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The Freeware Files: Make the Most of your Spare Storage with Five Freeware Servers!

David Murphy — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:30:00 -0500

So here's the deal. You have a ton of extra storage sitting around your house/apartment/basement. That's great. So what's the problem? It's just sitting there, doing you absolutely no good. You've maxed out the SATA ports on your desktop rig, but would love for a way to make use of your hard drives in some manner that's geekier than a doorstop, a height extension for your coffee table, or a crude weapon.

Have you thought about building your own server?

Woah, woah. Don't skip over this article just yet. It sounds complicated, but crafting up your own personal server for your files (and multimedia) isn't that complicated. In fact, for some of the free solutions I'm about to show you, all you need is a working PC that accepts USB keys. That's it. Plug it in, fire up the software, and you'll have a brand-new storage array that's ready to receive your file backups and music files in equal measure. And why is that important? Because you're probably not running a RAID array on your main PC--if your primary drive goes, that's it. Game over. End of story. And if you're the most backup-conscious person around, wouldn't it be nice to have a low-powered PC that serves up multimedia for any networked computer in your abode? I thought so.

unRAID Server

What it does: Boot this free server from a flash drive and you'll be ready to tap into the power of RAID-based redundancy for your files in no time. Unlike a traditional RAID-based NAS, the proprietary technology found in unRAID allows for multiple drive failures without a catastrophic loss of data. Sure, you'll lose whatever files happened to be on said dead drives, but you won't lose an entire array's worth of material as if you just watched two drives in your RAID 5 array disintegrate. Although unRAID is Linux-based, you can access its configuration screens via a standard Web browser. Take that, complexity.

Download it here!

FreeNAS

What it does: The ever-tiny FreeNAS requires few resources to operate: 128MB of RAM and at least 32MB of free storage space on any number of potential candidates, including USB keys, CDs, and other forms of portable storage (CF cards, anyone?) But that's not to say that FreeNAS is light on its features to match. RAID functionality, Web-based file management, iTunes server support, and an integrated BitTorrent client are among some of the unique applications you'll find on this lightweight server software. Heck, you can even encrypt your drives as well--an ideal solution if you'll be making heavy use of FreeNAS' torrent features, to say the least...

Download it here!

ClarkConnect

What it does: This kitchen sink of server software blends a large number of services and software applications into its meaty 513MB package. Where to begin? Firewall functionality is included, as is bandwidth management technology and VPN connectivity. You can use ClarkConnect to share contacts, calendars, and tasks--amongst other Outlook and Thunderbird-based features--with all the PCs connected to your network. LAN-based backup is included in the installation, as well as integrated FTP server functionality and user-based file shares. If you're looking for a total-package home server, you'd be wise to consider ClarkConnect. If media-sharing is your only interest, you would be better-served by a simpler server solution.

Download it here!

Amahi Home Server

What it does: This no-fuss home server software is free to operate and only requires that you have a working Fedora 10 operating system prior to installation. The Web site walks you through the brief install process, which then opens up your home network to server-based file hosting, backups, media sharing, and integrated search via your Web browser of choice. On top of that, Amahi's rich community has generated a number of add-ons that extend the power and functionality of this robust server software. Because of these, you can blend BitTorrent downloading, media catalogues, Web-based media streaming, and a sharable recipe book, as well as other features, into your default installation.

Download it here!

Tonido

What it does: Do you want the functionality of a full-fledged home server for your desktop machine, but still want to retain your standard, working operating system for normal use? Check out Tonido. Install this application and you can access a variety of server-themed services from any Web browser on the planet. Share the photographs on your home PC using an easy-to-access Web interface--files too. You can pull up and play your music collection as if you were sitting right in front of your desktop PC, as Tonido eliminates the need to install and configure fancy network tunneling software or VNC connectivity just to access an iTunes share. For the worker bee, Tonido's built-in workspace for note-taking, calendaring, and contact-sharing is ideal for maintaining a central repository of your thoughts. Oh, and the software integrates with Twitter too, just in case you needed to share those 140-character witticisms as well.

Download it here!

RAID5 May Soon Be Obsolete

Justin Kerr — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:35:07 -0500

RAID 5 users anxiously awaiting the debut of 2 TB drives to help build massive storage array’s may want to think twice before taking the plunge. An in-depth look into the underlying problems with massive storage RAID5 configurations suggests that s a single drive as redundancy might not cut it anymore. SATA drives carry a specified unrecoverable read rate of 10^14. This might sound like a huge number, but it basically tells us that any array in excess of 11.37 TB will contain at least one unrecoverable read. In the case of a RAID 5 rebuild, this can be catastrophic.

Storage companies want us to believe that RAID 6 will address the issue but sadly this doesn’t seem to be the case long term. The additional drive will increase redundancy, but since failures will always be followed by read errors on another drive, RAID 6 won’t help you one bit (pardon the pun). Many of the advances in storage capacity are a result of perpendicular recording which help reduce this problem, but it still exists. Perpendicular recording also isn’t likely to take us much further beyond 2TB. Delays in finding new methods will force those in need of massive storage configurations to turn to RAID5 or 6 which as we know now, are vulnerable.

Don’t get me wrong, we still have time to come up with a solution to this problem, but users stringing together 6 or more disks as early as next year could start hitting this ceiling. Additionally, in order for the worst case scenario to occur (loss of all data) the one failed drive would need to be completely unrecoverable. So the sky isn’t falling, but it sure makes for an interesting problem. Want to learn more about RAID? Read Maximum PC’s in-depth guide, RAID done Right.

An interesting item of note, on human progress. The picture shown below is just slightly over 2TB of storage. This much capacity will be possible in a single drive by next year. Isn’t progress wonderful?

(Image Credit Rainwulf.com)

RAID Done Right

David Murphy — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:49:59 -0600

Like the eponymous bug spray, RAID gets results. But in this case, the active ingredient isn’t a deadly poison, but hard drives—or, to spell out the acronym, a redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) disks.

RAID represents a storage schematic, a way to use multiple hard drives to accomplish wondrous achievements in automation and capacity. You can chain a number of drives together to create one large super-volume, you can have one drive automatically replicate the contents of another, you can do it all!

So where do you start? With this guide, because while RAID may sound simple, the actual practice of setting up an array is mildly daunting. But before we start attacking the various configuration options that smack you in the face with every RAID setup, we’ll start with the easiest part first, the shopping list.

To set up a RAID, you’ll need at least two items: a motherboard with the ability to create and manage RAID volumes and some hard drives. The exact number of drives will depend on the flavor of RAID you choose, the level of performance you hope to achieve, and your budget, but the drives should be of an identical make and capacity, as your RAID configuration will always be limited by the speed and size of the slowest drive. If you’re planning to string together more than four drives, you’ll likely need to invest in a RAID controller card as well (check your motherboard manual for details about its integrated RAID support).

RAID 0

The RAID variant that offers the fastest speeds and most capacity also comes with the biggest worries

A RAID 0 setup is commonly known as a striped array. Instead of writing all of your data to a single drive, this configuration allows a file to be broken up into smaller chunks, or stripes, which are then written across all the drives in the array. The more drives you add to a RAID 0 config, the faster the overall performance of the array. After all, by adding drives, you’re just spreading out the workload.

To really get the most from RAID 0, you’ll want to play with the stripe sizes. We say play, as there’s no concrete way to gauge what stripe size will be best for your particular setup—short of testing its performance with the apps you’ll be using.
If a file is a pizza, then a stripe is a slice. Slap a 50KB file onto a four-drive array with a 16KB stripe size, and three hard drives will have full 16KB stripes while the fourth will have just 2KB. The sizes affect RAID performance because using smaller stripe sizes often spreads the simultaneous writes and reads across multiple drives, which improves transfer performance for larger files. Using larger stripe sizes allows a single file to be split across fewer disks and, if your RAID controller allows it, will free the unused disks for other access operations. This improves the ability of the drive heads themselves to get to the part of the drive platter with the data.

Hands On

We used four Western Digital Raptor drives in our RAID 0 testing, with a fifth Raptor for the Windows partition. We experimented with stripe sizes ranging from 4KB to 1,024KB, measuring performance with the HD Tach and PCMark05 benchmarks. We achieved the best results with a 128KB stripe size. Using this size, we compared the performance of both a two-drive and four-drive RAID 0 config to that of a single Raptor.

As you’d imagine, the four-drive RAID 0 setup produced the fastest speeds in our benchmark tests. But even striping two drives together gave us a pretty awesome advantage over a single drive. The PCMark05 scores weren’t as much of a blowout as the HD Tach benchmarks, but they nevertheless show that our RAID array is faster than a single drive in every single benchmark the program has to offer.

This immense power, however, comes at a great cost—namely, the safety of the data stored on the array. For if a single drive in your setup fails, that’s it. Your data’s gone. On a two-disk array, striping doubles your chance of data loss due to drive failure. And that risk only increases as you add more drives to the mix.

RAID 0 Benchmarks
HD Tach				PCMark 05
	Burst (MB/s)	Average Read (MB/s)	Average Write (MB/s)	Score	XP Loading (MB/s)	App. Loading (MB/s)	Virus Scanning (Mb/s)	File Writing (Mb/s)
RAID 0 (Four)	414.1	208.7	180.2	11,984.0	23.19	9.07	131.52	272.87
RAID 0 (Two)	358.5	156.2	158.36	8,949.3	15.80	6.07	102.22	266.76
Single Drive	452.1	78.0	102.7	6,329.0	10.42	4.93	77.88	160.51

Two Terabytes? Denied!

Wait! Before you start building a super-array of drives, know that Windows XP does not support partitions greater than two terabytes. It’s just not happening. If you want to, say, chain four terabyte drives together, you’re going to need Windows Vista and a fifth hard drive, because even Vista can’t boot into the partition scheme you’ll need to set up, unless you have an EFI motherboard.

GPT, or the GUID Partition Table, is an updated version of the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme that will let you break through Windows’s 2TB limit on disk sizes. Install the OS on your separate hard drive, then set up your RAID 0 config. When you initialize the disk in Vista’s Computer Management window, make sure you select the GPT partition style instead of MBR.

RAID 1

Making a spare copy of your data will impact performance, but by how much?

Otherwise known as disk mirroring, RAID 1 maximizes protection between two disk drives. Unlike a RAID 0 setup, two drives linked in a mirror configuration don’t double the total capacity of a single new volume. Rather, the capacity of the volume is determined by the size of the smallest drive in the array.

The benefit of mirroring two drives together is obvious; just consider the name of the array. Whenever data is written to a single hard drive, it is instantaneously written to the other drive in the array as well. If one drive fails, you’ll have a copy of all your data. You can then boot off of the survivor by itself or replace your busted drive in the array with a working drive. Your RAID controller will rebuild the array without interrupting normal file operations and return everything to full working order.

This kind of setup is ideal for those who are more concerned about protecting their data than increasing performance. However, don’t misconstrue the benefits of RAID 1 for a data backup solution. A mirrored array is more designed for those, “Oh crap, the hard drive just died randomly” scenarios. A mirrored array won’t protect you from accidental file deletions or malicious software that wipes out your drive (see the sidebar below).

Hands On

Due to the extreme differences between RAID 1 and RAID 0, we expected to see dramatically different results in the relative speeds of the two formats. After all, you’re trading storage speed for sustainability. What we were unsure about was the performance difference between a mirrored setup and a single identical drive in a stand-alone configuration.

As it turns out, the mirrored array actually performed better than a single Raptor. We attribute this to our RAID controller’s ability to select which drive to read data from—it can use one hard drive for one data task, while simultaneously accessing a different data request with the other. Not surprisingly, the mirrored array’s write speeds weren’t as impressive but still bested a single Raptor drive by about 7MB/s.

RAID 1 Benchmarks
HD Tach				PCMark 05
	Burst (MB/s)	Average Read (MB/s)	Average Write (MB/s)	Score	XP Loading (MB/s)	App. Loading (MB/s)	Virus Scanning (Mb/s)	File Writing (Mb/s)
RAID 1	465.9	99.46	109.63	8,085.3	14.90	6.24	82.96	221.53
Single Drive	452.1	78.0	102.7	6,329.0	10.42	4.93	77.88	160.51

RAID 1 As a Backup Solution? No way!

If one drive’s contents are always replicated on another drive in a mirrored RAID configuration, RAID 1 is the perfect backup solution, right? Wrong. Using a mirrored RAID as your de facto backup solution works wonders in certain disastrous occurrences, like if one of your hard drives spontaneously explodes. But RAID 1 doesn’t prevent any of the more malicious (or user-created) data loss issues. If you have a virus on one drive—guess what?—it’s been replicated on the second drive. Or if you accidentally perma-delete a file, it’s gone on both drives. Grab a third-party backup program for your files and let RAID 1 take care of the act of God–type situations.

RAID 1+0

The best of both worlds, the RAID 1+0 combination approach yields great results! Right?

The mix-and-match of RAID setups, RAID 1+0 offers a unique combination of RAID 0 performance with RAID 1 data protection. It’s one of the proud members of the “nested” category of RAID configurations. Like peanut butter on bread, a nested RAID uses one RAID configuration as the base for a second RAID. This hybridization gives you a chance to reap the benefits of both setups, although you’ll never achieve the ultimate benefits of either.

Each RAID controller will handle the setup of the RAID 1+0 config differently, and some won’t even support such fancy storage dreams. Whether the controller defaults to RAID 1+0 or forces you to create an array on top of an array, the basic premise is still the same.

You’ll need at least four hard drives to create a RAID 1+0 setup. Logistically, the drives are split into two pairs. Each pair operates as a mirrored array, or RAID 1. The two pairs are then chained together in a RAID 0 configuration. This gives you data redundancy on the micro level, while still giving you speed and storage benefits on the macro level. You’re safe from data loss as long as you lose only one drive per mirrored pair. You’ll face the same data loss problem that plagues individual RAID 0 arrays if both drives in either of the mirrored pairs suffer an untimely demise.

Hands On

RAID 1+0 performance is far superior to that of a single Raptor drive. But that’s like saying ice cream is tastier than cat food. Two Raptors in a RAID 0 configuration still dominated in the average write portion of our HD Tach benchmarks. And that makes complete sense, as the mirroring portion of the RAID 1+0 array reduces its performance.

RAID 1+0’s average read speeds, on the other hand, are higher than those of two Raptors in RAID 0, but that’s not so much an issue of technology as it is one of scalability. Just for giggles, we fired up four Raptor drives in a striped RAID to get a true, four-drive showdown. The four-drive RAID 0 mercilessly decimated the benchmarks of our RAID 1+0 setup. Average read speeds were 38MB/s faster and average write speeds were 43MB/s faster. If you’re willing to risk catastrophic data loss, RAID 0 is still a speed demon’s friend. But you certainly won’t suffer, speedwise, with a RAID 1+0 array.

RAID 1+0 Benchmarks
HD Tach				PCMark 05
	Burst (MB/s)	Average Read (MB/s)	Average Write (MB/s)	Score	XP Loading (MB/s)	App. Loading (MB/s)	Virus Scanning (Mb/s)	File Writing (Mb/s)
RAID 0 (Four)	414.1	208.7	180.2	11,984.0	23.19	9.07	131.52	272.87
RAID 0 (Two)	358.5	156.2	158.36	8,949.3	15.80	6.07	102.22	266.76
RAID 1+0	334.1	170.73	137.8	10,307.7	22.43	7.90	106.22	225.33
Single Drive	452.1	78.0	102.7	6,329.0	10.42	4.93	77.88	160.51

Make a RAID with Windows

If you want the size benefits of a striped array but don’t feel like setting one up using your motherboard’s controller—or if your motherboard doesn’t include a RAID controller—you can actually create a large, striped drive in Windows itself. Just head over to your computer management screen (you get to it by right-clicking Computer in the Start Menu and selecting Manage). Convert the drives you want to stripe to dynamic disks, then create a new volume and select “striped” for the configuration. Voila! The speeds of the array won’t be nearly as fast as those of a controller-based striped array, but they’re still noticeably faster than a single Raptor’s, with the added benefit that your data isn’t tied to a controller that’s soldered onto your motherboard.

Windows vs Controller RAIDS
HD Tach				PCMark 05
	Burst (MB/s)	Average Read (MB/s)	Average Write (MB/s)	Score	XP Loading (MB/s)	App. Loading (MB/s)	Virus Scanning (Mb/s)	File Writing (Mb/s)
Controller RAID	358.5	156.2	158.36	8,949.3	15.80	6.07	102.22	266.76
Windows RAID	N/A	N/A	N/A	8,107.5	13.6	5.63	100.82	239.74
Single Drive	452.1	78.0	102.7	6,329.0	10.42	4.93	77.88	160.5

Best scores are bolded. HD Tach measures hardware-based volumes and cannot run benchmarks on software-based RAID solutions.

RAID 5

Parity makes a world of difference and barely hurts speeds.

Like RAID 1+0, a RAID 5 configuration is a hybrid combination of data safekeeping and speed. But unlike the former, RAID 5 doesn’t rely on mirroring to preserve your information. It instead uses an alternative method of data redundancy found in RAID setups—parity.

To get into the fine nuances of how parity works would require Excel charts, lots of binary code, and acronyms—lots of acronyms. So we’ll generalize. The mathematics of parity dictates that if you have four drives in an array, the RAID will split each piece of data into three stripes. Each stripe will go to a single hard drive, as it would in a RAID 0 configuration.
The controller then creates a parity stripe based on the three stripes of data. A parity stripe is a logical calculation that allows the controller to re-create any individual stripe that becomes corrupt (or in the case of a drive failure, nonexistent). Similar to mirroring, the lost data is made available to the host machine instantaneously. But the loss of a single drive puts the entire array at risk. Should an additional drive fail—making that two of the four drives dead—all the data on the array is lost. A parity stripe works wonders, just not miracles.

Hands On

RAID 5 gives you the best combination of speed, size, and data savings. Our RAID 5 and RAID 1+0 arrays scored similar speeds, with the RAID 5 squeezing 15 additional MB/s in our HD Tach average read test.

The bonus comes in the fact that our RAID 5 array gave us an additional drive’s worth of space to play around with—450 total gigabytes as opposed to the RAID 1+0’s 300GB of total capacity.

Admittedly, a RAID 1+0 array gives you better data redundancy on paper, but the additional mirroring seems like overkill. In essence, you’d be performing the same maintenance tasks you’d be performing in a RAID 5 array. If a drive goes out in a RAID 1+0, it would be in your best interest to stop what you’re doing and immediately replace the dead drive; the same goes for RAID 5. While the next drive that goes out in your RAID 1+0 array might not be the one to destroy a mirrored pair and consequently your data, do you really want to roll the dice? We wouldn’t, and we’d much rather have the performance and size benefits a RAID 5 array brings.

Why Use a Controller?

All of the benchmarks in this feature were completed using Adaptec’s RAID 31605 controller ($1,000, adaptec.com). In our initial tests, we found that our EVGA 608i chipset-based RAID speeds simply paled in comparison. Thanks to an onboard 800MHz processor and 256MB of DDR2 cache memory, the controller was able to output an average read speed of 211.7MB/s in a simple HD Tach benchmark of a four-drive, striped array. The motherboard-based RAID topped out at 118.9MB/s.

RAID controllers also offer more options and safety features than a motherboard-based chipset, and the motherboard RAID itself is limited to the number of free SATA ports you have. In contrast, our controller supports up to 16 SATA drives.

Motherboard RAID vs Controller RAID
HD Tach				PCMark 05
	Burst (MB/s)	Average Read (MB/s)	CPU Use (MB/s)	Score	XP Loading (MB/s)	App. Loading (MB/s)	Virus Scanning (Mb/s)	File Writing (Mb/s)
Motherboard	234.5	118.9	2.0	10,525.0	25.54	12.61	82.53	129.05
Controller	473.3	211.7	2.0	12,162.0	23.76	9.08	132.57	282.73

Best scores are bolded. Arrays were tested using a four-drive RAID 0 configuration.