With 4 identical drives in RAID5 am I likely to get away with a single drive failure and rebuild (ie is it likely any missing segments of date from a failed read will be available from elsewhere in the RAID?)

I was running mirrored with 2 drives but ran out of space, so expanded it with 2 more drives and went to RAID5 at that point....

I am currently running Windows 7 as OS on Dell and will probably run it on HP as well, mostly for ease of setup. From software I run local file sharing, internet file sharing, FTP, VPN, Plex, CCTV... Will probably need to upgrade CPU and RAM to 8GB to run CCTV on HP

That's interesting, from my research on the net before buying others have reported about 33W power consumption in idle. I measured mine to be 30W in idle with 1 HDD, maybe it's the Red HDD's consuming more power?

That's something to consider and I was not aware off.

It's not critical, more of pain in the ass if not working. Dell have served me well couple of years, only one HDD failed once, just bough a new one and swapped without powering down so no downtime.

Measured with one of these: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2909576441...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT Seems accurate enough as it reads 18W lightbulb as 17.2W and 2200 W kettle as 2250W. Interesting fact on TV as well, without Eco mode it takes 110W, in maximum power saving mode only 58W, was not expecting that big of a difference.

I was hoping to get at least 100 notes for ti, hard to judge the price, they are all over the price on e-bay depending on configuration. I think it did not have rails, need to check but does have 2x750W PSU's

I only have 250GB SSD on Desktop, ElsaWin is running on server as well and just a small 30MB client installed on desktop and laptops to run it from server. I can even run it remotely if I VPN in the home network.

I think I might try ESXi on USB and use all for HDD's in 1+0 then

It's hard to say, since it depends on the capacity of the hard drives and how much reading/writing has to be done to rebuild the data. Since RAID 5 uses parity to recreate the data (rather than simple duplication), rebuilding can be very disc intensive. Also, if one drive of four identical drives has failed, there's a good chance the remaining drives could be about to fail too and working them hard to rebuild the data might just push them over the edge.

Having said all that, there's a chance the drives might last better than expected and rebuilding may well succeed, but if you want to vastly improve your chances, with 4 drive bays, you could create a RAID 10 array instead.

I might give you 100 quid for it, depending on the condition and further details. If you're not in a hurry to sell it, bring it to the next meet and I'll probably buy it off you.

Years ago I had a home server, with 5 x 200Gb disks, and indeed 3 of them failed over a very short period. Now I have a NAS.
When my work HP server starts wobbling, it will be replaced with a NAS. I can't see the benefit of a server, and its complexity and expense, over the simplicity of a NAS.

For use as a simple home 'file server', I'd totally agree.

Of course a proper server can do so much more than any NAS though and in most larger businesses you'll usually find several of each, all serving different purposes. One of my customers is presently running 16 servers (6 physical and 10 virtual) and 4 large capacity NAS units (for shared storage and backups).

I had two NASes before but they were too slow, underpowered and lacked flexibility so I ditched them and bought Dell server. 20-30MB/s transfer speeds from NAS were not good enough for me, on Dell I am getting 110-112MB/s which is pretty much the limit of 1Gbps network. Besides that fully blown server lets me run all kinds of software say the same ElsaWin installed on server and then PC/Laptop only need small client installed. It also runs CCTV, acts as a router as I ditched BT Hub and I am just using open reach modem and then Cisco access point for wireless, it does VPN to log on home network remotely and some other soft as well.

Installing ESXi did not go to plan it wanted at least 4GB of RAM but with 4GB installed there is only 3.84 available. I will update RAM in the future but just want to get it up and running at the moment. I do not really need ESXi as I don't need to run several virtual servers anyway so might go for 5th HDD in ODD bay as I have several 2.5" HDD's lying around just need to get power cable adaptor from FDD to SATA.

I used VMware's offering for years. These days I'm doing more with Hyper-V. In Server 2008 it was somewhat lacking but since the 2012 release, it's become a very mature and stable product.

This is what you need .... some serious server power (notice the 24 logical processors and 72GB of RAM) :)

Attachment 11974

This is a setup I've been working recently on for a business customer. There are 4 servers in the group: 2 of them are of the spec you can see in the screenshot and the other 2, which only have 12GB of RAM each, are running the free Hyper-V 2012 R2 'core' OS (but can be managed from any of the full Server 2012 R2 Standard installations). The best thing about MS Hyper-V is how you can 'live-migrate' VMs from one physical server to another with zero downtime. I also have some of the VMs configured for replication such that, if one server dies, I can quickly power-up VM clones on another server in the group.

The customer I work for currently runs 4 physical servers running VMWare, spread across those 4 hosts we currently have around 75 virtual servers all running off those 4 boxes. Each of those 4 boxes has dual Xeon quad core CPUs and 128GB of RAM in each. I look after and maintain the whole lot, plus 2 other physical servers which are required due to needing access to PCIe cards. Storage wise we have two large NAS connected via multipath iSCSI to each host, we have at least 100TB of storage and more. The biggest headache is network cables because of the multipath IO to the SAN, each host has 8 network cables for the LAN connectivity and 8 for the SAN, so 16 cables in each host.

I had the same problem, but run PCI passthrough. Works faultlessly on ESX 5.0.0, but is widely documented (and proven by me) to be totally shafted in any later version. Doh.

The days of servers having storage are limited (well, over in most cases)

Separating compute and storage makes sense full stop. When storage is all in one place its a lot easier manage. When compute breaks, throw it away and get a new one. You've lost no data.

I run a Synology NAS at home, and feature wise its dripping with them, performance wise the 1GB lan is the bottleneck every time. Power, it uses very little. It also has a lot of apps available, including CCTV. All compute is on ESXi as its just easier (and cheaper) that virtualising over windows.

In terms of raid, even at home, losing access to data whilst you restore from backups is a pita. For that reason alone, I would run at least Raid 1 to give you a chance of keeping things going whilst you replace the failed disc.

Also, mirroring from a 4TB disc to 2 spanned 2TB discs, if even possible on a desktop O/S is a bit messy. Mirroring is best performed across identical geometries, however any mirroring beats none at all.