New Server, New Software!

Last year when I wrote the post about my mini server its performance satisfied my need for a small device that was able to acquire and stream Xvid quality media to our devices around the house. Well with the upgrade at the beginning of the year to a HTPC that can handle full 1080p quality media I quickly realized that the back-end was going to require some upgrades too.

Hardware

Having a small device that I could stash in the corner of the office was great but suffered from one major flaw: 4 drives packed into that small space produced heat that killed hard drives at an extremely high rate.  Of course a second flaw was that it would never be able to grow past 4 drives. I now highly recommend that you do not try that similar build. Instead, I’ve opted for a mid-sized tower with 9 5 1/4 “ bays, giving me the ability to install up to 3 hard drive cages holding 5 drives each. Yes, this gives me the ridiculous ability to install up to 15 hard drives. In addition to the case upgrade I also too this opportunity to upgrade the rest of the components.

Here’s the full part list:

• GIGABYTE GA-880GA-UD3H AM3 Motherboard – Supports USB 3.0 and Sata 3 and has a built-in video card with HDMI out in case I decide to
  use this as a second HTPC
• AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz – Low power and cheap but still more powerful than the previous system
• G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) – With many 1080p movies being over 8 gigs in size, the additional RAM will minimize chances of movies stuttering mid-playback
•  OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G 2.5″ 60GB SATA II SSD – Continuing with the low latency theme I used a SSD for my OS drive to make sure applications would start instantly
• 5 X WDEARS15 1.5 TB Western Digital Green Drives – I DO NOT RECOMMEND THESE. I used them because Western Digital upgraded me to them due to my old drives dieing and have already had one of these new EARS drives go bad. I recommend you use the Samsung counterpart as they have better reviews for use in RAID arrays
• CORSAIR Builder Series CX600 (CMPSU-600CX) 600W ATX12V v2.3 Active PFC Power Supply – If you’re going to be running this many hard drives, be prepared to have enough power to keep them running!

Case Hardware:

• Thermaltake V5 Black Edition Mid-Tower Gaming Chassis With Embedded Handle – Did I mention 9 expansion bays?!
• NORCO SS-500 5 Bay SATA / SAS Hot Swap Rack Module – The shallowest of the 5 bay hot swap bays I found. So far it has been whisper quiet and fit into my case
• SATA cables from monoprice.com

Software

For the operating system I stuck with Ubuntu 10.04. (long-term release) I have seen a lot of people in the media server community go with dedicated storage solutions like Windows Home Server or unRaid, but with the added complexity of Ubuntu (and once you get past the learning curve it’s really not that bad) comes a ton of additional capabilities and expansion options. I would dive into what you can do with Ubuntu that you can’t do easily with WHS or unRaid but the options on Linux are truly unlimited. The basic software layer is similar to what I used previously so I won’t go in to excruciating detail about the installation and configuration of Linux but I will make a few key notes about some of the tweaks:

• The RAM does not default to the tighter timings when first booted. To get the performance you paid for, make sure you change the timing in the bios
• The RAID setup is still as a soft RAID 5 array using mdadm (the native Linux soft RAID application) but since I am using “advanced format” drives I took care to partition each drive first to start on sector 64 instead of 63 so that the blocks would align correctly. Next, create the RAID device using the partitions and not the drives themselves.So, if your drives are /dev/had, /dev/hdb, and /dev/hdc, you would create the RAID using /dev/hda1 /dev/hdb1 and /dev/hdc1 so that it builds off the proper alignment. Further instructions are available here.
  • The read speed for this array is around 270 Mb/sec using hdparm
• The move to a solid state drive requires some tweaking to get the best speed and life. I found a couple helpful articles here and here about how to do this

In my previous build I recommended a mix between torrents for TV shows and newsgroups for movies. You probably don’t need too many more reasons to abandon torrents but my main reason for switching over completely was that with my move to all HD content, newsgroups produce a much higher, consistent download speed and the programs for acquisition are more feature rich. To revisit how my media acquisition piece did work, it went like this:

• TV Shows: Using an RSS feed from ShowRSS, my torrent program (torrentflux-b4rt) would scan the feed every 30 minutes for new content and download the show when it became available
  • After the show downloaded the Perl script SortTV would try to sort the TV shows by show name, season, and episode
  • Movies: Using an RSS feed from nzbs.org fed into the program Sabnzbd, movies I added to my “cart” on their website would be downloaded, unzipped, and filed into the movie directory

The new build keeps the same flow for movies, but adds a helper program that feeds TV shows into Sabnzbd from newsgroups as well, eliminating the complex torrent setup and sorting above.  The program I now use to feed TV shows into Sabnzbd is called Sickbeard. Not only does Sickbeard scan newsgroups (using a site like nzbs.org or nzbmatrix) for new TV shows, but it also sorts them and downloads their info/artwork from thetvdb.com, helps to back fill episodes your collection is missing, and updates XBMC after a download completes (amongst many other advanced features). Sickbeard gives you better organization of TV shows upon downloading them and doesn’t require another developer’s Perl script to make the magic happen. The best guide I’ve found for installing Sickbeard in Ubuntu is found here.

The features above really just scratch the surface of what this setup is capable of. I still use programs like ampache to listen to music when away, have installed a VPN server so I can always surf securely when using the internet at remote locations, and have my UPS system email me whenever the power goes out at the house. The bottom line here, is that if you can think up an application for the server, you should find a large community of people willing to help you out with it!

One final word on networking…

I was using both 802.11N and network over powerline to get the media from the old server to viewing devices around the house. With some movies requiring a constant 9MB/sec to stream, I took the plunge and ran Ethernet to my TV setup upstairs and the office. To keep the wireless signal strong around the rest of the house I’m now using two Netgear WNDR3700 (one v1 using dd-wrt and one v2) routers.  Remember, your network is only as strong as the weakest point!