<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Jim Oltman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jim.oltman@gmail.com" target="_blank">jim.oltman@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div><div class="h5">On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 3:37 AM, Tim Draper <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:veehexx@gmail.com" target="_blank">veehexx@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
</div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div class="h5">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div>On 16 July 2013 06:55, GZ <<a href="mailto:gzornetzer.lists@gmail.com" target="_blank">gzornetzer.lists@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> Hi all,<br>
> I've been thinking about upgrading my mythtv setup and at the same time,<br>
> I've also been looking at buying a RAID5 NAS box. After looking at the<br>
> price tags on some of those enclosures, I'm thinking about just building a<br>
> combination RAID / mythbackend box. I've read some of the guidance on the<br>
> wiki, indicating that RAID really isn't the best way to go for the mythtv<br>
> recording drive. I'm thinking about the following drive setup:<br>
><br>
> 1 SSD for the OS/database<br>
> 1x 1 tb for active recording (my existing recordings drive. Eventually, I<br>
> may just upgrade this to a 3tb drive that would act something like an in-use<br>
> hot spare<br>
> 4x 3tb drives in RAID5 for archive storage (pictures / long-term video<br>
> archive)<br>
><br>
> Since all of my tuners are now external (HDHR prime & usb QAM), I'm thinking<br>
> about a microitx motherboard to keep this box smallish (corner of my<br>
> office). There are a few H77 boards with 6 total SATA ports an H87 board<br>
> with 6x 6gbps sata. I figure that a 4-core ivy bridge or haswell process<br>
> has plenty of juice for this.<br>
><br>
> Couple of things that I'd like to do:<br>
> - It would be cool to move shows from the recording drive to the archive<br>
> upon lossless transcode. Do I have to write custom transcode rules to do<br>
> this?<br>
><br>
> - I'd like to use ACPI wakeup to reduce power usage on this system. This<br>
> means that I'm going to need some way to lock mythbackend when I want to use<br>
> the NAS functionality. I suppose that I could run some mythfrontends on the<br>
> client, but that's pretty kludgy. How complex is it to code up a client<br>
> that connects to mythbackend enough to bump the usage count and block<br>
> shutdown? Alternatively, does anyone have a good way to trigger a<br>
> mythwelcome lock and unlock commands remotely over the network?<br>
><br>
> Any advice or thoughts are welcomed.<br>
> Thanks very much,<br>
> -Greg</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div></div></div>I'll just put out there that no one in their right mind should ever use RAID5. It's just not safe. I'd recommend at least RAID6 or possibly RAID10 if you're paranoid. Remember, if a disk fails in RAID5, you need to resilver the array. That can take time. What if another disk were to die during the resilver? You'd be screwed. And don't think it won't happen to you. It happened to me. It was awful. Luckily, I managed to grab most of my data.</div>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>There is nothing wrong with RAID 5... but you have to be aware that it cannot be used in place of a backup, just like any RAID solution. The odds of a two disk failure are far lower than a single disk... so while the potential is there, odds are it won't happen and in the meantime your system will keep chugging along while the array rebuilds.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Of course I prefer a raid 1 or 10 array for performance, redundancy, and ease of recovery, if your willing to sacrifice 50% disk space required.</div><div><br></div><div>I use software raid 1 across 3 drives for my OS, database, and most critical data.... I only RAIDed a small partition at the start of my 3 recording drives, the rest of the drives are JBOD. So if I lose 2 drives, I can still recover my system easily, but I lose recordings.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>
<br>That being said, I have an ESXi host that has 24 GB of RAM, a FreeNAS VM with PCI Passthrough of 6 500GB SATA drives, and 2 2TB SAS drives. FreeNAS serves out an CIFS/NFS shares. I've never had an issue with the RAIDZ2 or Mirror I'm running.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Another VM is MythBackend dedicated and the third is an Ubuntu server install for my Subsonic server. (There have been numerous discussions this past week on the value of straight up virtualization versus chroot. I won't get into it as I have a solution that works well for me.) I really like this setup. However, since I have my NAS as a VM, and all clients on my network require the NAS, the ESXi host is on all the time (along with the APC SmartUPS 1500XL the host and 24 pt gig switch/pfSense Atom box/HD HomeRun/AP/Cisco ASA are all connected to). I've come to terms with the electricity bills.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The only real issues I've run into are Ubuntu based ones. For some reason, I had unmet dependency troubles with the kernel image and header files ont the virtualized machines. I'm thinking I did something wrong, but I've only ever tried to do the standard apt-get update/dist-upgrade.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Anyway, I'd virtualize if I were you. Just my experience and 2 cents (or pence, or whatever your local currency).</div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Virtualization adds an unnecessary layer of complexity and another point of potential failure. If all he wants to use the system for is mythtv and file sharing, then I can't see why you would recommend virtualization... you gain nothing over running the system natively.</div>
</div><br></div></div>