonky and Media Monkey that I had tried.
Click to expand...

I was about to suggest you Serviio over Twonky, but I guess you found it. Do you use UPnP for video streaming?, I mean for audio I understand, but for Videos, I have always preferred my HTPC with XBMC. If over the internet (out side your LAN) is what you stream videos to, then my question would be, are you able to stream videos smoothly.? I couldnt...... even though my upload is 1mbps and 3G is 3-4Mbps, I still could not make even a low bit rate DVD rip stream flawlessly with either Serviio or PLEX from my office.

One more suggestion, if you are running multiple UPnP servers do try Bubble UPnp on your NAS. First It combines all UPnP servers running in one package. and second more imp, foobar supports UPnP streaming from internet (outside your LAN) with Bubble UPnP. So yo can stream audio via foobar on Bubble UPnP.

manniraj said:
Even I was looking around to build a NAS based on either FreeNAS or UnRAID based on sam9s thread but both of them its a pain to configure (unless you know/dedicate the time/effort for unix commands) and use it. I build it with FreeNAS but never was able to use it to the fullest extent. So dropped the idea and instead built the music-pc with the same components. Now I got the ODAC assembled so even the music-pc has become redundant as I am using my existing htpc for both movies/music playback.

Having 2 minds either to sell off the PC or use it similar to what haisaikat has done.

thanks
Click to expand...

Manniraj, I seriously suggest to go for a prebuilt NAS like the diskstation, if you do feel a bit uneasy on all that configuration part. As I said I have been using DS413j extensively as I have to write a professional review on it, I now almost know the in and out of the product (very much like I know for Unraid), so ita very Unbiased, sincere suggestion, go for a pre built NAS.
 
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sam9s said:
Manniraj, I seriously suggest to go for a prebuilt NAS like the diskstation, if you do feel a bit uneasy on all that configuration part. As I said I have been using DS413j extensively as I have to write a professional review on it, I now almost know the in and out of the product (very much like I know for Unraid), so ita very Unbiased, sincere suggestion, go for a pre built NAS.
Click to expand...

Yes Sam whenever I get the sufficient moolah :lol: will surely consider the pre-built NAS route. Eagerly waiting for your write up on the Synology.

Thanks
 
@sam, I too soon will be joining you guys on the DIY NAS. I am going with unRaid and I got all parts bought and delivered. Now, I need to find time to put all together between my work and son :-)

Again thanks Sam for the wonderful write up on unRaid and @haisaikat thanks for this wonderful thread on flexraid. I thought about it a lot and finally went with unRaid , one reason being little bit more geeky :-)
 
sam9s said:
3. Custom transcoding did require to install LAME on Unraid and yes it did require to run few commands on Unix command line, but tweaking was simple as that was done via SBS itself.
Click to expand...

Even I have found custom transcoding unless supported out of the box is time taking to get to working in these servers, I dropped Twonky since after hours of speding behind it to configure custom transcoding I found that it spawns several child ffmpeg processes and never terminates them, one for each playback and that too including previews. Serviio was way better in supporting these out of the box with ffmpeg (no seprate install required) but one thing that I found to be better in twonky was its speed of adding files in the library, kind of instant if I share a path with lot of videos / audio. But in Serviio it take around aminute for individual movies at least (2 GB files). So far I can live with that since this is one time. I have pointed the temp folder of Serviio to a 16 GB Pen Drive for the time being until I fully figure out how on-the-fly transcoding will impact SSD life.


sam9s said:
I was about to suggest you Serviio over Twonky, but I guess you found it. Do you use UPnP for video streaming?, I mean for audio I understand, but for Videos, I have always preferred my HTPC with XBMC. If over the internet (out side your LAN) is what you stream videos to, then my question would be, are you able to stream videos smoothly.? I couldnt...... even though my upload is 1mbps and 3G is 3-4Mbps, I still could not make even a low bit rate DVD rip stream flawlessly with either Serviio or PLEX from my office.
Click to expand...

I do not do any streaming outside lan. But the main reason to install a separate media server was to make my Panasonic TV-s in built UPNP player work since the TV was already on my LAN. I opted for this since to me for casual viewing of SD content like TV Series and Regional Movies or Cartoon it seems to me a lot putting HTPC on, along with keeping Denon AVR on standby to allow passthrough of the video signal (HTPC is connected to AVR directly). Hence I thought keeping going the media server option which would also imply using only 1 PC (NAS only) at these times instead of 2. I agree that PQ with XBMC is far better.

sam9s said:
One more suggestion, if you are running multiple UPnP servers do try Bubble UPnp on your NAS. First It combines all UPnP servers running in one package. and second more imp, foobar supports UPnP streaming from internet (outside your LAN) with Bubble UPnP. So yo can stream audio via foobar on Bubble UPnP.
Click to expand...

I have bubble UPNP on my Veedee tab and Adroid cell phone where I use it for browing contenst shared by NAS but never used it as a stand alone Server. Will use it surely. On tabs it is just media browser but does not play all things on its own and prompts to use another external player , I use Rock Player mostly for cell phone (in conjunction with Bubble-UNP) and aVia player stand alone on Tablet.
 
sam9s said:
No question of hurting any sentiments Bro, absolutely valid points, and I support you on this all the way. Finally one member with me on the DIY NAS family. I have been waiting for like ages for some member from Hifi to join me in the DIY NAS catagory (DIY HTPC loads but not DIY NAS).

I would like to add or infact confirm few points in addition to what you wrote ...

1. Native USB drive support is not out of the box provided by unraid, so thats one supposedly questionable drawback. but for me it was not an issue as I used to connect my USB drive to USB 3 port of my laptop or PC and then access it via Unraid (on Cat5e), giving me blazing copy speeds.(50MBps + all the time)

2. There was no compatibility issue with any media server I installed. I used PLEX, Serviio and SqueezeBox server all worked in one simple go. However SBS is the one I stuck, coz of its performance and compatibility.

Video streaming is something I do not do on internet (i.e from out side my LAN), so PLEX and Serviio took a back seat. for Audio streaming SBS worked best.

3. Custom transcoding did require to install LAME on Unraid and yes it did require to run few commands on Unix command line, but tweaking was simple as that was done via SBS itself.

4. FTP and infact SFPT are natively supported by Unraid. no configurations required, but yes I agree with you on the other aspect of TP plgins requiring the same Unix familiarity.

5. Absolutely valid points, Unraid is headless server (infact most of NAS boxes are) so you cannot use it for anything else except for what it offers as a NAS media box (Synology Diskstation simply excels in this department.)

I am in the process of writing a comprehensive review and product dissection of my next NAS project which is a prebuilt NAS by Synology (DS 413j) and I must say, infact request and insist people looking for a NAS to build (who do not want to take DIY route), to wait for my insight on that product. It is simply mind-blowing. The level of things and out of the box customization DSM 4.1 on DS offers is purely commendable, and most of it would take ages n ages to configure on any DIY NAS.

Plus there are things you can do with DS, which I could not even dream of achieving on my Unraid. Wait for it ...... :)



I was about to suggest you Serviio over Twonky, but I guess you found it. Do you use UPnP for video streaming?, I mean for audio I understand, but for Videos, I have always preferred my HTPC with XBMC. If over the internet (out side your LAN) is what you stream videos to, then my question would be, are you able to stream videos smoothly.? I couldnt...... even though my upload is 1mbps and 3G is 3-4Mbps, I still could not make even a low bit rate DVD rip stream flawlessly with either Serviio or PLEX from my office.

One more suggestion, if you are running multiple UPnP servers do try Bubble UPnp on your NAS. First It combines all UPnP servers running in one package. and second more imp, foobar supports UPnP streaming from internet (outside your LAN) with Bubble UPnP. So yo can stream audio via foobar on Bubble UPnP.



Manniraj, I seriously suggest to go for a prebuilt NAS like the diskstation, if you do feel a bit uneasy on all that configuration part. As I said I have been using DS413j extensively as I have to write a professional review on it, I now almost know the in and out of the product (very much like I know for Unraid), so ita very Unbiased, sincere suggestion, go for a pre built NAS.
Click to expand...

Can you share where and how much you bought the DS413j for? I am thinking of adding another one, wondering if its available locally.
 
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