Looking to update/upgrade my microserver and build a media pc

[GeorgeStorm]

Hi,
As above, I'm finally considering:
a) upgrading my microserver to store more
b) getting some kind of backup solution! (at last)
c) build the family a media pc

My current setup:
N40L with 4x2tb (storage) and 1x250gb (boot)
Nothing is backed up apart from my pictures, which are also on an external 1tb.
I have another 2tb drive that I could fit in the microserver which has some stuff on, probably less than 1tb though.

I've considered building the family a media pc in the past, but money/time has been an issue, now that I'm working the money issue isn't quite so big, and I have various components already reducing the cost (some of which I've tried to sell without success)

So I was thinking something like:
CPU - AMD APU/intel i3?
Motherboard - matx
RAM - 2x2gb Corsair Vengeance (already own)
PSU - 300-400W (I may have one spare, can't remember)
HDD - Potentially the 250gb drive from the microserver if I switch that to a usb install of some sort
Case - Lian Li PC-V351B (already own)
OD - LG BR drive (already own)
GPU - either integrated from the APU, or I should have a spare card

I would be used to watch DVDs/BRs/iplayer etc on both the TV, and hopefully the projector in the next room (which they don't use very much at the moment since they don't have a pc there all the time, they need to plug in a laptop if they want to use it and that's often too much effort by the time they remember). I'm guessing I would need a long HDMI cable, along with a wireless keyboard/mouse set or something similar. The ability to play some games would be nice as well, mainly stuff using a controller (hence my xbox controller thread) such as the LEGO games.
Thoughts?

Couple of potential ideas:
a) Simply sell my current drives, and upgrade to 3/4tb drives (not sure which)
I could run some kind of RAID if I went with 4tb drives for instance, so I use 3 then have the 4th as one which can restore the data if I lose a drive? (I think that's a type of RAID?)
b) Sell my current drives (or some of them) and buy some 3/4tb drives. Then put some in my microserver, and some in the media pc at home. The ones at home would act as a 'long term' backup (as in, whenever I go home I would backup ) Obviously this isn't ideal since it wouldn't be very regular, but it would probably be better than nothing, and would also mean the family could use my stuff. It could also mean a TV card could be added to the media pc and then the family could record stuff onto the media pc, whereas now they use one of those dvd/recorder combo things, which works but has limited storage and could can't organise what you've recorded very well.

Thoughts?
I don't have a strict budget, but I'm just trying to work out what would be a sensible/viable solution, for both the microserver/backup situation, and the media pc.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

[peterb]

The sweet spot in terms of cost per byte seems to be 3TB drives, so you could have a couple of those in RAID 1 giving you 3TB of resilient storage. You will need to consider a back up of some sort, maybe another drive that you use only for back up. You could keep your OS on the existing drive, keeping data completely separate from the OS.

You have 8TB storage at the moment, so you could use 4 3TB drives in RAID5 giving you 9TB in total. (4TB drives would give you 12TB, but that extra 3TB would be disproportionately more expensive).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This FM2+ motherboard has 8 SATA ports onboard:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-dvi-hdmi-matx

An A8 5500 for around £70 should do the job or a Kaveri A8 which should be out in January.

[herulach]

My microserver is my media pc. Cost/Watt/faff it was by far the best solution for me. All my media is on there anyway. If you then want a separate backup solution a small single Bay dumb NAS should do it.

[GeorgeStorm]

The sweet spot in terms of cost per byte seems to be 3TB drives, so you could have a couple of those in RAID 1 giving you 3TB of resilient storage. You will need to consider a back up of some sort, maybe another drive that you use only for back up. You could keep your OS on the existing drive, keeping data completely separate from the OS.

You have 8TB storage at the moment, so you could use 4 3TB drives in RAID5 giving you 9TB in total. (4TB drives would give you 12TB, but that extra 3TB would be disproportionately more expensive).

Yeah, I've seen the odd deadl on 4tb drives that bring them pretty close but 3tb drives seem to be better overall.
Is it worth going for WD reds?
Is RAID 1 just a basic copy?
I think I'd want to keep the OS separate from the data, just easier, I'm happy reusing the current 250gb drive.

RAID 5 is the one I was thinking of, although I'd only be getting an extra 1tb for quite a lot of money :/

This FM2+ motherboard has 8 SATA ports onboard:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-dvi-hdmi-matx

An A8 5500 for around £70 should do the job or a Kaveri A8 which should be out in January.

This for the media PC I assume?
I'm definitely leaning towards AMD for the media pc, more than enough power to act as a media pc, but also enough oomph to be able to play the odd game.
Not sure how many sata ports I would need, at the moment 4 would do, since I could get 3 3tb drives for the backup of my stuff, and then the boot drive.

My microserver is my media pc. Cost/Watt/faff it was by far the best solution for me. All my media is on there anyway. If you then want a separate backup solution a small single Bay dumb NAS should do it.

The media pc is for my family at home, whereas the microserver is with me.
A single bay NAS wouldn't be able to backup my stuff, I'd need a 2 bay as a minimum with 4tb drives in.

The media pc at home won't be on all the time, just when it's being used.

[peterb]

RAID 1 is mirroring - basically the two drives are written to simultaneously so one is a clone of the other. RAID 5 needs 3 or more disks and gives you 1 disk redundancy.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You can combine the media PC and server into one box. My mate does it with his server.

Edit!!

I just read what you said again.

I still would go for Trinity or Kaveri for the media PC.

[peterb]

Is it worth going for WD reds?

Probably not over any other drive - any reason you ask?

(I have just looked at the WD pages, and I can't see any concrete evidence that supports the claims - the three year warranty might be a plus - but - if a drive fails to an extent that you can't wipe it before you send it back, do you care if your data could be compromised? If you do, then you can't return it and the warranty is useless.)

Personally, I'd go for Hitachi 4TB drives, and Seagate for 3TB. Whether you value power consumption over performance is a personal decision, although the price differential isn't that great, but then I doubt if you would notice much in the way of reduced performance between a 7,200 RPM drive and a 5,400 drive.

[GeorgeStorm]

RAID 1 is mirroring - basically the two drives are written to simultaneously so one is a clone of the other. RAID 5 needs 3 or more disks and gives you 1 disk redundancy.

I definitely won't be running RAID 1, since that's kind of what I'll hopefully be doing on a every now and again basis with the media pc at home.

You can combine the media PC and server into one box. My mate does it with his server.

Edit!!

I just read what you said again.

I still would go for Trinity or Kaveri for the media PC.

Haha good good, you're not the first person to be confused at what I'm asking, clearly need to work it better.
Yeah an APU is looking like the way to go, since even if I save power going intel, that will most likely be canceled out by the gpu I'm using with it (whereas I probably wouldn't have a gpu with th APU)

Probably not over any other drive - any reason you ask?

(I have just looked at the WD pages, and I can't see any concrete evidence that supports the claims - the three year warranty might be a plus - but - if a drive fails to an extent that you can't wipe it before you send it back, do you care if your data could be compromised? If you do, then you can't return it and the warranty is useless.)

Personally, I'd go for Hitachi 4TB drives, and Seagate for 3TB. Whether you value power consumption over performance is a personal decision, although the price differential isn't that great, but then I doubt if you would notice much in the way of reduced performance between a 7,200 RPM drive and a 5,400 drive.

Because apparently they're designed for 24/7 use etc.
A longer warranty is definitely a plus, although I think other companies offer 3 as well on some things (at least I hope they do). I don't think there will be any really sensitive data on their, photos will probably be the most 'sensitive', but I'd rather get a replacement and possibly let some lab tech see them than have to buy a new drive
I highly doubt I'll notice any difference, since they'll only be used for downloading/as a file server basically. If I do ahead and make the media pc have enough oomph to play some games (which is the direction I'm definitely leaning) then I'll just install the games on whatever boot drive I go for. As a result I would value power saving over performance (even though this PC probably won't be on for that much per day, every little helps)
I've currently got a couple of hitachi drives which are doing fine, I've no particular brand loyalty when it comes to hdds
Which will either be a smallish hdd or I may go for an ssd if I see something at a decent price.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The AMD APUs under low loads and idle are not that much different than the comparable Intel CPUs,of course dependent on what motherboard use. Under heavy IGP usage during gaming they will consume more power,but they give more consistent and higher performance anyway.

[herulach]

So didn't notice you were needing to be in two locations. If the media pc doesn't need to do games then basically anything with a HDMI output will be fine (scan have an msi board with integrated celeron that would happily run XBMC or similar)

Otherwise it really does sound like you've described a ps3 to do the media pc job. A slim with 12gb is only £119. I'd trust my mum to be able to work one much better than moving between xbmc/some other media centre software and games.

It sounds like some form of RAID 5 solution in the microserver is probably best - but raid isn't backup, so I'd keep either your existing drives or some new ones as cold storage for stuff you really can't bear to loose (for photos I just use flikr as my offsite backup strategy, but I have good upload speed and much less than 1tb of photos).

[DanceswithUnix]

(I have just looked at the WD pages, and I can't see any concrete evidence that supports the claims

Red drives are basically a Black drive with different firmware. For home use perhaps the firmware isn't so important, but usually in a RAID array you don't want the something like 5 minute time-out that some consumer drives can go on for re-trying a sector that they will obviously never be able to read. The drive should quickly send back an error so that the controller/computer can grab a copy of that sector from elsewhere so the user gets their data and the controller can then write the correct data over the errored sector so the drive can re-write the data or reallocate a spare sector as it feels appropriate.

WD claim vibration protection, but I suspect that is just the fact that Black drives have decent dual bearing setups.

I went for Red drives for my server. I would avoid any "green" drive, raid arrays tend not to like them.

[GeorgeStorm]

The AMD APUs under low loads and idle are not that much different than the comparable Intel CPUs,of course dependent on what motherboard use. Under heavy IGP usage during gaming they will consume more power,but they give more consistent and higher performance anyway.

Fair enough, I thought that overall they would probably be the better bet
Now it's just a case of whether I try to get a FM2+ board to be able to upgrade to Kaveri down the line or not.

So didn't notice you were needing to be in two locations. If the media pc doesn't need to do games then basically anything with a HDMI output will be fine (scan have an msi board with integrated celeron that would happily run XBMC or similar)

Otherwise it really does sound like you've described a ps3 to do the media pc job. A slim with 12gb is only £119. I'd trust my mum to be able to work one much better than moving between xbmc/some other media centre software and games.

It sounds like some form of RAID 5 solution in the microserver is probably best - but raid isn't backup, so I'd keep either your existing drives or some new ones as cold storage for stuff you really can't bear to loose (for photos I just use flikr as my offsite backup strategy, but I have good upload speed and much less than 1tb of photos).

That's fair enough, I didn't explain it well.
The media PC would be for playing back various media (either streamed, or local play back, DVD/BR etc) and being able to play games has become a definite having spoken to my family a bit more. They already have a PS3, but he doesn't play it that much (more of a pc gamer now), it doesn't have space for a media collection, and it only works on the wireless, and can't stream iplayer etc.
Interface wise I haven't decided what I would do, I probably would just put W7 on there, since it's an interface they all know and can use, and will mean they'll be able to do whatever they want (whether that be play games, watch a film, watch iplayer etc)

The backup will be in the media pc if I go for backup. So I'd have a couple of drives in the media pc, a complete backup of my microserver, which I would update every now and again (when I go home).
I may go for RAID 5 in the microserver as well, just for added protection, but that's not my first priority.

Red drives are basically a Black drive with different firmware. For home use perhaps the firmware isn't so important, but usually in a RAID array you don't want the something like 5 minute time-out that some consumer drives can go on for re-trying a sector that they will obviously never be able to read. The drive should quickly send back an error so that the controller/computer can grab a copy of that sector from elsewhere so the user gets their data and the controller can then write the correct data over the errored sector so the drive can re-write the data or reallocate a spare sector as it feels appropriate.

WD claim vibration protection, but I suspect that is just the fact that Black drives have decent dual bearing setups.

I went for Red drives for my server. I would avoid any "green" drive, raid arrays tend not to like them.

Whilst I may go for some kind of RAID setup eventually, I probably won't to begin with, so I may not bother with reds since they do command a bit of a premium.

[DanceswithUnix]

Whilst I may go for some kind of RAID setup eventually, I probably won't to begin with, so I may not bother with reds since they do command a bit of a premium.

Indeed they do, Black drives are basically the same but cheaper and have a 5 year warranty.

[Bluecube]

You might want to look into using Xpenology on your Microserver. It's very good and uses a custom Raid 5 solution to store your data. I use it myself and in my case, I also back up really important data to Amazon Glacier, which is very easy to do using the inbuilt app. It will also happily run Plex Server which you may find useful as a back end for your media PC.

[GeorgeStorm]

Indeed they do, Black drives are basically the same but cheaper and have a 5 year warranty.

From a quick look they seem to be a lot more expensive than the reds (at around £50 per tb :/)