Home Server – BBS2 Advanced, from Tranquil PC
This was a post I found in my drafts from April. It seemed complete enough so I thought I’d post it.
I’ve finally got around to buying a home server from the guys at Tranquil. If I’m honest, I was a little disappointed with the variety of multi-disk systems available on the market. It seems to be a very small market (understandably I guess) and with most people after Windows Home Server. It appeared to me that there were three major options, one from Acer, a few from HP, and then the Tranquil BBS2. The HPs appear to be great if you intend to use WHS, but not worth the expense if you’re simply going to dispense with the OS and thus the extra features it brings.
It was a tossup between the Acer and the BBS2 for me, and I went with the BBS2 as it had a much faster CPU, more RAM, and an extra HDD slot (5 in total). I upgraded the RAM to 4GB – apparently it’s not user upgradable once it’s been set in the factory, so I thought it was worth the upgrade – and chose the x4 RAID option without the eSATA port. My rationale here is that the reason I’ve got the RAID is to act as my main defense against data loss, and that I’ll rarely do backups onto an external HDD (perhaps bi-monthly depending on how much data has changed, and just the most important stuff). With this in mind I’m hoping that the slow speed of USB 2.0 will suffice.
I’m going to use RAID5, as I like the combination of striping and redundancy. I also like the fact that the system can continue through a disk failure (at reduced speed, but with all the data available), and the fact you can hot-swap disks in and out, should you have a failure. The downsides to RAID5 are reduced writing speed, and the simple fact that your data is spread across multiple devices, so in the case of failure and you want to get at your data somehow, it’s not possible to just wack one of the hard drives in another system and grab the data like it would be for RAID1 (mirroring).
Having read a number of opinions on how to setup your RAID, I decided that despite having a fake-hardware RAID board in the BBS2, I’d instead use Ubuntu’s Software RAID. Both use the CPU for RAID management, but Ubuntu’s software RAID does not rely on a specific piece of hardware which would need to be sourced if the original were to malfunction. As well as that, Ubuntu officially supports Software RAID, and don’t say good things when it comes to fake-hardware RAID.
I bought four 1TB 64MB cache Caviar Green hard drives from Western Digital, praised for their low power consumption. I intend to put a small HDD in as the system drive at some point, and use all four 1TB drives as data disks, but for now I have three for data, and one acting as the system drive. The BBS2, in the configuration I bought, supports x4 HDD RAID, with one non-RAID HDD system drive. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to grow the RAID array when it comes to adding the forth data disk.
It turned out that one of the drives I received was actually dodgy, and seemed to cause write errors. But once I had that replaced, I went on to successfully setup my system. mdadm is brilliant, and makes setting up RAID really easy.
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1