DIY RAID 5 NAS server worklog - Recently Updated Pages

The Parts

snootch — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 21:49:22 CST

The Case: So I looked around online to find an acceptable case. Most of the cases I found were your garden variety beige boxes with space for only 4 or five internal drives at most. Most of the cases had several 5-1/4” slots which I didn’t need. Finally I came across this case: link In the description it reads “External Bay: 5.25x9 or 3.5x9 or Internal Bay: 3.5x9” So that will allow me to mount 9 hard disks, comes with two 120mm fans, and doesn’t come with a garbage power supply that I’ll have to throw out anyway. Great!

The Guts: I already had an old computer gathering mold in my garage, so putting it to work would be great; saving me money and making room in my garage- a win –win situation! J The good thing about a simple NAS like this is that hardware requirements are pretty low. You just don’t need lots of CPU cycles and memory, so this provides a great use for old parts. If you’re a moderate computer geek like me you undoubtedly have parts laying around. Old parts I used were:
An Intel micro-ATX motherboard:
(3 PCI slots, one AGP slot) with a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz CPU

Two 512 sticks of DDR Samsung RAM:

A 3.5” floppy drive , CD-ROM drive, and associated IDE and floppy cables were also pulled from the old system.

The beige tower that all this hardware originally housed in had a cheap 300W generic power supply in it. I was going to be needing a little more power, since I will be having 5+ hard drives spinning up together at startup. I ended up buying a Silverstone ST50EF-Plus 500W power supply from Newegg: Link

Now down to the meat and potatoes of the NAS- the RAID array. I wanted to use hard drives that were relatively new on the market so if a drive fails, I can replace it with the same exact model. I also wanted to use disks with a serial ATA (SATA) interface due to the increased speed over the old IDE interface, and its smaller cables that assist airflow throughout the case. From reading all the information about RAID I could find, I found that usually a hardware RAID card will outperform the integrated software RAID solutions commonly found built into motherboards these days. But since I am using an old motherboard that does not have integrated RAID, I must go with a PCI RAID controller card anyways. Using the standard PCI bus will limit data transfer to/from the array to a maximum around 100-133MB/s; whereas if I was using a motherboard that featured PCI-X or PCI Express slots, I could see maximum transfer rates in the 180-200MB/s neighborhood for PCI-X, and faster for PCI Express. I don’t run a business or anything, so 100MB/s is fine for personal use.
I searched around and found a few four SATA port PCI RAID cards capable of RAID 5, but taking user comments and price into account I settled on the Highpoint RocketRAID 1740 PCI controller card:

I want to realize around 1TB of storage space from this NAS. Using RAID 5, this means 4 disks of 400Gb each. (4x400Gb=1.6Tb) One disk’s worth of data for RAID 5 parity will be eaten up, so (1.6Tb – 400Gb= 1.2Tb). Subtract the amount the OS will use for the format of the array, and the usable storage space should be around 1.1Tb. The four drives i'll be using are SATA II Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 400Gb 7200RPM 16Mb cache disks from Newegg.com

In the future if I need more storage space, I’ll buy another card, and four more drives to add to the tower. I’ll also probably go with 500 or 750Gb drives, as I’m sure the price will fall especially considering Hitachi just introduced their 1Tb hard drives.

Operating System: The OS is usually Microsoft Windows for me, as it is comfortable and familiar to me although I’m not especially wild about the stability concerns I have about Windows. I do want the OS to be stable since this box will be “headless”, meaning stuck in a corner with no keyboard, mouse or display attached. These thoughts got me looking in other directions for an OS.
Linux- This was the obvious first place to look for an alternate OS. However, not being used to it I found it frustrating, as I couldn’t figure out the root command line commands to install the drivers, or do anything for that matter. I prefer to have a point and click GUI at my disposal.
FreeNAS- I downloaded this image and played with it for awhile. It is based on the FreeBSD OS, and seems pretty stable. However, I still could not figure out how to install the RAID controller drivers, as it is all done through command line. All this testing alternate OS’es made me want familiarity, especially should something go wrong with the array, where I could spend hours trying to do something simple that I already know how to do in windows. I also figured since the NAS box will not be used in a business environment, If it crashes occasionally it is not the end of the world. Thinking this, I finally decided to use Windows Server 2003.

I made a full list of all the hardware I would need, purchased it online for the total cost of $776.00. I procured the OS, and stripped the old computer into components; lying the used hardware neatly in a stack in the corner of the room. Then I waited for the boxes to arrive in the mail. Assembly: I finally received all the parts in the mail. I’ll do a mini review of each component as I install it.

Assembly >>

Testing & Completion

snootch — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 06:31:52 CST

Conclusion: The finished NAS server looks pretty good next to my desktop, and performs pretty well too; 102.4MB/ s sustained read speed!

The machine performs as I hoped it would, having over 1Tb in storage, allowing FTP access and expandable as well. The only downsides I encountered were the lack of adaptor brackets and documentation for the case, the freakishly long SATA cables supplied with the Highpoint card, and of course the 100MB/s bandwidth of the PCI bus. For just under $800 I feel this is a great alternative to the pre-built RAID 5 NAS units available.

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Assembly

snootch — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 06:31:20 CST

The SuperTalent 901BS server case:

The case is made from your average sheet steel and the inside edges are quite sharp. I almost cut myself once or twice during this build.

Supplied are a bag of assorted screws and brass motherboard standoffs, a steel bracket needed if you want to padlock the case, a small piezo buzzer for attaching to the motherboard, and a piece of paper illustrating the pin-outs for the case connections. A small hinged door at the front bottom of the case features two USB connectors, a single fire wire connector, and audio connections for headphones and a microphone.

The side of the case features two fan grilles, one of them filled with a 120mm fan. The other grille has an adjustable black plastic shroud on the inside to direct air onto the CPU cooler.

On the back of the case there are slots for seven cards, a single 120mm fan (which could be helped with a better grille) and the standard space for an ATX power supply. Opening the case, we see the plastic shroud for the CPU cooler, and the 120mm fan attached to the inside of the case lid. Inside, the motherboard tray has mounting points for Micro-ATX or full-size ATX motherboards. There are 9 drive slots, but they all look like 5-1/4” slots. Since there is no documentation provided with the case, I must assume in order to get 9 -3.5” hard drives in there you must buy 5-1/4” to 3.5” adaptor brackets separately. I wish I would have known that earlier. For right now I guess I will have to mount the disks only on one side.

I mounted the motherboard using the brass standoffs, and mounted all the hard drives:

Next, I mounted the Silverstone 500W power supply. It came in a hefty black box, proclaiming 500 watts of continuous power on the lid.

Installing the power supply was a snap. The larger bunches of wires exiting the back of the unit are encased in black techflex loom. The supply comes with a manual in several languages, four black mounting screws and two wiring adapters for different ATX and 12v molex connections.

I connected power to all the drives, and routed the excess wire behind the drives out of the way. Next, I installed the Highpoint RocketRAID PCI card:

The card comes in a pretty blue and yellow box with the card’s description and features emblazoned on the front.

Inside the box was the card, a half-height header bracket for use in rack mount applications, and four very long blue SATA cables.

I installed the card with no issues other than the SATA cables. They are so long that I had to bundle the excess at the bottom of the case. I connected the case’s front panel connection cables to the header on the motherboard, and connected the side panel fan to the power supply before the side lid was screwed on.

It powered up with no issues, I configured the RocketRaid BIOS, installed Windows and the driver and software for the Highpoint card. Once the RAID management tools were installed it took 7-1/2 hours to initialize and build the RAID 5 array. Once the array was done and I formatted it through the disk management service, it showed as a 1,1178Gb disk in the My Computer screen. I installed the IIS snap-in to enable FTP capabilities. Once the FTP was configured, I was able to access it over the Internet. I removed the CD-ROM drive I installed to load Windows and disconnected the monitor and keyboard.

To Testing & Completion >>

Starting out: The Plan

snootch — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 06:30:32 CST

Several months ago, I was returning from partying with my wife on the town. She had been in the process of downloading something off the net and had her 500Gb external drive sitting on the nightstand hooked up to her laptop sitting on the bed. I accidentally stepped on the cable which jerked the running drive off the table and onto the tile floor with a solid whack. The 80% full drive broke on impact, breaking the main platter bearing and causing the stack of platters inside to vibrate and rattle around freely inside the chassis.My wife was quite upset at this not only due to the loss of all her movies and music, but mostly to the loss of irreplaceable data such as pictures and documents. I then realized that the external drive setup was just too fragile and vulnerable to data corruption especially since the single drive offered no redundancy. We really needed a way to backup our data to guard against data loss in the future. An alternate online backup method for our data wasn’t a real alternative to us mostly due to the recurring costs, and limited bandwidth of our cable modem connection.
I did some research into building a network attached storage (NAS) server, and bought the appropriate hardware online. I’ll cover the steps I took to build a homebrew NAS server capable of offering 1Tb of redundant RAID 5 storage.
Some reading this may be wondering what RAID is, and why did I want to use it. Well, I’ll explain it…. Actually I’ll be lazy and cut and paste from the net: read this link. I basically wanted something faster than a single disk and something versatile; able to recover from a disk failure.

The Plan: My first step was planning the system out. How much storage space did we need? How fast did it need to be? Could we expand the storage capabilities in the future should we need to? I determined we needed a terabyte (1,000Gb) of storage space since we had used approximately 600Gb of storage space that was still growing both in her external HD for her laptop, and the 300Gb drive in my desktop. Should that Tb be used up, I would need a way to add another later on. I looked at a few ready made solutions online such as the Buffalo Terastation, and the Infrant ReadyNAS units, and found them to be prohibitively expensive, especially since a total 2Tb of hard disk space dictated I use 500Gb drives as both units only had space for four drives total. I also would actually see only 1.5Tb of usable space due to the parity information of RAID 5 using up a quarter of a four disk array. Finding all this information; I really needed to look at building a tower with room for five drives (4 RAID disks + 1 for the OS) and expandable to include four more disks for another RAID array. That means building a unit much bigger that the ready made units, but I figured I’d just hide the unit away somewhere where it wouldn’t bee seen.

The Parts >>