HA Server Hardware review

[IVB]

RAID 0 for C: (OS drive) or Un-RAIDed
RAID 5 for Data

RAID 1 - Never
I have never head justification for RAID 1, it is the least cost efficient of any RAID level (that provides data security).

My belief is that hard drives are already dying by the time I buy them, the only question is it 1 yr out or 5. Hence, I use RAID1 to mirror my boot disk for *when* it fails.

That way, I don't have to do a thing to rebuild the machine - it'll failover, i'll get an alert, then i'll drive to compusa and pick up another one and be back up to protect against hard drive failure.

Those drives are typically no more than $50 each in the size I get (smallest SATA I can find) as they're just boot disks, the $50 is worth me not doing a thing on failure.

 

[asteinmetz]

Well while i continue to agonize over the software decision, i've come to the conclusion my 600 athlon with 20G ata HD isn't gonna cut it... my mp3's skip when i move the mouse over jriver's window. not good! plus my music doesn't fit on the drive....

I built all my other boxes we have from scratch with the backbone currently consisting of Asus A8N-SLI + Athlon 64 ...

Perhaps I'm missing something but who says all your functionality has to be in one box? Why not just dedicate your slow box to the HA software and build your new box just for video and audio? IVB has a block diagram of his setup showing how he separates the functions and it looks pretty smart.

I am just designing my HA/HT system now but I already have a couple Squeezeboxes for music delivery. I am considering their Terabyte ReadyNAS/Squeezebox bundle. The NAS is a Linux box that comes preloaded with the Slimserver software. Serving the music doesn't take as many CPU cycles as decoding it but I'm using dedicated players anyway. The risk for me is I don't speak Linux and won't be able to do any troubleshooting.

 

[MikeB]

RAID-5 spans this protection over multiple (3 or more) drives, in order to increase performance. Typically, RAID-5 is only used on servers that have extremelly high disk IO (pretty unlikely need on a home computer unless you are recording multiple video streams at the same time).

The big advantage to RAID 5 is lower cost to protect a larger amount of data from a single drive failure. While read performance on a RAID5 array is good, write performance suffers.

My belief is that hard drives are already dying by the time I buy them, the only question is it 1 yr out or 5. Hence, I use RAID1 to mirror my boot disk for *when* it fails.

That way, I don't have to do a thing to rebuild the machine - it'll failover, i'll get an alert, then i'll drive to compusa and pick up another one and be back up to protect against hard drive failure.

Those drives are typically no more than $50 each in the size I get (smallest SATA I can find) as they're just boot disks, the $50 is worth me not doing a thing on failure.

Absolutely. If you don't want to rebuild it because of a drive failure, or you want to help reduce any potential downtime, setup a RAID 1 mirror. Even with a Ghost backup, you will have unscheduled downtime if a drive fails. And drives fail ALL the time.

 

[shenandoah75]

Art,

basically, until i make a firm call on the HA package, it's premature, but in my opinion, running ML/CQC/Jriver/Girder, etc on this box in varrying combinations, Jriver is in deed the big hog. H/A is secondary importance to me since all i really want it to fire tasks/etc in the elk. That should be minimal overhead in my opinion (ignoring for a second how the packages actually achieve it)

If i need to offset the HA stuff later, i can, but will the dual-core cpu, i personally doubt i will / hope i wont need to..

thx
-brad

 

[IVB]

actually I think Art has a great point - with CQC, that Athlon may be good enough. You won't need JRMC as with V2.2 there's an mp3 scanner, so there's no hoggy apps. How's the trial download running now?

If you're really not doing anything other than HA and audio rendering on that box, even a C2D 4300 is waaaay overkill. Seriously, my AMD2500Barton worked just fine for 18 months. Your Athlon 600 may indeed be good enough, and the $$ saved would be like getting CQC for free.

And with that thought, even buying hardware might be premature until you decide what you want to run on it.

 

[Sacedog]

RAID 0 for C: (OS drive) or Un-RAIDed
RAID 5 for Data

RAID 1 - Never
RAID 10 (0+1) - Never
RAID 3 - Never

I have never head justification for RAID 1, it is the least cost efficient of any RAID level (that provides data security).

If it is not a gaming or video machine, no point in RAIDing the OS drive unless you just "wanna do it". If you do, just two cheap drives is fine for anything short of a topshelf gaming rig.

Most of my machines I don't RAID the C: and Use RAID 5 for D:

RAID 0 is good for up to 4 drives, performance wise. And will ensure you LOSE your data sooner or later so don't put anything but Reloadable crap on it.

RAID 5 will start at 3 drives (33% of cost goes to parity, but better than the 100% cost of raid 1). If you have OCE, you can add more hard drives later. Every drive you add to RAID 5 lowers the % cost of the parity drive... At 8 drives, you are only spending 12.5% on parity...


I like mITX, but find it way too expensive now, just buy a Core 2 Duo in a case like those Antec's cases. 65W of heat does not require a CPU fan, just a cover and rear fan (BTX).


Vaughn

Why would you never use RAID1. It is a MORE cost effective way to protect data over RAID5, since you are using 1 less disk, and as I stated before, RAID5 only gives you performance over RAID1; they both protect your data.

I have configured servers for over 13 years now, and I can guarentee that RAID1 is useful and widely used. A typical SQL or Oracle database server will use RAID1 for the OS partition, another RAID1 for the rollback log partition, and RAID5 for the actual database. Why? Because RAID1 protects the OS and rollback logs from a hard drive failure...but they certainly do not need the additional performance boost that is gained from RAID5. You also save money, as you do not need to purchase an additional drive for those partitions.

IMO, it is a waste of the additional $50 for a small SATA drive, to give yourself RAID5 for an OS partition. You will NEVER use the performance gained over RAID1, on that partition.

 

[shenandoah75]

And with that thought, even buying hardware might be premature until you decide what you want to run on it.

Man, did i know that was coming!

Demo's are ok... at this point, i think i've demoed as much as i need to with ML... I need to wait for Harleydude's release of his latest elk drivers for continuing with Girder. That leaves CQC - and there i'm good on the basics, i just need a few tips if you have 15 minutes or so some night this week. Maybe tonight/thurs (EST) - pm me if either of those work...

thx
-brad



btw you're right on the savings, except for the licensing... I plan on living here 15years minimum. That's 1500 bucks minimum just for the yearly license.... still a possibility though depending on the continued trial (or should that be trials - hehe)

 

[shenandoah75]

sacedog,

given that commentary,what's your opinion my post "Today, 12:43 PM "

-brad

 

[Sacedog]

sacedog,

given that commentary,what's your opinion my post "Today, 12:43 PM "

-brad

I think that if you are going to use the same logical disk for multiple partitions, and one of those partitions has a lot of data, it would probably be worthwhile. Personally, with the speed of a SATA 10k drive (even the 7.2k ones), read/write speeds should not be an issue in almost all home computing scenarios; so I would consider RAID1, but once again...just my opinion.

Whichever way you go, make sure to still perform regular backups. RAID is great, but you still have many single points of failure that can mess up your data. More than once, I have seen a RAID controller corrupt the data on an array, rendering it all useless. Granted, that was a long time ago, and hardware is much better these days...but you can never be too safe.

 

[IVB]

, i just need a few tips if you have 15 minutes or so some night this week. Maybe tonight/thurs (EST) - pm me if either of those work...

tonight is awesome, i totally phased on turning on my AIM/yahoo, i'll do that now.

btw you're right on the savings, except for the licensing... I plan on living here 15years minimum. That's 1500 bucks minimum just for the yearly license.... still a possibility though depending on the continued trial (or should that be trials - hehe)

Keep in mind that you get future upgrades for that price, so it's not just a licensing fee. To be a fair comparison, you'd have to compare to the cost of upgrading the other packages. Most folks I've PM'ed spent $200 on the last ML upgrade, which came 2 years after the prior release. At that rate, you'd be dead even on a licensing cost perspective.

In the end, i'd recommend picking whichever package you understand the best and works best for you both short term and growth wise- the cost difference between any of these packages over that timeframe is negligible.

 

[shenandoah75]

fyi - I guess my struggles with using the current athlon 600 are related to the MB limitations... No Raid, No Sata... So i'm gonna have to invest in a larger ATA drive for the music storage and i would get no redundancy / protection from failure w/o buying an external raid card. That is unless i buy a CD changer or two controlled by the H/A app in which case i need nothing additional at all).

I like saving money though... but the athlon certainly can serve my kids (6 and under) probably better the the PIII 300 they have now...

decisions, decisions...


IVB - quick question... So if i use this as a hybrid cqc box runing the server and the interface viewer - still no issues? I noticed while playing around with the media pages this weekend, that the viewer would grap 98+% of cpu and became very slow - wouldn't respond to mouse clicks, etc... Happened twice, killing it seemed to improve (i was running admin/designer/brownsers at the same time) (and this is on a laptop with a 1.86 M/!G of ram)

thx
-brad

 

[shenandoah75]

also on the O/S... do i care if i get Xp/Home for HA when i don't plan on needing Ms's media center stuff? by the 100, llooks like you're assuming home?

(i currently run 2000 pro on most of my machines)

thx
-brad

 

[kayemsi]

also on the O/S... do i care if i get Xp/Home for HA when i don't plan on needing Ms's media center stuff? by the 100, llooks like you're assuming home?

(i currently run 2000 pro on most of my machines)

thx
-brad

If you will use a touchscreen type device that needs RDP, then don't get XP/Home as it does not support it. Xp/Pro and Xp/MCE both do and Vista/business and Vista/Ultimate do as well.

 

[IVB]

IVB - quick question... So if i use this as a hybrid cqc box runing the server and the interface viewer - still no issues? I noticed while playing around with the media pages this weekend, that the viewer would grap 98+% of cpu and became very slow - wouldn't respond to mouse clicks, etc... Happened twice, killing it seemed to improve (i was running admin/designer/browsers at the same time) (and this is on a laptop with a 1.86 M/!G of ram)

I'm trying to reach into the 'way back' machine, when I was using that AMD2500, but I just can't remember how much stuff was on that box. You should ask over on the CQC forum what the weakest server/viewer machine is that folks are using with the current version.

I constantly run CQC Server/admin/designer/browsers/etc on my 1.6GHz Celeron/1.25GB RAM laptop, but that's not the master server so there's a few less processes on it.

also on the O/S... do i care if i get Xp/Home for HA when i don't plan on needing Ms's media center stuff? by the 100, llooks like you're assuming home?

Yes assuming home, no you don't care. I use XPHome for almost all my machines. I would think W2K would work, but again i'd check on the forums before purchasing anything.

 

[shenandoah75]

fyi... Final specs as ordered:

HD: 80G|ST 7K 8M SATA2 ST380815AS % - $42.99 (used for boot)
HD: 250G|ST 7K 16M SATA2 ST3250620AS - (3) @$209.97 total (used for raid5 / storage)
MB: INTEL BOXDG965WHMKR G965 775 - $124.99
CPU: INTEL|C2D E4300 1.8G 775 2M R - $117.00
MEM: 1G|KST DII800 KHX6400D2LL/1G R - $71.99
DVD_ROM: SONY|DDU1615/B2s BK % - $17.99
MS WIN XP PRO W/SP2B SINGLE PACK % - $139.99 (indeed, i will likely want a portable airpanel, equivalent someday in the HT/Family room)
CPU FAN: A/IZALMAN CNPS7700-ALCU RT - $33.99

Antec TAKE 4 Quiet 4U Rackmount 450W ATX12V @ $233.73 each (wife definately wants in-wall recessed rackmount of the equipment)

plus the maudio-410 i have...



thx for all the advice... might have spent a little more than needed but would rather have than condition than noisy ATA hds, etc

-brad