Can't understand why some people use big cases like Norco 4020 for WHS

[theinv]

Base on what I read in various forums, it seems that a lot of people are building WHS using the Norco 4020/4220 box.

But I just don't understand why people do that. Here are my thoughts:

1. energy consumption

The case supports 20 hot swap drives but do you really need 20 drives to be on at the same time? Running 20 drives eats electricity and is not environmentally friendly.

If you have multiple WHS, you only turn on the WHS servers you need.


2. performance

It is much better to build two or more WHS than building a single huge WHS system. Regardless of how you view it, having 20 drives in a single WHS will surely perform worse than multiple WHS.


3. vision for the future

When building a system like this, we need to have a vision for the future. Why tied up your 20 drives to current technology (motherboard, processor, RAM, hard drive). I know there are some people who bought 20x 1TB drives last year because they didnt' see the 2TB coming. Also, the capacity of the 2.5" size drives is growing, we will see 1TB/2TB 2.5" in a few years, wouldn't it be much better to have a small WHS build using 2.5" only drives? The USB 3.0 era is also near....


Imagine 5 years from now, do you still want to run your 20-drives on pentium dual core? Probably no.

If you have multiple WHS, upgrade is 10x easier. You can selectively upgrade the WHS you need as the technology evolves (both in hardware and software). You can have one run on windows server 2003 base WHS, and another one base on windows server 2008 base WHS.


Furthermore, who knows what future will bring. Maybe in 5 years, when the FIOS internet becomes a household standard, you can run one WHS in US, and another one in Europe or Africa. By not having all your data in a single location, this provides an extra level of data protection.

Anyway, these are just some of my ideas. I am building a new WHS system and want my system to be as future proof as possible. I am shocked to see why so many jump to use 20-bay cases without any thinking.

 

[nitrobass24]

Base on what I read in various forums, it seems that a lot of people are building WHS using the Norco 4020/4220 box.

But I just don't understand why people do that. Here are my thoughts:

1. energy consumption

The case supports 20 hot swap drives but do you really need 20 drives to be on at the same time? Running 20 drives eats electricity and is not environmentally friendly.

If you have multiple WHS, you only turn on the WHS servers you need.

Energy consumption, while it is important and something to consider when designing a system its not exactly on the top of the list.
Having access to all my data is important to me and my family.

Having multiple WHS does not work well.
Having data strewn out over multiple machines is stupid and defeats the purpose of WHS in the first place. Thats the whole point to have everything in one easy to access place.
Having to go "turn on" a certain box when someone wants to watch a movie or a different one for pictures, or a different one for VMs, etc. is stupid.

2. performance

It is much better to build two or more WHS than building a single huge WHS system. Regardless of how you view it, having 20 drives in a single WHS will surely perform worse than multiple WHS.

This is just Dumb.....see above
Performance does not mean shit, if it is not efficient.

3. vision for the future

When building a system like this, we need to have a vision for the future. Why tied up your 20 drives to current technology (processor, RAM).

Yea cause processors and ram cant be upgraded?

I know there are some people who bought 20x 1TB drives last year because they didnt' see the 2TB coming.

Theres always something coming.
if you needed 20TB a year ago then it made sense to buy 20x 1TB drives.
Secondly its not like they cant be replaced/upgraded.
Thats the point of WHS, you can have diff sized disks.....its not RAID.

Imagine 5 years from now, do you still want to run your 20-drives on pentium dual core? Probably no. Do you still want to run everything on WHS 2003?

In 5 yrs from now I wont be running 2003, I will running WHS V2.
Do I want to run them on a dual core probably. I dont need a 32-core WHS for file-serving.
Also doesnt that kind of contradict your "energy-consumption" statement above?

If you have multiple WHS, upgrade is 10x easier. You can selectively upgrade the WHS you need as the technology evolves (both in hardware and software). You can have one run on windows server 2003 base WHS, and another one base on windows server 2008 base WHS.

If you have multiple WHS the upgrade is easier? WTF are you smoking?
For every WHS you have it makes it that much harder. Because you have to do that much more mgt.
I just dont see the advantage, you say you can both 2003 WHS and 2008 WHS, but why would you? Whats the advantage?
Why not just run one big 2008 WHS?
So you can spend twice as much on licensing?
Multiple Boxes is dumb.

Furthermore, who knows what future will bring. Maybe in 5 years, when the fiber optics becomes a household standard, you can run one WHS in US, and another one in Europe or Africa. By not having all your data in a single location, this provides an extra level of data protection.

Do you have any idea how retarded this sounds?
Having Fiber in the home will not have anything to do with having the ability to have a WHS in Africa.
I have FIOS, but I wouldnt think of paying to have a WHS duplicate everything in Africa.
Its more cost effective to use something like Mozy, which does the same thing.

Anyway, these are just some of my ideas. I am building a new WHS system and want my system to be as future proof as possible. I am shocked to see why so many jump to use 20-bay cases without any thinking.

Because you are building a WHS, I suggest that you research the technology a bit more before making blanket statements about the technology.

 

[MrMike]

Base on what I read in various forums, it seems that a lot of people are building WHS using the Norco 4020/4220 box.

But I just don't understand why people do that. Here are my thoughts:

1. energy consumption

The case supports 20 hot swap drives but do you really need 20 drives to be on at the same time? Running 20 drives eats electricity and is not environmentally friendly.

If you have multiple WHS, you only turn on the WHS servers you need.

I don't care about whether it's environmentally friendly at all.

I think you're largely underestimating the storage requirements some people have. There are people on this forum with more than one 20-bay case filled.

2. performance

It is much better to build two or more WHS than building a single huge WHS system. Regardless of how you view it, having 20 drives in a single WHS will surely perform worse than multiple WHS.

In what way is performance hurt?

I haven't seen any significant bottlenecks that aren't easily resolved. Network? Add another card and team.

3. vision for the future

When building a system like this, we need to have a vision for the future. Why tied up your 20 drives to current technology (motherboard, processor, RAM, hard drive). I know there are some people who bought 20x 1TB drives last year because they didnt' see the 2TB coming. Also, the capacity of the 2.5" size drives is growing, we will see 1TB/2TB 2.5" in a few years, wouldn't it be much better to have a small WHS build using 2.5" only drives? The USB 3.0 era is also near....

Why are we tying it up? When did it become impossible to upgrade your CPU/motherboard/RAM/HDs? I bought the 20 enclosure so I could add more drives as time goes on without removing the old ones.

Also, 1TB 2.5" drives are already out...

What does USB 3.0 have to do with it? Faster backups? I don't think anyone here considers USB 3.0 drives as any sort of permanent solution for adding drives to their WHS pool.

Imagine 5 years from now, do you still want to run your 20-drives on pentium dual core? Probably no.

If you have multiple WHS, upgrade is 10x easier. You can selectively upgrade the WHS you need as the technology evolves (both in hardware and software). You can have one run on windows server 2003 base WHS, and another one base on windows server 2008 base WHS.

Of course I wouldn't want to run them on a Pentium Dual Core. I'd upgrade the CPU/Motherboard/RAM as necessary. Why is that a problem?

Furthermore, who knows what future will bring. Maybe in 5 years, when the FIOS internet becomes a household standard, you can run one WHS in US, and another one in Europe or Africa. By not having all your data in a single location, this provides an extra level of data protection.

Anyway, these are just some of my ideas. I am building a new WHS system and want my system to be as future proof as possible. I am shocked to see why so many jump to use 20-bay cases without any thinking.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here....

Why wouldn't you just use an off site backup solution like Mozy, like nitro said?

 

[Archer75]

1. Don't care. I pay my electric bill, not you.

2. Doesn't work for me. I have tons of movies taking up an enormous amount of space. I don't want to power up 3 servers just to find the movies I want to watch.

Well my norco has 22 bays(2 internal) though i'm only using about 13 of those bays. It will be a long time to fill the thing up. But this way I don't have to take out the smaller drives and throw them away. I can keep adding to the pool.
You can still buy IDE drives, sata is going to sata3 within the next year or so, so I don't see support for sata2 going away for many many years.

 

[theinv]

Well, your tone sound really harsh. I definitely know what is WHS, and what it is about. Like I said, they are ust some of my thoughts.

Do you think google can run handle all google searches on a singler server?
Can youtube stream all their videos using one server?
When u have vast amount of data, scalability is also as important as availability.

Having multiple WHS does not work well.
Having data strewn out over multiple machines is stupid and defeats the purpose of WHS in the first place. Thats the whole point to have everything in one easy to access place.
Having to go "turn on" a certain box when someone wants to watch a movie or a different one for pictures, or a different one for VMs, etc. is stupid.

No, having multple WHS doesn't mean u can't leave them all on at the same time.

This is just Dumb.....see above
Performance does not mean shit, if it is not efficient.

So building a 20+ drive WHS is efficient? I can't see that. It is surely convenient, but not efficient.

Yea cause processors and ram cant be upgraded?

If you have multiple WHS the upgrade is easier? WTF are you smoking?
For every WHS you have it makes it that much harder. Because you have to do that much more mgt.
I just dont see the advantage, you say you can both 2003 WHS and 2008 WHS, but why would you? Whats the advantage?
Why not just run one big 2008 WHS?
So you can spend twice as much on licensing?
Multiple Boxes is dumb.

I build all my desktops and servers by myself. Yeah, they are upgradable.

Having multiple means you upgrade the servers only when necessary. You don't need to upgrade all servers at the same time. Having more server also means less risk to your data in case of system failure.

Well, just ask yourself, what if your data requires 60 x 2TB drives or whatever the number of drives where one box is just not enough? Do you still use one WHS?

Theres always something coming.
if you needed 20TB a year ago then it made sense to buy 20x 1TB drives.
Secondly its not like they cant be replaced/upgraded.
Thats the point of WHS, you can have diff sized disks.....its not RAID.

In 5 yrs from now I wont be running 2003, I will running WHS V2.
Do I want to run them on a dual core probably. I dont need a 32-core WHS for file-serving.
Also doesnt that kind of contradict your "energy-consumption" statement above?

I don't see the contradiction at all. Multiple boxes just means you can run some boxes using old processor, and some with new processor. You only upgrade the boxes that needs upgrade. Upgrade doesn't mean 32-core cpu.

 

[Archer75]

multiple boxes, left on at the same time, is going to consume alot more power. Not efficient at all.

 

[[LYL]Homer]

theinv - I think you're off on a dead-end path future-tripping. Those that bought 20x 1tb drives must have needed/wanted that much space, so no biggie, they got what they got. Looking back and saying they somehow screwed up because they didn't anticipate or wait for 2tb drives is just a BS argument. We all know that computer parts start depreciating as soon as we get them, and the same will be true when you build your WHS box. Does that mean you should have waited longer for the next jump in storage technology? No, not if you need the space today.

I hear you saying that large cases like the Norcos hold too many drives and somehow you think that one server with 20 drives is less efficient compared with 2 or 3 servers with a total of 20 drives. Bogus. You've got the overhead of everything powered in the additional server(s) beyond the hard drives themselves (and maybe addional controller cards to get up to 20 drives in one box). Turning a WHS box on/off just to access particular media seems like a giant hassle and exactly NOT what WHS is designed to do.

I do care about my energy consumption and power bill cost, that's partially why I did the thread in my sig. I'll scale my WHS to fit as much data as I need, as efficiently as possible, and with whatever drives are available when I need them.

I suggest that you build a WHS and use it for a while and then revisit these thoughts.

 

[kharan5876]

I'm not running WHS so this may be slightly off topic.

There is always going to be something better coming out. Your shiny new stuff is obsolete as soon as you buy it. The real point is to buy something fills all your requirements for the immediate future.

I needed at least 10TB and the Norco was the best way to do that. I'm currently using 10 of the 20 bays.

Having multiple boxes seems pointless to me. It's lot more work to manage and upgrade them all.
2 machines with 5 drives each consumes a lot more power than one machine with 20 drives. So if at any time in your setup you have at least 2 powered on you are wasting power. If you are running an application like bittorrent which needs access to your disks continuously then you always have to have at least one of the disk nodes powered on and the gains become a big loss (if you have a master node and a disk node on) or only a marginal gain (if your torrent disks are in the "master node").

Finally this means you also need to buy multiple systems and multiple windows licenses. Who can afford all that. It's also more potential for hardware failures to have to deal with. I haven't done the math but I imagine by the time you recoup the losses on your electric bill it will be time to upgrade the hardware again. Once you do upgrade them all you have an even bigger pile of old hardware to have to do something with.

If you really care about power consumption then try to get low power drives and take advantage of power saving options in the OS.

 

[GJSNeptune]

Multiple WHS boxes means more parts that can fail. Less reliability.

 

[charlesshoults]

I can kind of see both sides of this. I have three computers which I use on a daily basis. One is a Core 2 Quad in a Thermaltake Mozart TX. In that machine, I have XP and Ubuntu, with seven hard drives making up about 2TB of storage. My second computer is the HTPC in a DH-101, running four hard drives, making up about 1.2TB. My last system is a MacBook Pro, using about 120GB of a 200GB hard drive. If I'm looking for a document or a particular picture, it can be a nightmare trying to figure out what is on which machine, not to mention the fact that many of the same files exist on all three computers.

I'm finding Windows Home Server to be extremely useful, getting all of my duplicate files off individual machines and taking each computer down to a single drive. So right there, energy efficiency is much improved.

Do I want to:

A: Buy an off-the-shelf WHS? Buying a small HP or Acer box that supports 4-5 drives might be the route for some. Sure, the box could hold 2TB x # drives, but I'm not 100% comfortable with proprietary hardware. That's why, other than the MacBook Pro, I've never bought a whole computer.

B: Build a bookshelf WHS? This is a more-desirable option as I can decide specifically what hardware I want to go into it and dictate how much physical space I want the box to take up. What happens when I exceed current technology, and require more space than the box is able to provide? I could buy external enclosures and link them back to the WHS by eSATA, or I could build a second WHS, but as already stated, a second WHS is eqivalent to the hardware of the 1st and costs another $100 on top of for the privilege of supporting Microsoft. No thanks. The eSATA option is compelling but I'm unsure of the cost. Buying a 5-bay enclosure could cost me $200 - $250 and building one could be just as much. But hey, I could buy an RPC-4220 for $300. That could give me space for 20 drives, where acquiring four 5-bay enclosures could cost me $1000. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Does that mean I'm going to go out and populate all 20 drive bays, probably not. After spending $300 on a case and populating it with hardware I have left over from other projects, I'm not too keen on dropping $2800 on drives. However, I might throw the 7 spare hard drives I do have into the enclosure and add to or replace drives as needed.

C: Build a WHS built on the rack-mount form factor? Well, I have a DirecTV box, a Sony stereo receiver and blu-ray player and have put together an HTPC using the DH-101. Looking at the DH-101 and a 4U case from the front, they're roughly the same width and height, so the form factor is pretty good. While a little bookshelf unit is good for some, it doesn't quite fit the 'look' of my other components, so I'm more likely to go with something between 2U and 4U. A lower height means tighter confines and might cause issues with cooling. If you've ever heard a Dell 1U blade server or an Apple X-Serve, you know how much peace and quiet gets sacrificed for the sake of cooling. I don't think anyone would want that in their living room. If you have a basement, you could put it down there, but my new house doesn't have one, so that's not an option. Therefore, for better cooling, I go with a taller enclosure. Back to another question. Do I want a rack mount case that supports 8-10 drives or a 20 drive monster. If the 20 drive monster gives me future expandability and keeps me from needing to buy external enclosures in the near future, that's the route I'm going to go.

Do I want to build a Windows Home Server and have it be my end-all, be-all storage solution? No way in hell. I've had power supplies fail and destroy every electrical device inside the computer case. It was just a gaming rig, but still wasn't any fun at all. How would it feel to lose multiple terabytes of data? /wrist... Whether it's on-site or off-site, there still needs to be some sort of failsafe, whether in the form of nightly or weekly backups. I could set up another system based on FreeNas or some other variety with equal or greater storage space to the WHS and schedule backups between the two. It's more expensive than having one server, but it's a smarter solution. If I decide on weekly backups, the NAS is turned off and unplugged 6 days of the week and is active only for that one day that backups take place.

A thought on multiple Windows Home Servers:
Do I want to have one WHS box or two? It seems to me that having two of them is a step in the wrong direction. Not only do I have to buy WHS twice, I have to buy two motherboards, two processors, twice the fans, essentially maintaining twice as much equipment. Does that mean that I really WANT to have one 20-drive box that weighs 100+ lbs, maybe not. But I could if I wanted to. The way I understand it, when a drive isn't in use, it's spun down to 0rpm. If it's spun down, how much energy is it really using? The boot drive is active, but that's true of any computer not in a sleep state.

 

[CKTurbo128]

Do you think google can run handle all google searches on a singler server?
Can youtube stream all their videos using one server?
When u have vast amount of data, scalability is also as important as availability..

While your logic may make sense for servers in an enterprise or heavy I/O environment, it does not make sense for the home user. A typical WHS box will not likely see the heavy I/O activity that commercial servers typically face.

You have to also remember that WHS was designed specifically for the typical home user, so that even casual computer users can run and manage it without having significant technical knowledge. By introducing multiple WHS, it just adds unnecessary complexity (in other words, overkill) for typical users.

 

[gimp]

#1 - multiple servers will use up more electricity than one, if all are needed.
#2 - it's easier to upgrade a single box than multiple; also much cheaper.
#3 - performance will NOT be hurt. These aren't running in an enterprise environment with hundreds of users. Even a dozen connections to the same box, depending on what it's being used for by each one, will not make a noticeable difference. If it does, add an extra NIC, team, be done.
#4 - why would I want to buy multiple cases, multiple CPU's, multiple mobo's, multiple power supplies, multiple WHS licenses, etc, when it can all be done with one of each?
#5 - with WHS you can easily replace a single HDD. If you run out of room, replace that 1tb drive with a 2tb drive, WHS takes care of the rest. Then replace next. Then next. Done.
#6 - as stated before, wtf would anybody want to do an offsite backup to another WHS box? use an online solution.

 

[dydx]

I also see alot of people building massively huge WHS systems which I think is overkill. Personally, I think power consumption is very important and I do everything I can when designing my WHS to minimize it. A 24/7 system that consumes 200W will easily cost $200-300 per year to run. As long as it's connected to gigabit, performance is probably the last thing I am concerned about with my WHS. I can barely fill up my 1TB, and sometime I wonder what people put on their WHS machines other than movies and DVDs.

I can see your reasoning on why it may be helpful to build two separate WHS systems. Perhaps one low power system for 24/7 access to important files, then another more powerful system to keep your massive collection of movies or other rarely accessed files. I really dont see a point in keeping a massive system running all the time just so you can more easily access a movie once a week. But then again, I never watch movies twice so I see no point in keeping downloaded movies.

 

[CyCo_SoMaTiC]

The thing is, for every person that is using a big ass Norco to do a WHS box, there are many more that use a standard case or whatever's laying around. Some are even drinking the kool aid and buying the little HP WHS boxes. The people running the Norcos are people that crave ultimate storage. Yes you could run several smaller boxes, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a "server" for "home" usage. Like J-sta said, that's buying multiple motherboards, RAM, processor, power supplies. Also that is adding in more parts that can go wrong. One machine goes down, then there goes part of your collection inaccessible until you get it back up. I see what you are saying about duplication, but this is not a corporate environment. If you lose something, more than likely you will just re rip it.

And to you guys that are like RAH RAH RAH overkill, it's just a hobby guys. Evidently the guys with the Norco cases have the money to put into them and their drives. No reason to hate on them just cause they have more money for their hobby.

 

[valve1138]

Who the hell turns off a server?

 

[Archer75]

Who the hell turns off a server?

I do. I just don't need to watch my movies at 3 in the morning.

 

[MrCrispy]

OP, you bring up some interesting points. But the single most important thing WHS does is consolidate storage, spreading it out over multiple servers defeats that purpose.

If one day WHS has the ability to add network disks as part of the local storage pool, then it might work. But then again, you are apporaching iSCSI/SAN and moving away from the simplicity of WHS.

Remember, WHS is targeted at non-geeks, nevermind the people here who have the monster Norco racks It says something about WHS that even for that kind of storage, people choose WHS over solutions like Raid, NAS boxes etc.

 

[MrCrispy]

Who the hell turns off a server?

People who don't have LightsOut installed

 

[Archer75]

People who don't have LightsOut installed

I do have lights out installed. All it seems to do is show me up time of all my computers. It seems to have no other options beyond that. That's the way it came in my xfiles WHS edition.

 

[Concentric]

Do you think google can run handle all google searches on a singler server?
Can youtube stream all their videos using one server?
When u have vast amount of data, scalability is also as important as availability.

Those are nowhere-near comparable scenarios.

Google search/Youtube receive millions of hits from different users every second and have computation and storage/streaming requirements that clearly exceed the capabilities of a single server.

Some guy's home system running WHS has to process maybe 2 simultaneous users watching a movie or two and typically need a couple of terrabytes worth of storage. That is certainly a case where a single server is sufficient.
If you wanted to be especially fault tolerant then you could have another system ready to use in case of problems, but spreading that tiny load over multiple machines would be pointless.

 

[charlesshoults]

Hey, there's an idea. Once upon a time, I tested out NFS mounts between my work MacPro and an Ubuntu box, just to see what it was capable of. After I got it working, I repeated the process on my computers at home. I really liked being able to transfer files at 90% bandwidth. If I were to set up a roll-your-own NAS box for the sole purpose of supplying an NFS mount for Windows Home Server, is it difficult to get WHS to use it as a backup location?

 

[nitrobass24]

Hey, there's an idea. Once upon a time, I tested out NFS mounts between my work MacPro and an Ubuntu box, just to see what it was capable of. After I got it working, I repeated the process on my computers at home. I really liked being able to transfer files at 90% bandwidth. If I were to set up a roll-your-own NAS box for the sole purpose of supplying an NFS mount for Windows Home Server, is it difficult to get WHS to use it as a backup location?

Are you asking if you can mount iSCSI/NFS volumes in WHS or backup a WHS to iSCSI/NFS?

 

[charlesshoults]

I want to set up Ubuntu Server and enable it as an NFS storage location so that hopefully WHS can see it and save backed up files to the Ubuntu Server rather than a location within the WHS box.

 

[Dangman]

I also see alot of people building massively huge WHS systems which I think is overkill. Personally, I think power consumption is very important and I do everything I can when designing my WHS to minimize it. A 24/7 system that consumes 200W will easily cost $200-300 per year to run. As long as it's connected to gigabit, performance is probably the last thing I am concerned about with my WHS. I can barely fill up my 1TB, and sometime I wonder what people put on their WHS machines other than movies and DVDs.

I can see your reasoning on why it may be helpful to build two separate WHS systems. Perhaps one low power system for 24/7 access to important files, then another more powerful system to keep your massive collection of movies or other rarely accessed files. I really dont see a point in keeping a massive system running all the time just so you can more easily access a movie once a week. But then again, I never watch movies twice so I see no point in keeping downloaded movies.

Those "massively huge WHS systems" are just overkill for you. Think about the actual needs of those people who spend the money for such a setup. As for power consumption, if you want to build an energy efficient WHS setup, go for it. But as you should be able to see, not everyone here cares about their power consumption as they are willing to deal with the costs.

As for people put on their WHS machines other than movies and DVDs, it's not that hard to figure out:
- TV Shows
- Cartoons
- Anime
- Music in FLAC format (just setup a WHS setup for a friend with a 2TB FLAC collection)
- Pictures (Same friend from above had over a 1TB of pictures he had taken throughout the last 5 years)
- Home videos
- Backups of other people's PCs
- Audio tracks
- Backups of Photoshop files.

As for what's the point "in keeping a massive system running all the time", in my case, I have friends and family up at all hours of the night and day over at my home. So my WHS server does get accessed many times throughout the entire day as people are constantly watching movies, TV shows, or streaming music.

 

[MrCrispy]

I do have lights out installed. All it seems to do is show me up time of all my computers. It seems to have no other options beyond that. That's the way it came in my xfiles WHS edition.

Which version is it? LO can put your WHS to sleep/wake it up at scheduled times. e.g. I've set mine to sleep from 2am-6pm on weekdays (when I'm at work), and 2hr after no client accesses it. Even during those times WOL can wake it up.

 

[EnderW]

one of the dumbest threads I've seen in a while, but found out about a potentially cool WHS plug-in

 

[novadude]

I am shocked to see why so many jump to use 20-bay cases without any thinking.

The only person I see not thinking is you, I'm afraid.

 

[wonslung]

This post made me laugh.

I built my norco 4020 case because i most certainly DID need the storage though i would never use WHS. It's absolutely terrible in my opinion. I use OpenSolaris and ZFS.

If you care about your data, having redundancy matters. Also having a backup system matters. This is one reason why people build big servers. My personal norco 4020 based system is 3 RAIDZ2 vdevs (5+2 5+2 4+2) so out of those 20 drives i get the space of 14
70% space for that kind of redundancy is great if you ask me. I can tolerate losing up to 6 drives at one time if they are the RIGHT drives and at worst 2 drives at once, without data loss.


This still isnt' enough for me, i plan to build a second and maybe a third norco server.

My home unit is the backbone of a giant home entertainment system for 2 houses.

HD TV shows take up 1GB each and HD movies can be 8-20 GB depending on encoding. I have a very nice gigabit lan setup with link aggregation to the opensolaris server. it serves 6 hdtv's and 3 sdtv's
it also servers 4 desktop pc's 3 laptops 2 iphones and a couple other oddball items.


and in reality, this was a big SAVINGS in power because before, we had decentralized core2duo based htpc's on most of the tv's.

now we have atom based ionitx units with all the storage being on the norco. this ends up saving a TON of power. We are considering expanding to another house (neighbor on the other side wants to kick in for upgrades/htpc's to join our network)

I have it set up REALLY nice....and it's great
we dont' even watch cable TV anymore
my name is TomB.

Some people have OnDemand

I have OnBmand

 

[GeorgeHR]

A Norco 4020 costs about $300. Much too much for a case.

20TB (20 1TB drives) of storage is at least 2000 DVDs - 4000 hours of viewing, or 20,000 hours of HDTV viewing.

Few individuals are able to view that much video.

---

I prefer to simply recycle the cases and power supplies from our home occupation. It is easy to fit enough hard drives/videos in standard case to cover all the material that will be watched more than once. And $20 hard drive external cases are sufficient for those videos that are seldom watched - no need to keep them powered up.

(I have 7 HDTV tuners recording all the TV I want and I rip 9 DVDs a week. It will take a long time to find enough material worth saving to fill up my modest disk space. And then I will never have enough time to watch it.)

But to each his own,

 

[Lazn_Work]

Why in the word are people buying all these gigantic cars. I see no reason for anyone to buy anything other than smart cars. If you have more than 2 people in your house, buy more smart cars. There is never any instance ever for anyone to ever have a car that can carry more than 2 people, that doesn't exist. Even fire trucks should be replaced by smart cars.

(this argument is actually better than the OP's about Norcos)

 

[Omegas]

This post made me laugh.

I built my norco 4020 case because i most certainly DID need the storage though i would never use WHS. It's absolutely terrible in my opinion. I use OpenSolaris and ZFS.

If you care about your data, having redundancy matters. Also having a backup system matters. This is one reason why people build big servers. My personal norco 4020 based system is 3 RAIDZ2 vdevs (5+2 5+2 4+2) so out of those 20 drives i get the space of 14
70% space for that kind of redundancy is great if you ask me. I can tolerate losing up to 6 drives at one time if they are the RIGHT drives and at worst 2 drives at once, without data loss.


This still isnt' enough for me, i plan to build a second and maybe a third norco server.

My home unit is the backbone of a giant home entertainment system for 2 houses.

HD TV shows take up 1GB each and HD movies can be 8-20 GB depending on encoding. I have a very nice gigabit lan setup with link aggregation to the opensolaris server. it serves 6 hdtv's and 3 sdtv's
it also servers 4 desktop pc's 3 laptops 2 iphones and a couple other oddball items.


and in reality, this was a big SAVINGS in power because before, we had decentralized core2duo based htpc's on most of the tv's.

now we have atom based ionitx units with all the storage being on the norco. this ends up saving a TON of power. We are considering expanding to another house (neighbor on the other side wants to kick in for upgrades/htpc's to join our network)

I have it set up REALLY nice....and it's great
we dont' even watch cable TV anymore
my name is TomB.

Some people have OnDemand

I have OnBmand

You sir are amazing...
I would love to have neighbors either like you or like yours.

 

[jonnyjl]

This post made me laugh.

I built my norco 4020 case because i most certainly DID need the storage though i would never use WHS. It's absolutely terrible in my opinion. I use OpenSolaris and ZFS.

If you care about your data, having redundancy matters. Also having a backup system matters. This is one reason why people build big servers. My personal norco 4020 based system is 3 RAIDZ2 vdevs (5+2 5+2 4+2) so out of those 20 drives i get the space of 14
70% space for that kind of redundancy is great if you ask me. I can tolerate losing up to 6 drives at one time if they are the RIGHT drives and at worst 2 drives at once, without data loss.


This still isnt' enough for me, i plan to build a second and maybe a third norco server.

My home unit is the backbone of a giant home entertainment system for 2 houses.

HD TV shows take up 1GB each and HD movies can be 8-20 GB depending on encoding. I have a very nice gigabit lan setup with link aggregation to the opensolaris server. it serves 6 hdtv's and 3 sdtv's
it also servers 4 desktop pc's 3 laptops 2 iphones and a couple other oddball items.


and in reality, this was a big SAVINGS in power because before, we had decentralized core2duo based htpc's on most of the tv's.

now we have atom based ionitx units with all the storage being on the norco. this ends up saving a TON of power. We are considering expanding to another house (neighbor on the other side wants to kick in for upgrades/htpc's to join our network)

I have it set up REALLY nice....and it's great
we dont' even watch cable TV anymore
my name is TomB.

Some people have OnDemand

I have OnBmand

Right on. I'm running a Norco 4220 with OpenSolaris w/ZFS (8 drive/2vdev Raidz1) and I'm getting hard up for space.

Plan on plopping another 8 drives in (Raidz2) as soon as I finish up my taxes. Probably will re-do the pool so I'll have 16drive/2vdev Raidz2. Leaving the last 4 open for cache devices and hot spares.

 

[movax]

Right on. I'm running a Norco 4220 with OpenSolaris w/ZFS (8 drive/2vdev Raidz1) and I'm getting hard up for space.

Plan on plopping another 8 drives in (Raidz2) as soon as I finish up my taxes. Probably will re-do the pool so I'll have 16drive/2vdev Raidz2. Leaving the last 4 open for cache devices and hot spares.

Do you have somewhere to put all that data while remaking the pool? You could resilver drives, but that's the one flaw of ZFS/RAID-Z atm, expansion

 

[EnderW]

This post made me laugh.

I built my norco 4020 case because i most certainly DID need the storage though i would never use WHS. It's absolutely terrible in my opinion. I use OpenSolaris and ZFS.

If you care about your data, having redundancy matters. Also having a backup system matters. This is one reason why people build big servers. My personal norco 4020 based system is 3 RAIDZ2 vdevs (5+2 5+2 4+2) so out of those 20 drives i get the space of 14
70% space for that kind of redundancy is great if you ask me. I can tolerate losing up to 6 drives at one time if they are the RIGHT drives and at worst 2 drives at once, without data loss.


This still isnt' enough for me, i plan to build a second and maybe a third norco server.

My home unit is the backbone of a giant home entertainment system for 2 houses.

HD TV shows take up 1GB each and HD movies can be 8-20 GB depending on encoding. I have a very nice gigabit lan setup with link aggregation to the opensolaris server. it serves 6 hdtv's and 3 sdtv's
it also servers 4 desktop pc's 3 laptops 2 iphones and a couple other oddball items.


and in reality, this was a big SAVINGS in power because before, we had decentralized core2duo based htpc's on most of the tv's.

now we have atom based ionitx units with all the storage being on the norco. this ends up saving a TON of power. We are considering expanding to another house (neighbor on the other side wants to kick in for upgrades/htpc's to join our network)

I have it set up REALLY nice....and it's great
we dont' even watch cable TV anymore
my name is TomB.

Some people have OnDemand

I have OnBmand

what's so terrible about WHS?
it seems to work great for lots of people

 

[jay2472000]

@ OP , I understand your point. I think you may have alienated people though because you used a blanket statement that was misinterpreted by more than a few people here.

@ People with Norco's, I also see your points.

And being a logical higher life form I can understand the pros AND cons for both sides ( See how both sides have pros AND cons there? )

Ok, the Cons of using 20 huge drives in a norco

1) Data loss. People here are saying its good to have all your data in a safe place, etc. NOT TRUE. But we must also remember its a server, so all you guys with 40Tb in a Norco SURELY have all that data backup up correctly right? ( offsite, etc.,) I doubt it, but lets move on. Lets face it, its not uncommon where I live for some half blind little old lady to drive thru the side of a restaurant. Now imagine her Buick parked on top of your server..... Lets not forget WHS' impeccable ability to lose files when it feels like.

2) Pricey. Self explanatory.



Now, the Pros

1) Norcos are like Corvettes and SSD. 99% of the people with them dont need them, but we all love the whole "look at me " factor.

2) Holds 20 drives. Thats a lot of drives!!! Lets face it, if you actually need to have 20 drives worth of stuff available, then a Norco gets it done well.

3) Having everything on one Pc/Server is nice, but see no 1 in the cons.


In conclusion, I think that it would be safe to say most people dont need Norco's and it WOULD be a huge waste of money to invest in one, UNLESS your one of the ones that needs it. I think a lot of people confuse needs and wants

 

[mwarps]

This entire thread is moronic. It's a home server, which means it's probably going to sit and never be turned off unless it's being upgraded.

The multiple-server-electrical/environmentally friendly argument is fucking stupid as shit. 20 drives at full read write pull maybe 140 watts worst case. Any modern CPU system is going to pull that at idle, never mind at load, and never mind the drives on that. 280 watts for one system full read/write. two systems with only ten drives each, and you're at 420 watts, but still the same number of drives, and your storage capacity hasn't increased. Never mind the fact that there is no way in hell you're going to get 20 drives reading or writing all at the same time, unless they are RAIDed, or you have as many network cards as you do drives in the box, so your power figures drop to about 3W each, and the CPU is now the main power draw in the system, even at idle.

 

[EnderW]

This entire thread is moronic. It's a home server, which means it's probably going to sit and never be turned off unless it's being upgraded.

The multiple-server-electrical/environmentally friendly argument is fucking stupid as shit. 20 drives at full read write pull maybe 140 watts worst case. Any modern CPU system is going to pull that at idle, never mind at load, and never mind the drives on that. 280 watts for one system full read/write. two systems with only ten drives each, and you're at 420 watts, but still the same number of drives, and your storage capacity hasn't increased. Never mind the fact that there is no way in hell you're going to get 20 drives reading or writing all at the same time, unless they are RAIDed, or you have as many network cards as you do drives in the box, so your power figures drop to about 3W each, and the CPU is now the main power draw in the system, even at idle.

I agree this thread is fucking retarded, but there are plenty of systems that use under 140W

 

[nitrobass24]

Well we can thank wonslong for bringing this subject back to life

 

[pjkenned]

I think 2TB WD Blacks are like 9w at idle and the Hitachi 2TB are 7.5w at idle. Both can sleep and would then be lower.

One other thing to remember is that the more you can keep things only on the server, the fewer drives you need in other systems. For example, in my workstation and laptops, the biggest drive I have is 160GB now and all are SSD's.

Just as a reference, with a E6420 w/ a GTS 8800 512MB + Adaptec raid card, 13 7200 rpm drives + a blu-ray drive running WHS + a core i7 920 system with 12GB, 20 drives (1, 1.5 and 2TB) plus a HP Expander, HP P410, an Adaptec 5805, and Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad running 2008 Server R2 + WHS in hyper-V = 600W @ wall through two Antec True Power Quattro 1000w power supplies and an IBM UPS. The servers @ 600w were transferring some data so it wasn't a 100% idle reading, but still, replace a few bulbs with LED/ CFL and you make up the difference.

 

[jay2472000]

Well we can thank wonslong for bringing this subject back to life

Wonslong, is that a racist insult against asian people? I am thoroughly offended and feel that I must report this harrasment to the mods asap.

It's the name of the guy who bumped this thread in post #28. It's beyond me how you made the jump from wonslong to asian hating.-Oldie