Author Topic: external nas versus internal raid  (Read 3591 times)

justdeb

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external nas versus internal raid
« on: December 08, 2009, 07:52:55 am »
Hi All,

I have been away and noticed that 8.10 beta is up and running and from what i can read some exceptional work has been done by everyone.

My question is as follows - i run 7.10 with an external QNAP NAS system and it has worked well until recently. I have started to notice that the cpu usage within the nas dashboard has been at 100% consistently. If i take it out of the linuxmce envrionment and run it under windows the cpu utilisation drops to only 5%. When i reconnect it - the cpu utilisation climbs back up to 95% and as soon as i try run media from it we go back to 100%. I have done all the firmware updates for the QNAP nas and as far as i can tell it seems to be something within linuxmce. Has anyone come across this and if so is it easy to resolve?

Alternatively i was contemplating rebuilding everything under 8.10 and instead of using the external nas i was contemplating throwing in a couple of TB drives for my media and run it directly from the server only.

If this has been posted please direct me to the link.

As always thanks in advance

Justin

klanmce

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Re: external nas versus internal raid
« Reply #1 on: December 08, 2009, 02:02:35 pm »
I have a mix of both have not experience any issues.

I have NAS based on freeNas - had it before linuxMCE - which I use to backup linuxmce video and audio to; it is not setup in linuxmce - that is - I choosed ignore. On my production core, I had a 750 G drive, just for media, which I let linuxmce configure; planning on when I properly recreate the production system, to simple remap the original /home/public/data/ directory to that of the new media disk (have to create all folders as in original directory), so all media go to the other drive, the original just for binaries and diskless images; plan on using an adaptec card 4 port, raid 0, three disk, as I will be backing up to the NAS.

You can use a raid card to handle the drives, or your onboard raid if you have the appropriate driver support, or linuxmce built in raid.

Personally I like the raid card option as the ones I have used support hot swapping, thus in combination with a hot swappable case, a drive fails, you simple pull it out and put in a new one, less steps than software.

Drives internal saves you power as you do not have the additional electronics to power continuously.

See the links below:

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Create_RAID_in_LMCE

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Create_RAID_in_LMCE_Manually

This is also the link for the wiki, lots of other stuff

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Main_Page

wierdbeard65

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Re: external nas versus internal raid
« Reply #2 on: December 08, 2009, 04:43:46 pm »
Careful when using Raid Cards.

I have one and although everything is now working, MCE's AutoMounter doesn't see it initially as it doesn't appear as a "standard" disk (SCSI, IDE or SATA). You need to modify the AutoMounter script to get it to work. See http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=7580.msg62545#msg62545 for a discussion about this (at the end!)

Just a heads-up!
Paul
If you have the time to help, please see where I have got to at: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/User:Wierdbeard65

tkmedia

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Re: external nas versus internal raid
« Reply #3 on: December 08, 2009, 06:31:31 pm »
I have been using a 3tb freenas  for my primary lmce storage for over a year with both 0710 and 0810.
It gets automatically detected and configured with linuxmce without issue for me.



Tim
« Last Edit: December 08, 2009, 08:44:42 pm by tkmedia »
My Setup http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/User:Tkmedia

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King

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Re: external nas versus internal raid
« Reply #4 on: December 08, 2009, 08:00:06 pm »
I use a Buffalo Linkstation and an internal 500g drive with no problems on either.
Core Running as Hybrid:
Asus P5N7A-VM Mobo
On Board NVIDIA Geforce 9300
Single 500G HD
PCI NIC
Currently running 8.10
No MD's Yet
Buffalo Linkstation NAS
Sharp Aquos LC-46SE94U

totallymaxed

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Re: external nas versus internal raid
« Reply #5 on: December 09, 2009, 01:05:15 am »
Hi All,

I have been away and noticed that 8.10 beta is up and running and from what i can read some exceptional work has been done by everyone.

My question is as follows - i run 7.10 with an external QNAP NAS system and it has worked well until recently. I have started to notice that the cpu usage within the nas dashboard has been at 100% consistently. If i take it out of the linuxmce envrionment and run it under windows the cpu utilisation drops to only 5%. When i reconnect it - the cpu utilisation climbs back up to 95% and as soon as i try run media from it we go back to 100%. I have done all the firmware updates for the QNAP nas and as far as i can tell it seems to be something within linuxmce. Has anyone come across this and if so is it easy to resolve?

Alternatively i was contemplating rebuilding everything under 8.10 and instead of using the external nas i was contemplating throwing in a couple of TB drives for my media and run it directly from the server only.

If this has been posted please direct me to the link.

As always thanks in advance

Justin

Our preference is for using RAIDED NAS's as we find them far more reliable and generally easier to expand and maintain.

All the best


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justdeb

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Re: external nas versus internal raid
« Reply #6 on: December 09, 2009, 04:33:04 am »
Thanks all - i will keep it the way it is.

Has anyone come across the issue of the nas cpu utilisation being at 100% when hooked up to linuxmce?

King

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Re: external nas versus internal raid
« Reply #7 on: December 10, 2009, 01:11:19 am »
The only issue I had with the Linkstation was LinuxMCE was writing 0kb files to the trashbox every three minutes which added up and after a while stated to cause skipping during playback, but I never looked at CPU utilization. I had to change settings from Read/Write to Read only on the linkstation whenever I wasn't ripping anything to it. Maybe check that.
Core Running as Hybrid:
Asus P5N7A-VM Mobo
On Board NVIDIA Geforce 9300
Single 500G HD
PCI NIC
Currently running 8.10
No MD's Yet
Buffalo Linkstation NAS
Sharp Aquos LC-46SE94U