@NattNatt said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@geertcourmacher said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

Seems that GTA V with the latest update has finally gotten rid of the cheaters/modders. Anyone here still playing it?
Got a bit hooked during the last weeks, and buying it on kinguin it should be quite cheap by now.

Other than that I will probably always be in love with Age of Empires, particularly AOE III still has a reasonable amount of players should you care about RTS.

Still playing from time to time, I want the new Company stuff to be available in private sessions though...

What you can do is enter a public session and make your internet connection delibertely laggy for a few seconds. Run a speed test, connect to a vpn and cancel and you will end up in a public session alone. Alternatively, sometimes you will find sessions that are populated by only a few companies, not bothering with each other.

Having said that, I lost a lot of in-game money with pickups. I won't do a delivery in a full session, though.

@Breffni-Potter; online isn't that bad. Some servers are, and there's too many kids in general, but it can also add to it if you get a nice crew and don't already have a ton of real life friends playing the game.

Seems that GTA V with the latest update has finally gotten rid of the cheaters/modders. Anyone here still playing it?
Got a bit hooked during the last weeks, and buying it on kinguin it should be quite cheap by now.

Other than that I will probably always be in love with Age of Empires, particularly AOE III still has a reasonable amount of players should you care about RTS.

Just a little update for those interested.

I have now utilized 2 60GB SSD's as a software-based Raid0 with Win10 installed and I keep an Ubuntu stick by the server. Every now and then I boot into Ubunto just to see whether everything is accessable and it seems to work fine.
According to Adaptec all new Raid cards should be compatible with mine, so the biggest risk remaining to me seems to be user error.

I don't post this to disregard your great advice; I am sure there are better options, but I had to fill the server rather quick to escape the situation described above and hence didn't have the time to get aquainted with entirely new OS's, or whole notions of virtualization (for the next update I shall, however, try to do this your way).

The server is actually running anything but 24/7 - I only turn it on every other day for a few hours at most. Whenever I have to move more than a few gigabytes I turn on write-cache - I figured as long as I'm copying it from my main PC there is no risk involved. Afterwards I turn it off again.

The issue with the WD Red's being recognized as Sata1 keeps reoccuring - and changing with every reboot - but I haven't seen any negative impact given my usage scenario.

I installed the best fan I am aware of blowing air directly at the card (140mm Noctua Industrial) and with 1300RPM I get up to 62° (shaving off 20° compared to an 120mm fan I had installed before), if it runs at 2000RPM I could get it down to 52°, but the noise is unbearable.

The only thing that's left that I haven't figured out is regarding scrubs. I have two options that seem similiar on the controller. One is called background consistency checks; which can be set to anything; even a few hundred days (I set this to 180 days so it hasnt ocured yet). The second is called verify and fix, which can be set at a maximum of once a month. If I don't run either, it means the controller doesn't scrub at all?

Not really a backup. For the purpose of creating this array I had to fill up every hard drive I could find. I know you're probably crinching right now, but I actually had to delete backups for that, so for the moment even my critical data is not backed up. Only a few more hours, though. *fingers crossed

The improved speed is indeed impressive, but I'd only feel the difference right now, as I am filling up the array. And even then, I won't get to use all of the improved speed (it's either limited by the network, or worse, usb 2.0). I've actually gone ahead and left it enabled despite the fact that I don't have a battery just for filling up the array. I figured, hopefully not wrongly, that I can't lose any data as long as I don't delete it from my external drives/work pc even if the first power failure in 5+yrs were to occur.

@wirestyle22

Yes, indeed the controller negotiates the speed. I couldn't find an easy way to adjust that though.
Google search only led me back to this thread
But if its to do with WD Red's, I'll just have to live with it I guess.

Temperature: The controller gots really hot with temperatures of up to 78°C. It still reports as normal, but it seems really hot to me. I probably shouldn't compare this to a normal pc, but I actually doubt that I could cool it much better with air; I suspect the heatsink is just too small. Temps dont really drop much when inactive. Water cooling is probably not feasible, or even available.

Scrubs: I have two options that seem similiar on the controller. One is called background consistency checks; which can be set to anything; even a few hundred days. The second is called verify and fix, which can be set at a maximum of once a month. If you the specifics, all the better, but if you don't, given the very rare writes, what would be a good number of days/months to run scrubs?

@scottalanmiller said in Raid 6 Amateur File Server Setup Questions:

@geertcourmacher said in Raid 6 Amateur File Server Setup Questions:

Mind if I ask you what speaks against the approach of having the OS not on the array? You said performance, number of ports, etc...

Waste of Performance, waste of capacity, extra effort...

Ask the question the opposite way, given that splitting arrays causes huge losses in capacity and performance, what factor would make it a consideration? Try to answer the "pro" of going against standard best practices instead of only looking for the cons of following them.

Again, I'll take your word for granted, so no questions there. But, I'm not really wasting any capacity by attaching a 60gb ssd I already own (own it twice, in fact, and I find it too small for anything). I'm not wasting a slot since the ones on the mb aren't used at all (wouldn't be wasting a slot on the controller either, since I probably won't ever attach 20 drives). No extra effort too.
That leaves performance. If I'm fine with the write, and the read is maxed out anyway - would you still advice (not on principle, but in my case) against it? I've read your article on Raid1 + Raid 5. Am I wrong that my scenario deviates from standard industry use enough?

As for drive performance, I just provided what I though would be my only usage scenario. Does this give you more info or what tool should I use to measure the IOPS?

With write-cache enabled (just for test purposes)

Mind if I ask you what speaks against the approach of having the OS not on the array? You said performance, number of ports, etc...

Just as a trial I threw in a small SSD connected to the motherboard rather than the controller. It produced the results above; write is not great, but for my purpose OK (and could you really expect much more with RAID6?; Read could have actually been even better; I think 115MB/s should also be close to the maximum of what my Gigabit ethernet can do, right?).

I think with the way I write, that is I copy it over from my main pc, I could even risk enabling write-cache. That would mean that in the event of power-failure the data currently written is lost, right? The likelihood of that happening during I copy something over is almost zero, but even if it happened, I would still have the data on my pc. (Write performance is not so critical, so I won't be doing it, just out of interest).

I have also booted the entire thing with Ubuntu on a stick and I could access the array with no issues.
So it almost seems like a panacea for me; I could switch OS later on, while taking full advantage of the energy conservation options of the controller (switching drives off etc...). The OS would still run on the SSD, instead of having 6 disks spinning up and down for access to the OS alone.
I'm probably missing something though.

The issue with drives only being recognized at 1.5GB/s has returned. I think I can rule out a bad cable since the drives are attached to a 1-4 splitter cable (SFF 8087 to 4 SATA) and there is no pattern of, say, one cable producing bad results. I haven't changed any of the cables, and yet the speed seems to change every reboot. Write-performance seems not be impacted (still got around 10MB/s when 5 out of 6 where recognized as SATA I; next time I get 4/6 recognized as SATA II).

Although I rebooted thrice after the firmware update, the issue seems to be gone now. I didn't change anything though. I coulnd't find any firmware uppdate for the drives, except the lcc update, but none of the drives were affected by this.

I've built the array now with a stripe size of 512KB, hopefully not too much (I consulted the web; let's see whether that actually holds) It was the second highest, 1024 would have also been available (down to 16).

Just ran a quick test and got transfer rates of about 11MB/s write and 115MB/s read. The write penality is probably within range?!

Firmware update was succesful. The drives are still not recognized at 3GB/s, but this seems to change arbitrarily. At some point I had one or two of the 5 WD drives recognized as 3GB/s, now I'm down to 0 again (all show 1.5GB/s); the only stable one is the HGST. A few other drives I tested got 3GB/s too.

Thanks; I'm beginning to understand.
On my desktop change of OS would depend on where data is stored. With JBODs and a seperate OS disk or ssd I could run linux on a stick or install it as a second OS and access the data.
If the desktop OS is on the same disk as the data, it would be hard to get rid of the old one. But otherwise changing OS would be quite easy, or am I wrong?

Ok, so firmware upgrade first.
Then array creation. Any hints on the issues above with the drives being recognized as too slow? (Possible chance step 1 will rectify this, though).
Regarding the many settings in the controller config; no changes from default?
And stripe size? If the suggestion was 4, 16 would be the closest to choose. Yet, that would be the lowest of the options and I have larger files.

Third, OS choice. Still uncertain and only vague understanding of what VM does. Would XS run on top of CentOS or concurrently?
If I just wanted the array up and running, could I actually change the OS later on? (I guess this would assume OS installation not on the array). If the controller is doing all the work, this shouldn't be impossible, no? But I guess in practice, Windows will not use the same filesystem. If it worked the other way around (CentOS, XS being able to read NTFS), though, then I could familiarize myself with all of your suggestions on another PC, and then make the switch on the array.

Thanks for all the help so far!

In the Raid controller Bios I realized two things:

• The Firmware is not the latest, but very close to it; 18937 (Feb 2012) vs the latest release 18948 (May 2012). Is an update recommended or just an unecessary risk? No Data or arrays are created yet.
• All of the WD drives are recognized as Speed 1.5G, vs the HGST one with 3.0G. Is that the Sata speed, 1 and 2? Because all drives should be 6Gb/s actually, and while the controller only goes as far as 3Gb/s it shouldn't be just 1.5GB/s. Weirdly at first 2 of the WD Red's were recognized correctly.

In case you wonder why I used CN1 and CN3, that's because the other 2 are currently blocked by the hd-sliders (I could remove those plastic bits though, if necessary).

The other thing I am uncertain is whether I should change anything in the general controller configuration; I'll attach a screen of the options.

When it comes to the Array configuration (I haven't yet started), the suggestion was to go with 4KB stripe size, correct? I can only start at 16, all the way up to 1024.

I am also uncertain as to the 2 remaining options here, Read Caching and Write Caching. The last (Create RAID via) has already been answered (A: Quick Init).

Oh no, it's independent in that sense. I was referring to whether stripe size or any other setting within the Adaptec Raid Utility would respond better/worse to either OS.

I now have Win10 and CentOS on 2 usb sticks; I removed the 2.5" boot drive and only have the future Raid drives hocked to the controller.

I will now use the Adaptec Raid Bios utility to set up the Raid, following your instructions. Can this be independent from whatever OS I will eventually use or should I change settings accordingly?

I'll at least start an installation with one of your recommendations, either on the server now are as a second boot option on my work pc. CentOS would also be good as a server system, or was this a general recommendation to be paired with XenServer?
I'd like to start small with only what's necessary, if that makes sense. If i find it easier than anticipated, I can still go further.

@Dashrender
You're quite correct. I wasn't actually sure whether either of those sites were made for what I wanted; let alone that anyone would care about a simple home file server. In academia, as almost anywhere else in life, I'd say its important to listen to those who really understand what they are doing. There is so much info/tutorials out there where people just pass over their "knowledge" of what they have read somewhere, without understanding anything behind the scene/GUI. Kind of like, if I now started to give advice to others on why Raid 6 is such a good idea, how to go about it, etc.. - even though it may work for my purpose, I feel very few users outside these very particular forums have a true understanding of eventual risks, downsides and so on. For instance, aside from a very general article on, I think Cnet, that Raid5 is becoming useless, those forums are still full of people "bragging" about their raid5 setup (quite similiar in size to what I have in mind, not something really small either). Just reading over at spiceworks and some of SAM's articles/comments, I knew that wasn't an option, yet I still had no idea (and had not read anything about it) that a very simple thing such as a BIOS update would screw over fake Raid10 (which, I assumed, was very safe). I didn't even have a reason to do that bios update, I just saw a new one coming out.

Most solutions offered here, honestly, are overkill for what I want and need. But better be overwhelmed and aware of risks, then having a false sense of security.

I know you are all correct and I hate ignorance, but to be perfectly honest - and I hope you don't count that as dismissal of any advice (which it isn't), there is still a great sense of unease for me when thinking about these setups and I would much rather just go about and slap that ol' windows onto the array or even just run it from a seperate disk. I would feel much better if this was a general foray into a new OS without my storage depending on it. Because as secure as these OS' are, the risk of user error is certainly larger on my side. I know this mindset is in conflict with that of true IT guys - that lack of curiosity and exploration surely won't be understood (and, I would have the same idea in my discipline) - but at heart I'm still very content to be just a slightly advanced consumer, not an admin, if that makes any sense.
Again, I hope this doesn't create the feeling of rejecting any advice; I won't. It's just what I could do in the next half hour and know it would work, and something obviously better, yet with a lot of unknowns in it.

So it seems I should really get to know another OS. In that case I'll probably have to put the entire thing off for a while as I won't be finding the time in the months to come.
Which would be the easiest to learn from the good ones suggested here?

And just to understand the decision-making a bit more, why is it so terribly stupid to run a client OS on a server if I have zero need for server OS capabilities? I'd assume there is a risk of it messing with the controller or anything of the sort, but if you care to elaborate, all the better.

Unless I have completely misunderstood the information presented on the Adaptec website, it seems as most controllers would be compatible between each other. Hence I could also get a newer one, should the 51645 become unavailable.

http://ask.adaptec.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16881/~/how-to-replace-a-sata-or-sas-raid-controller-without-loss-of-data

Although I am slightly confused by what a HostRAID should be (is that software raid on a pci-raid controller?), it probably doesn't affect the 51645.

To be prepared for a controller failure, would it still make no sense to install the OS outside the array? The likelihood of the OS drive failing is probably a lot larger than that of the controller. But would that damage the array or have any impact on it, or could you just swap the OS drive without the array recognizing any difference?
Actually, coming back to this, @Dashrender suggested not installing the OS away from the array; by that you meant install it directly on the RAID6, right? As opposed to just having a single OS disk plugged into the raid controller rather than the mainboard sata port.

Bootable arrays: before replacing the controller with a different model it is necessary to first install the operating system drivers for the new controller otherwise the operating system installed on the bootable array cannot start. In order to load the operating system drivers for the replacement controller just add the "new" controller to the system without arrays attached to it and install the driver before you remove the "old" controller.

That's from Adaptec. With only a single PCI slot, that seems like an impossible task.

I've actually just finished reading your article, so I will stay away from it too. But I was hypothesizing on why it could be popularized in general; because people are afraid of entirely new operating systems and FreeNas is falsly advertised as something less complex.