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  1. #21
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    Thanks everyone for the advice, I think i will probably go down the Unraid route, i havent actually used Seagate drives too much but my current NAS boxes have Western Digital Red drives in them so I suppose I should stick with the tried and tested regardless of the extra few pennies they will cost.

    Will definitely be asking you guys for advice once I get the server up and running, however probably looking like it will be done after Xmas due to (hopefully) moving house.

    The mrs is letting me keep some money back from the house sale so that I can upgrade my servers so I may end up upgrading the drives in my 2x Gen8 servers and selling off my 8TB N54L
    You know he grew up as a little shitspark from the old shitflint and then he turned into a shitbonfire and driven by the winds of his monumental ignorance he turned into a raging shitfirestorm. If I get to be married to Barb I'll have total control of Sunnyvale and then I can unleash the shitnami tidal wave that will engulf Ricky and extinguish his shitflames forever. And with any luck he'll drown in the undershit of that wave. Shitwaves.

  2. #22
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    I got a system up and running earlier today and just dipped my toe into unraid.

    Typically of the 2 motherboards I scrounged from work, the gigabyte high quality one wouldn't boot from USB, while the Soyo branded one did, I dont think either will have the gusto to fullfil the requirements anyway, but its great to play with unraid and see just how inadequate the hardware is before I look at buying new.

    So far, so good.

    Thanks to all that have contributed so far

  3. #23
    DF Admin Teajunkie's Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    Although the unraid route looks a good one for me I just can’t move over yet
    I just don’t want to lose all my data when formatting the drives.

    If if anyone else has an idea of how to move?
    Have you joined the DF discord server. https://discord.com/invite/YajVGQxDaw

  4. #24
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    Quote Originally Posted by Teajunkie View Post
    Although the unraid route looks a good one for me I just can’t move over yet
    I just don’t want to lose all my data when formatting the drives.

    If if anyone else has an idea of how to move?
    Hi
    I bought one big drive that I was upgrading at the time and moved one drive at a time. I had and still do a spare server, which you would be welcome to borrow if you lived more locally, however you would have to pay shipping both ways as you are a long way from Norfolk.
    LS
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    Thanks to Lou_smorals

    Teajunkie (23rd November 2017)  


  5. #25
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    threw 2 x 3tb red drives into the box to test it out and after watching a few noob youtube vids, set it to format them before I went to bed. That was 20 hours ago and the first of the two still ain't completed formatting. Is this normal? I read a few posts on forums saying it took 5 hours to format a 2tb, so obvioulsy its not a task to sip a cuppa over but 20 f'kin hours can't be right.

  6. #26
    DF VIP Member Rhinoz's Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    Quote Originally Posted by {{909}} View Post
    threw 2 x 3tb red drives into the box to test it out and after watching a few noob youtube vids, set it to format them before I went to bed. That was 20 hours ago and the first of the two still ain't completed formatting. Is this normal? I read a few posts on forums saying it took 5 hours to format a 2tb, so obvioulsy its not a task to sip a cuppa over but 20 f'kin hours can't be right.
    I thought windows long format does a read only check of the entire drive before doing a 'quick format', that check takes hours and is mostly pointless on a new drive, I take it these are not new drives?

  7. #27
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    brand new, just took em out the antistatic bag, straight into the unraid box. Would it have been better to format em in a windars box first?

  8. #28
    DF VIP Member Rhinoz's Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    When hard drives were smaller I would do a full format on new drives but as drives have got bigger and time takes longer I've not bothered and do a quick format instead, I could have just been lucky and not had any bad sectors so far.

  9. #29
    DF VIP Member Over Carl's Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    If it's just a test build that's one thing, but it's a good idea to test drives as thoroughly as possible before setting up a RAID.

    In theory RAID should allow us a little bit of redundancy. However this is going on the assumption we are dealing with a good set of drives.

    Could end up in total data loss if one drive fails, then at rebuild time another drive is found to be faulty. (Yes I have had brand new faulty drives more than once).

    Depending on the RAID type/controller, even a "working" sector that takes a few attempts to retry could make a drive drop offline (read into TLER).

  10. #30
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    I went to work and came back to see the system was still reporting that it hadn't finished formatting so I rebooted and they all reported formatted and working, so I guess it was a refresh issue.

    I tested it briefly with some 10gb 1080p files and apart from the occasional few seconds of buffering, it seemed to work pretty well. This could be down to the fact that my router isn't gigabit too, which I didn't realise until now.

    I'm guessing this will be adequate for the school really, so the plan now is to take this system back to work after populating it with a bunch of spare drives. The school doesn't need anything more than 500gig so I can probably just put a single 500gig in there for storage and a second one in as a parity drive, so if all goes well, it'll have cost em nothing and I wont mention the mobo, cpu and ram that i still have left over.

    So, next step is to grab some more power efficient hardware (and a new router most probably) and cobble a similar machine together for myself. Expect more questions...

  11. #31
    DF VIP Member Over Carl's Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    It may be cheaper/more practical to keep the existing router, but install a gigabit switch.

    If you aren't bothered about buying brand new, used 24/48 port rack mount switches often appear for pennies on ebay. I remember I thought about putting some Dell 24 port gig switches (Powerconnect 5324?) that I used to have on eBay until I saw they were going for pennies so I just gave them away.

  12. #32
    DF Super Moderator Rick Sanchez's Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    Any questions regarding UnRAID, feel free to ask me here and if you get stuck I can help via TeamViewer.
    Domain Registration, SSL Certificates and Web Hosting - Fusionhost- 25% Discount Available On All Web Hosting Plans For DF Members - Code: DF2022

  13. #33
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    I'll probably just buy a new router for the sake of keeping things tidy, the shop next to my work has a range of boxes so I can just pick one up easily.

    A few questions and problems.

    I'm guesing with unraid, if the USB stick it installs from breaks or just gets errors, a standard fresh install will be able to see my data? I'm still very cautious to trust my current 5tb of data on this new set up (when I do get my own shit sorted)

    One problem I am having, if I transfer a bunch of big files, it'll do maybe 7 or 8 gb and then the transfer will die, windows just drops to 0k in the transfer window and at the same time my PC pretty much dies, it will become totally unresponsive for about 15 seconds, then kinda recover before taking another 15 second nap, a few times it even locked up at the shutting down screen. I think this may have only started after setting up shares to organise movies and TV shows, although I haven't had time to double check on that.

  14. #34
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    confirmed the transfer issue, I can transfer as much as I like if I do it to a disk share, but to a user share it loses faith at about 9gb.

  15. #35
    DF Super Moderator Rick Sanchez's Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    Strange. Could you screenshot your share setup?
    - Go to PM if it is easier.
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  16. #36
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    This set up isn't gonna be permanent anyway so I'm not going to delve into getting it perfect.

    Gonna take it to work today and dump a few of the current spare drives into it and set it up on the network there. Give it a week and see if there's any issues.

    Once they're happy I'm gonna look into using these 3tb drives on my own set up.

    This testing has been very useful, I can see that the cpu and ram that's in this current machine seem to be up to the task of just serving my TVs with HD media so I aim to buy some cheap hardware that benchmarks the same or better, with lower power consumption.

    The current one is a lower spec (forgot the model number) LGA775 cpu in a cheapo Soyo branded motherboard (with serial and parallel on the IO!), along with that there's a spare gigabyte board with the same socket and a faster core2duo 8400. Both of em draw 65watt, so probably not best suited to my needs but the school's machine will only be on during work time, and I wont be paying the bills either.

  17. #37
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    Hi
    Essential plugins are
    1) fix common problems (this lets you know of any issue with your server or update)
    2) Unassigned devices (this enables any usb device to be mounted)
    3)Community Applications (exactly that)
    4) all the Dynamix suite are cool

    hope this helps
    LS
    Dear Lord, please grant me the ability to punch people in the face over Standard TCP/IP

  18. #38
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    cool. I'll look into the plug ins later.

    Right now I have 3 HDDs I copied some of my data across to on the original set up, but the actual system is now sat at work waiting for me set it up (which I'll probably do over lunch tomorrow)

    If I set up a new machine at home and plug the 3 HDDs in, will a fresh USB see the data as before?

  19. #39
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    drank a few beers and read a million different opinions on teh internets and I am as lost as ever...

    I was set on buying a mini itx board and cheap 1150 cpu, should benchmark the same as the test machine but have faster / more ram so I can't imagine there will be issues...but then I found a board with 6 sata ports, which would be ideal for future-proofing my build.
    Further searches have thrown up the idea that most boards with more than 4 sata will be using 2 different sata controllers and that this is somehow undesirable. Is this an issue with build? Other suggestions I have read are to buy a 4sata ported board and add a PCI-e sata controller.

  20. #40
    DF Super Moderator {{909}}'s Avatar
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    Default Re: DIY Microserver alternative

    the schools machine is, as far as i know, running ok and I have built a new system for myself with 2 3tb drives and a 1tb I had spare in a NAS style case fitted with a ASRock J4205 all in one board.

    Considering what I ended up needing (which I think is basically a file server), is it still best to go with unraid or should I try out freenas?

    I liked the parity setup on unraid and the simplistic way you could add additional HDDs, but I am not sure how freenas works in comparison, but with freenas being free, it makes me consider my options.

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