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

[wonslung]

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

300 dollars isn't much at all when you consider what the norco 4020 brings AT that cost.
Just do a search for 4u rackmount cases with 20-24 hot swap bays and see what you find.

The closest thing *I* could find was a supermicro case for 900 dollars, sure, it came with redundant power supplies...but let's pretend THAT costs 300 bucks (which it doesn't), you're still at 600 dollars which is twice as much. That alone makes the norco a value.
When you have big systems with 20 drives, it's not a matter of IF a drive will fail, but a matter of WHEN it will fail. Being able to replace it easily is key. Also, remember, if you have hot swap bays with lights it's much easier to SEE which drive HAS failed. Try to do that when you have 20 drives in cases without lights.
It's a pain and remember, removing the WRONG drive may cause you to lose an entire pool. accidently messing up something while your doing this can have the same result.

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.

That is only if you store dvd quality video. When you move into 720p or bluray quality video the hours start to get smaller and smaller.
Also, the same mentality could be used against cable tv. Are you telling me you can watch 400 channels of TV?
So why don't you go back to basic cable or OTA tv.
I'm not trying to be hostile, i'm just trying to make a point.

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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,

To each thier own. This isn't a bad method either. It all depends on what you hope to accomplish. There is no "best way" only "best compromises"

 

[wonslung]

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

It uses NTFS for one.

It probably does work great until it doesn't. I'm sorry, i prefer to have end to end data integrity that ZFS provides. WHS doesn't have anything CLOSE.

 

[wonslung]

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.

I put 3 ssd's on the space inside the server. 2 for rpool (mirror) and 1 for L2ARC

Worksgreat. I can easily fit 3 more 2.5 drives in there. I'm considering building a norco casemod which used 2.5 inch hotswap bays and adding those in, removing the entire area where the cd tray and other stuff fits, then moving the power and reset buttons to the back or side.

 

[wonslung]

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

It's wonslUng not wonslong

and it has nothing to do with asians. It's just my handle. It's my handle everywhere...if you see someone named wonslung anywhere, it's likely me. For better or for worse, I have an unusual internet name.....so i'm sure if you google wonslung you'll see me asking stupid questions SOMEWHERE.

but no, i am sorry if you found my name offensive, i assure you i mean no harm, and that never even crossed my mind.

 

[FLECOM]

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

considering your average 5-in-3 sata removable tray thing costs about $100, $300 for a case with 20 hot-swap SATA bays is a steal imho

I planed for future expansion, which is why I am making a SAN... have a machine that sits between the ethernet network and the fiber channel network, and right now have one 16 drive container with 16x drives in a RAID6... if I ever need more space I just buy another array and attach it to the fiber channel network and done!

 

[lizardking009]

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

While there is a higher chance of having a part failure with multiple computers, those individual part failures mean less. WIth multiple servers, you would lose access to only part of your data if one system was down.

(Not commenting on WHS specifically, just the idea of having multiple servers as opposed to a single.)

 

[GeorgeHR]

considering your average 5-in-3 sata removable tray thing costs about $100, $300 for a case with 20 hot-swap SATA bays is a steal imho

I planed for future expansion, which is why I am making a SAN... have a machine that sits between the ethernet network and the fiber channel network, and right now have one 16 drive container with 16x drives in a RAID6... if I ever need more space I just buy another array and attach it to the fiber channel network and done!

5-in-3 cases are also expensive it is much cheaper to simply take a sheet of 1/8" plywood and drill holes in it to hang hard drives from. (I like to play with my machines also.)

But more to the point RAID and hot swapping drives as well as the Norco case are industrial solutions - expensive ways to solve home problems

But feel free to build what you wish. Enjoy your results and be happy.

 

[wonslung]

5-in-3 cases are also expensive it is much cheaper to simply take a sheet of 1/8" plywood and drill holes in it to hang hard drives from. (I like to play with my machines also.)

But more to the point RAID and hot swapping drives as well as the Norco case are industrial solutions - expensive ways to solve home problems

But feel free to build what you wish. Enjoy your results and be happy.

I disagree with this. The norco cases are aimed at enthusiast home users AND low end offices.

 

[pjkenned]

When you have 20+ drives, you understand at some point or another why hotswap drive bays are great. If you look at enthusiast cases a lot of them are $150-$200 but can't handle 20+ drives.

Then again, if you compare Norco cases to their Supermicro or other equivelants, you'll see the difference between the lower end Norco cases and the higher end, truly industrial solutions.

 

[wonslung]

When you have 20+ drives, you understand at some point or another why hotswap drive bays are great. If you look at enthusiast cases a lot of them are $150-$200 but can't handle 20+ drives.

Then again, if you compare Norco cases to their Supermicro or other equivelants, you'll see the difference between the lower end Norco cases and the higher end, truly industrial solutions.

Exactly.

When you are dealing with 10+ drives in large raid arrays it's not a matter of "if my drive will fail" it's a matter of "when my drive will fail"

Hot swap cases do 2 things to aid in this:

1 The obvious. It's hot swap, so you can swap out the drive without shutting down the machine or opening the case:


but the second thing is much more subtle and much more important if you ask me

2) Hot swap cases like the norco or higher end cases generally have both power and activity lights for drives. This helps you find which drive is not working. If you do not have some way to find which drive maps to a physical system drive you have a serious problem when you need to replace it. ESPECIALLY if you are using single parity or mirrored setups. Replace the wrong drive and you could take out an array.

Also, in this situation you do NOT want to be digging around inside of a case knocking wires loose.

The norco cases provide a very cheap alternative to this. 300 dollars for 20 hot swap bays is downright cheap. If you want to build a system with 20+ drives this is not very much money ANYWAYS.

 

[Nefarious]

I'm in process of building a 4220 now. I currently have 5 pc's all running in order to have multiple network shares for a fraction of my media. I'm consolidating all the media into one location. I own over 1000 dvd's and 2000 music cd's that I want to convert and be accessible at anytime. I download all my TV shows via automated usenet RSS feed and dropped my cable last year. My wife is getting into photography and high quality pictures eat up space. The norco just seems like the right solution. I'm after 40 TB which will likely still not hold all my content, but it's a starting point. My electric bill is my concern and not anyone elses.

I believe that WHS has a max of 30 hard drives that can be in the pool. Hopefully V2 will lift that limitation.

 

[pjkenned]

I believe that WHS has a max of 30 hard drives that can be in the pool. Hopefully V2 will lift that limitation.

If you are going to be using that many drives, it is probably worth it to consider Raid 6 since using 6 drive arrays with 2TB drives will give you 10/30 disks used for parity versus 15/30 for WHS duplication. At $150/ disk that's a $750 savings in disk costs.

Also, power consumption on these larger WHS systems is much lower than you may think. This is 600w worth of power consumption (and two WHS's): http://www.servethehome.com/?p=284 Odds are you won't see anything like that power wise since the i7 uses quite a bit of power.

 

[Adidas4275]

Does the OP even own a WHS?

is the OP older than 13?

Does the OP have any experience with large data arrays, high end RAID setups, running multiple servers, or anything?

This is a dumb thread.... the Norco 4020/4220 makes one of the best WHS builds for people who have the space and do not want to remove older drives when they want to add more storage....

I have one with 8 drives in it and I love that 2 days ago I was around 90% full and got a 1TB for under $70 and w/o my wife needing to stop watching her movie that was being streamed from the WHS I was able to increase my capacity.... seamless.

 

[Sgt_Strider]

I didn't read the whole thread, only the first page, but I got a nice laugh out of it. I'm really not sure how old the OP is, but man, he needs to really improve his logic here. He makes really bad use of analogies as well.