16 hard drives, 1 case

[rsw686]

It probably uses a combination of the SMART data and actual failures when reading/writing data to the drives. Verify should be the same as a scrub. The process involves reading the data, calculating the parity, and verifying it matches the written parity. If a memory bit flip occurred the parity would not match. If you were rebuilding from a failed drive that stripe of data would be corrupted. You will hard pressed to find a server without ECC memory.
 
I wouldn't go buying a new system just for ECC memory. When I mentioned horror stories I should have put that in the paragraph above. Most commonly you see large arrays with only one parity drive where another drive failed during rebuild. Second you will see multiple drive failures from running an array for years with no scrubs. Lastly is ECC memory. The chance is low that a bit flip will occur. I have 8GB ECC memory and no memory errors have been detected in the 6 years it has been running. I have another box with 24GB ECC memory with no issues either. At work I've seen one server have an ECC memory error where we ended up replacing the memory. However if you do decide to split the system into separate boxes I would opt for ECC memory.
 
You mentioned you are only seeing 160MB/s with FlexRAID. Gigabit ethernet provides 100MB/s which is plenty fast for streaming video. If speed is your thing I would look at a solution besides FlexRAID. I am seeing 190MB/s reading data from 4 drives. With the number of drives you have it should easily hit 400-800MB/s.

 

[pete_c]

Interesting read here folks....
 
The pictured endeavor was more related to a small footprint NAS box with a mini-itx motherboard and trying to fit (and I was able to) a FW upgraded IBM M1015 to LSL SATA card.  I picked the AMD based mITX board mostly because I wanted to give it a try.  Recently here only had been using Intel based motherboards (both mITX and standard sized ones).
 
Yup; here have my NAS boxes separated a bit with different media and data content per box/NAS.
 
I did originally stream video at the box connected to the LCDs.  I switched to pure streaming from the NAS box these days.
 
I have too migrated from the chrooted tweaked very small NMT's to now very small Aopen Digitial Engines running XBMC. (probably a bit overkill these days but it works for me).  Nothing fancy really and the HD content looks good to me from these boxes.

 

[etc6849]

The Flexraid setup is in snapshot mode, not realtime raid mode.  I haven't used realtime raid, but there are options that would greatly increase the speed.  However, since I'm not storing a database or files that may change or be edited, I opted for snapshot mode where parity is only periodically calculated and verified.
 
Snapshot mode is only as fast as one disk.  This is because when snapshot mode is used, Flexraid figures out where to stick the entire file and spins up only that particular drive!  This means a lot less heat is generated.  Flexraid never splits your files in any way, which is also something I like.  This means that you can pull any drive from the array and access the content on another PC without any special software.  This is vastly superior to traditional software raid IMHO as I can lose more than the number of parity drives and still have most of my data (that can be read by any PC), provided some common cause failure doesn't take out all my drives.
 
The 160MB/s is if I copy from HDD to HDD.  If I copy from an SSD to one of the array's HDDs, I get ~180MB/s (I tested this last night with a 38GB file).
 

You mentioned you are only seeing 160MB/s with FlexRAID. Gigabit ethernet provides 100MB/s which is plenty fast for streaming video. If speed is your thing I would look at a solution besides FlexRAID. I am seeing 190MB/s reading data from 4 drives. With the number of drives you have it should easily hit 400-800MB/s.

 

[etc6849]

So Aopen makes that NAS box in your pictures?
 

I did originally stream video at the box connected to the LCDs.  I switched to pure streaming from the NAS box these days.
 
I have too migrated from the chrooted tweaked very small NMT's to now very small Aopen Digitial Engines running XBMC. (probably a bit overkill these days but it works for me).  Nothing fancy really and the HD content looks good to me from these boxes.

 

[pete_c]

No.  The NAS box is using an Asus AMD CPU on an Asus M35M1-I.  This is Asus' answer to the low power Intel Atom based motherboards.
 
A mITX board is all that would fit in the small NAS case.  It is utilized headless.
 
Aopen Digital Engines serves the media directly to the MM/LCD TV's via a micro mini PC (before the Mac Mini). 
 
An Ubuntu OS 64bit build is serving up MythTV with 5 tuners.  Works well on a BCM "industrial" media mITX board in a small footprint case (but its also headless).
 
I purchased commercial style Aopen Digital engines (got a deal).  These are similiar but smaller than laptop motherboards.  The one next to the main LCD TV used to run Microsoft Media Center and has a little miniature tuner, Blue tooth module, hard drive and DVD combo player.  Today though its just running XBMC OS; not really needing the hard drive these days.  Its more of a workhorse PC and not fancy and is very plan looking.

 

[etc6849]

Nice setup!
 
I think I've seen the Aopen digital engines running the displays at a McDonald's that was recently built.  They do look small...
 
I upgraded my motherboard to a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 and it boots with all cards installed (video card, 8x AOC-SAS2LP-MV8, 8x LSI 9201-16e).  The motherboard has plenty of room for expansion with multiple 16x and 8x slots (almost as many as the higher end server boards).  
 
I'm going to run two SAS2LP-MV8's and sell my cheap $54 case.  Having the fans on the outside of the box just made too much noise for my home theater.  I'll post some pictures when I get everything running.

 

[pete_c]

I upgraded my motherboard to a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 and it boots with all cards installed (video card, 8x AOC-SAS2LP-MV8, 8x LSI 9201-16e).  The motherboard has plenty of room for expansion with multiple 16x and 8x slots (almost as many as the higher end server boards).

Great news etc6849!  Did a quick Google search.  Very impressive reviews and motherboard.
 
Yeah the AOpen DE's I got are very industrial looking with a plain metal case; nothing fancy. Interesting that I purchased them as new old stock with a few of the non commercial Aopen Mini PCs (hot spares) all with embedded wintel / licenses from an advertising company that went out of business. (purchased in bulk at a great price). 

 

[etc6849]

They sound like great XBMC machines. I'm close to switching to XBMC once they flesh out their blu-ray player (2D and 3D, menus, bd live, etc...).  That or I'm going to have an HDMI switcher run off two PC's.
 
Here's a few pics of what everything looks like.  It's much cleaner having everything in one case, plus now I have hard drive activity lights to identify which drive is which if I have issues.  Now to dump what I can't return on Craigslist/ebay...
 
 

 

 

[pete_c]

Very nice.
 
Your endeavor got me playing some more with my MythTV box. 
 
Personally I do not watch TV in general. 
 
I recently decided to start searching EPG stuff for some old TV shows and have scheduled recordings / storage. 
 
I am using schedules direct for the EPG and noticed huge difference between those schedules and the broadcast EIT scheduling provided by the broadcasters.  (that and I am playing with multiple tuners in the box)
 
Trying to keep the footprint of the MythTV box small.  RIght now just have a 1Tb 2.5" SATA drive in it.  Might increase that to 2Gb and compare the live recording to recording to a NAS setup just for recorded TV stuff.
 
So far the recordings are fine and seeing some 1Gb or more for 30 minutes to 60 minute recordings.

 

[etc6849]

1TB is plenty.  WMC recordings are much larger, a one hour should can easily be 4-6GB!  There's a lot of conversion tools, so it's not too big of a deal...
 
The only reason for my large number of drives is I use the My Movies in WMC to automatically load blu-rays in ISO format and DVDs in folder format.  It's a pretty nice system.  A movie's metadata is stored both in the cloud and locally.  This means I can scan the movies with my phone and later link the ISO files to the movie database entry on the PC.  My Movies also runs in server mode, so other PC's running WMC can play the ISO files.  The other software required is AnyDVD HD (to backup legal movie copies, only needed on the My Movies server), Arcsoft TotalMediaTheater or PowerDVD (to play the ISO, needed on each PC), and Daemon Tools or Virtual Clone Drive (to handle ISOs, needed on each PC).
 
It's similar to a Kaleidescape system, but much more powerful.  Kaleidescape is limited to not decrypting Blu-rays, which means they load movies super slow (via a disc changer) and also have to deal with HDCP (which really sucks too).