Home Servers/Windows Home Server

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jdomaha

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Oct 6, 2007
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We've recently had our second Toshiba laptop fail, which is kind of a pain in the ass because my wife's been keeping all our pictures on it. And, of course when you send the laptops in they don't do anything to keep your data...they just send you a new laptop.

I was looking at backup solutions so I picked up an external hard drive, but I was also thinking it might be a good idea to have something on the network designed to just run backups and serve as a central storage point for shared files.

Looking around Newegg I saw some already-configured server systems that are probably cheaper already assembled than what I'd be able to put together myself.

I was thinking about something along this line: ASUS TS Mini SOHO Home Server

We've got my beast of a system, 2 Dell Alienware Auroras for the kids arriving tomorrow, 2 laptops and an HP kitchen touchscreen computer.

So, my question is - Is anyone running a home server?

And if so, what are you doing with it?
 


why not build a server cheaper and run BSD or linux or something as a server.

I ran a home server for a while, it was a Sun blade I picked up for free
 
a shared network drive hooked to my desktop that never turns off (drobo)

shares all pictures / music / video through ps3 media server
 
ya, u really just need like a linux box w/ samba as a dump point for files or like a NAS if you got some gigabit shit up in yo crib.

windows home server is a nice idea, but really overkill for what ur lookin to do probably.

also word to the wise -> keep the kiddies away from the HP touchsmart, I had one, piece of shit. touch, touch, touch, then it didnt work. recalibrate, no dice. had to send back to distrib. VERY "touchy" devices to say the least :P especially around little ones who will bang it, drag their fingers across etc (if they're little)
 
KaniGT5 said:
ya, u really just need like a linux box w/ samba as a dump point for files or like a NAS if you got some gigabit shit up in yo crib.

windows home server is a nice idea, but really overkill for what ur lookin to do probably.

also word to the wise -> keep the kiddies away from the HP touchsmart, I had one, piece of shit. touch, touch, touch, then it didnt work. recalibrate, no dice. had to send back to distrib. VERY "touchy" devices to say the least :P especially around little ones who will bang it, drag their fingers across etc (if they're little)
Click to expand...

They don't really even use the touch screen on the HP that much. It just fit nicely on the desk, but under the cabinet in the kitchen. Wife uses it for recipes, we turn on Spongebob during breakfast, etc..

I'm not comfortable with Linux. Not a huge fan. Comfortable with windows or apple's OS offerings.

And whenever I price out components for a new box I immediately go for the "bestest with the mostest." I do not buy cheap systems very well. I upsell myself. :(

It'd be nice to get something that can run scheduled backups on all the systems every night.

And a complete system with WHS would be around $400 or so...
 
jdomaha said:
We've recently had our second Toshiba laptop fail, which is kind of a pain in the ass because my wife's been keeping all our pictures on it. And, of course when you send the laptops in they don't do anything to keep your data...they just send you a new laptop.
Click to expand...

It failed, what failed... you do realize you can open the laptop and extract the data using a adapter right?

Extracting data from a dead laptop with a laptop hard drive adapter

Don't have to lose your pics, if the HD failed - there's plenty of data recovery businesses also.
 
zimok said:
It failed, what failed... you do realize you can open the laptop and extract the data using a adapter right?

Extracting data from a dead laptop with a laptop hard drive adapter

Don't have to lose your pics, if the HD failed - there's plenty of data recovery businesses also.
Click to expand...

Thinking the power supply failed. Could be the motherboard though. She heard a pop and it powered down from a full charge. The week prior it wasn't charging when the AC adapter was plugged in.

Fortunately we found the pics have mostly been saved from the last time we went through this 6 months ago.

Didn't know about the laptop hard drive adapter though, thanks for pointing that out.
 
I think a big point was missed here. If you were to grab that server mentioned above for example it's got one drive in it. Not only does it only have a single drive, that drive is sitting in a box away from any of your other computers. What does that mean? If the HDD starts to crash the chances are you won't hear it. If it suddenly crashes you've got zero redundancy. The box doesn't even have 1:1 mirroring in it, let alone raid 5 or something reliable.

My solution, pay $100/year for a 50gig dropbox account and dump anything important in there, then mirror the dropbox onto all of your computers. You now have as many up-to-date copies of your stuff as you have computers, and access times are incredibly fast. Plus if you accidentally delete a file, or modify it it keeps version history so no loss at all, two clicks and it's restored.

One bonus of dropbox, their system works off a hashing system. This means that if someone has already saved a file of the same hash as you, then you don't need to re-upload it. So for example if you had a favourite 10gig of MP3's the chances are they have already been uploaded once before, you don't need to spend time uploading them again, nor do you have to re-upload them if you delete them.
 
Got myself a Synology NAS (DS209) recently, worth considering for what you're talking about.
 
Definitely do the following:

Get NAS (as mentioned ^^^) - I prefer the Buffal Terastation for my stuff.

Configure the NAS in Raid Level 0 (or higher).

Set up automatic backups to a mapped network drive on each machine.

Even better, skip the automatic backups and just make ALL of your storage folders for documents, pictures, be on the shared NAS. That way if you ever have to bug out of your house the only thing you need to really worry about grabbing is the NAS box. Mine is like 8"X10"X3" and weighs just a few pounds.
 
if it's just pictures your worried about why not burn a DVD of them every month or even better use a new SD card everytime one gets full.
 
I'm going to address a few things here. First, as already mentioned, if a machine fails you can always get the data from it unless the actual drive itself failed. You are taking a very hands-off approach here which is fine but it forces you to rely on customer support and as you have noticed they tend to do the minimum when it comes to protecting customer data.

As far as RAID is concerned, one person said "it doesn't even have 1:1 mirroring (RAID1) or something reliable like RAID 5" -- RAID5 is not more reliable; for data redundancy RAID1 is preferred and will also be faster. RAID5 allows you to have data redundancy and use more storage capacity of your disks if there are 3 or more disks involved.

Someone else said: "Configure the NAS in Raid Level 0 (or higher)." No, RAID0 is a stripe which spreads the data across multiple disks with no redundancy and all data will be lost if any disk in the array fails. (This is used for video editing, etc. where speed is needed to deal with huge temporary files.) With 2 drives and when data redundancy is required RAID1 is the option. RAID5, 6, or 10 can be considered with 3+ drives being used.

If you have network attached redundant storage that you actually put your files on on a regular basis you will be in pretty good shape. You could also get away with a combination of simpler things like DVDs and an external hard drive, or one of those and an online solution, but the point is not to have your backup just be another single point of failure or only be controlled by outside parties (in the case of online storage). As far as buying a NAS box, turning an old PC in to a server, buying a new barebones PC to turn in to a server, etc. it is all basicly going to be the same thing. The NAS boxes will be running Linux and you shouldn't have to actually talk to Linux as they will have a little setup wizard, or the Windows server should work well enough but Windows in a piece of equipment that is supposed to increase reliability just seems like a paradox to me. :)
 
raid 5 is very redundant... yeah run raid 1 ok -- so raid 1, one hd fucks up you ok, two fuckup you fucked, raid 5 one hardrive fails you ok two hardrives fail you fucked... so the moral of this story raid 5 = more speed & more space with the same reliability -- or you can just hire an indian to memorize all your information for $0.0000000001 an 1/0 or send me your confidential information and I will keep it very safe
 
ohh here are some very nice home servers:

ghetto-drive-open.jpg


shoebox.jpg
 
ttime said:
raid 5 is very redundant... yeah run raid 1 ok -- so raid 1, one hd fucks up you ok, two fuckup you fucked, raid 5 one hardrive fails you ok two hardrives fail you fucked... so the moral of this story raid 5 = more speed & more space with the same reliability -- or you can just hire an indian to memorize all your information for $0.0000000001 an 1/0 or send me your confidential information and I will keep it very safe
Click to expand...

FWIW Raid 6 has two parity blocks which means it can suffer two instant HDD failures. Alternatively you can run Raid 5 with a hot spare.

The problem though is that the probability of failure is not based on the number of drives as much as it is the amount of space. If you chuck four 2TB drives in a box you can expect a failure within two years, and since the drives are probably all from the same production batch the chances of a second failure within a short period increase exponentially. Personlly if possible I'd go from Raid 1 straight to Raid 6 for more than two drives (if you have that much porn anyway.)
 
Insomniac said:
If you chuck four 2TB drives in a box you can expect a failure within two years, and since the drives are probably all from the same production batch the chances of a second failure within a short period increase exponentially.
Click to expand...

Couldn't you just use drives from different manufacturers to eliminate that variable?
 
ttime said:
raid 5 is very redundant... yeah run raid 1 ok -- so raid 1, one hd fucks up you ok, two fuckup you fucked, raid 5 one hardrive fails you ok two hardrives fail you fucked... so the moral of this story raid 5 = more speed & more space with the same reliability -- or you can just hire an indian to memorize all your information for $0.0000000001 an 1/0 or send me your confidential information and I will keep it very safe
Click to expand...

Actually the moral is RAID5 = similar reliability, more space, less speed. RAID1 is two disks mirrored and it can read/write from either disk which is why it is faster. RAID5 uses parity meaning that it has to write the data across however many disks you are using plus write the parity data (which is what gives you your redundancy -- that's why a RAID5 also takes longer to rebuild after a failure and is slower until rebuilt.)

I don't have a problem with you liking RAID5, but it is going to have higher costs and maintenance associated with it (more disks to fail, more power required, etc.) and may not be necessary in a home situation which is why I mentioned RAID1 before.

Also see the links below.

Insomniac said:
The problem though is that the probability of failure is not based on the number of drives as much as it is the amount of space. If you chuck four 2TB drives in a box you can expect a failure within two years,
Click to expand...

Related:

On Large Drives And RAID
http://www.networkcomputing.com/tapes-and-disks/on-large-drives-and-raid.php

Large hard drives in RAID 5 a problem?
http://blogs.nil.com/blog/2008/12/02/large-hard-drives-in-raid-5-a-problem/

Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162
 
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