Twin server drive configuration/build.

[mbarasing]

Hope this is the correct forum. I'm a new poster but have been quietly watching y'all. I need to purchase and configure the hard drives for the following setup.

Background: I just purchased 2x used Supermicro 1u x9 systems with 16GB ram and e3 1270 v1 processors. They will be located on the same property but placed on separate electric meters about 1/2 mile apart and connected thru a private line-of-sight wireless setup at 54 MB/sec (already in place). One freeNAS server will be in the house and should backup to the other freeNAS server located in the other structure. I currently have about 0.5 TB of data on a single mirrored pair (ReadyNAS) and no other backups.

Ideas:
1) Buy 4x 2TB drives for each server and run Z2 setups. High cost, performance hit vs mirrors but the most redundant?
2) Same as above, 4x 2TB drives in each, but the house server would run dual mirrors and backup to the offsite server onto a Z2. Same cost, better performance at home, less redundant on the house server.
3) 2x 4TB drives for each server run in single mirror setups. Lower cost, better performance, easier expandability in the future, and the redundancy of 4 total mirrors?

How would you setup a similar system? I am leaning toward #3 because the benefits seem to outweigh the risk of losing 4 drives at once.

Barasingha

 

[depasseg]

You didn't say what you were using the house storage for, so it's difficult to suggest mirrors over RAID-Z2. And your storage requirement is pretty small, do you think it's going to grow soon?
And keep in mind that a 2 disk mirror isn't going to perform better than a 4 disk RAID-Z2.

If you are going with 2TB drives, you could probably get away with RAID-Z1 in the house.

 

[mbarasing]

I got ahead of myself. Single mirror sets will allow easy future expansion with the benefit of a future performance boost to boot.

Additional background: Family of five. About 0.5 TB of data was recently lost because of idiot light syndrome. (When the oil light comes on but it's ignored.). That happened for a year of time machine backups and then a HD failed. We lost one year of pictures/videos that ending up totalling the same amount of other data that we have aquired over the past 10 years. As storage becomes bigger so too does the size of files with higher quality cameras and media. The house Nas will be to backup 4 computers and a handful of phones/tablets. I have yet to rip any of my DVDs and the thought of using a plex plugin intrigues me. My CDs are already ripped and we use iTunes to interface. I don't anticipate more than 2 local contiguous media streams if/when plex is used. The offsite server will only be used to backup the house server.

Line of thinking: Save upfront costs by using mirrors and have future expandability.
Using a z1 at the house and a z2 for the offsite doesn't sound good to me because of a mismatch of pool sizes (assuming 2tb HD throughout).

Thanks for the input. Would using a single mirror onsite and a single mirror offsite worry any of y'all?

Barasingha

 

[mbarasing]

Another question: Would using a twin mirror onsite with a twin mirror offsite backup concern y'all? (Thinking future here).

 

[mbarasing]

Nevermind the post above about z1 and z2 size mismatches. I now realize that a 3x z1 and a 4x z2 would save me the cost of one HD and have similar storage sizes. That setup would still lack easy/cheap future expansion.

 

[depasseg]

Another question: Would using a twin mirror onsite with a twin mirror offsite backup concern y'all? (Thinking future here).

Can you explain what you mean with "Twin Mirror"?

 

[mbarasing]

Can you explain what you mean with "Twin Mirror"?

Stripped mirrors. 4 hdds, 2 mirrored vdevs, 1 pool.

 

[depasseg]

Look at how likely your expansion is and how much room for expansion you have in each machine (less drives needed to expand your striped mirrors, but you get less protection (which is offset by having a backup). There's nothing wrong with either scenario, since you have a replicated backup.

 

[solarisguy]

@mbarasing, I am afraid that you are grossly underestimating your future storage needs.

I can foresee a family coming back from a weekend trip with 100GB of videos (including thousands of pictures) they want to offload from their smartphones. Etc.

Also, I would skip the idea of redundancy (another unit at another physical location with essentially the same data). And devoted resources to off-line backups. They could be stored in that other building, but they should be off-line and protected against being accidentally overwritten (as in: I needed an external drive for a project, and noticed one unused in the bottom drawer...).

 

[mbarasing]

solarisguy: I am the only guy in the house of five. I completely agree that I may be undersized. Every problem so far has to do with lack of memory on the girls phones. I wish someone made a plugin to backup the best photo in a group and ignore the rest; do we really need 30 photos of the exact same shot all with varying degrees of blurriness?

I have already purchased the 2x 1u supermicro servers spec'd above so I will do the off-site replication. My internet takes 6 wireless line-of-sight hops before reaching the ISP--~7 MBv, ~4MB^; I can stream youtube and Netflix but pings are latent: ~74ms--needless to say cloud storage would take too long to be a viable option so I'm left to my own devices. I do plan to take a external HDD backup and keep it in the safe inside the house but let's face it, I failed maintaining backups before while an idiot light flashed. The offsite backup may prevent loss by fire and hopefully be more automatic.

Since my original post I have ordered 4x WD Red 4TB drives. I will use 2 in each server. The 1u servers have 4 drive caddies so when the future catches me lacking I will add 4 more drives and convert the servers from mirror to raid 10. My current readyNas has 2x 2TB mirrored drives and if I included the lost data we would have about 1TB data. With the new setup I should be able to have 3+ TB of storage that's easily upgraded to 6+ TB at any point. If I go beyond that I will need larger chassis.

I ordered supermicro sata doms for the boots. The servers are coming with 1 TB HDD each: not sure what to do with the 2x 2TB drives from the ReadyNas and the 2x 1TB drives from the servers? Any ideas?

Also, do I need battery backups? I'll have no slog, arcs, or other super-user acronyms on my system.

Barasingha

 

[solarisguy]

Yes, you have to keep all the photos and videos forever...

 

[LubomirZ]

Barasingha,

you wrote your properties are :

>> connected thru a private line-of-sight wireless setup at 54 MB/sec (already in place)
>> My internet takes 6 wireless line-of-sight hops before reaching the ISP--~7 MBv, ~4MB^; I can stream youtube and Netflix but pings are latent: ~74ms--


having wireless background, I would like to point your attention to:
a) it's not 54MB/s, it's probably 54Mbit/s... the most common datarate for 802.11a or similar products. This is 8 fold difference. 54Mbit/s wireless will provide 6.75MB/s mathematical maximum not counting with radio protocol overhead, not being full-duplex in nature etc, so REALISTICALLY you can expect about 5.5MB/s maximum throughput IN TOTALLY CLEAR OUTDOOR ENVIRONMENT WITHOUT ANY INTERFERENCE. That is approx. 44Mbit/s. Any interference will destroy your performance, easily to 25%.

b) you said your internet is 6 wireless hops away and you get 7MB [probably download] and 4MB [supposedly upload]. Once again I'm not quite sure if you talk about MEGABITS per second or MEGABYTES per second, but given the wireless nature above, I would somehow expect 7Mbit/s == 0.875MB/s == 896kB/s speed seen in browsers when downloading. My assumption is based on calculation : 7MB/s is 56Mbit/s and that clearly is not possible with 54Mbit/s radio you were talking about, and you have SIX cascaded hops before getting to internet where I expect severe drop in throughput as you are not the only one using the internet connection.

So, with that stuff discussed, can you please confirm what your exact situation is and if my assumptions are correct ?

The problem : on your property, you have single 54Mbit/s link between physical locations with storage. That only is going to provide you - as said - less than 6MB/s real throughput. This means single 64GB SD card from your camera/camcorder will be copied 64GB x 1024 (GB->MB factor) / 6 = 10922 seconds. THREE HOURS to copy 64GB of data from location1 to location2 and this is still being very very mercy, it can easily be 4 hours with some little traffic if you use the same radios to connect to internet.

What I want to say : make sure you have sufficient bandwidth available to replicate your storage PLUS fulfill other concurrent communication needs (internet access).
In the worst case, you could easily exchange existing 54Mbit/s radios with current 802.11n or 802.11ac models. Before doing that, make sure your environment is interference free because these new radios live and die with clean frequency spectrum. Don't even think about running them in OUTSIDE environment in India in crowded places, you simply will fail - if not today, you will fail next month or next year.