Now that we have a basic Ubuntu box up and running the next step in building a media server is to have some storage to hold the goods. Taking some basic SATA cards and 6 new 500gb SATA drives I proceeded to assemble a raid system.

The key to the software Raid5 setup is to use MDADM. You can find full instructions for the setup of raid disks under Linux at Gregory Gulik’s site.

I liked the idea to use LVM which allows you some future flexibility to expand volumes, add more arrays to your volumes and in general get out of a bind if need be. The basic idea is to virtualize your array and volume setup so they can be modified without loosing data.

Lastly the Linux Raid wiki has lots of good info about the setup of software raid systems. Read through some of this info to get a good feeling about what you are doing before depending on the raid system for your live data.

Well, after a few weeks of playing around with FreeNAS, it was time to build out the plan for real. First up was some added hardware to create a “real” NAS box. Hard drives are top of the list, then network, cables, etc.

Hardware Procurement list

1. 6 – 500GB Hitachi Sata II Drives
2. Misc Sata cables to hookup everything
3. Adaptec 2610 (Dell) RAID card – for hardware raid (from Ebay)
4. CF to IDE boot drive adapter (from Ebay)
5. Intel Pro 10/100/1000 Network adapter
6. New case (from Re-Pc)

So, first up was to build out the new raid system. The plan was to use 6 500 gig drives using a hardware raid controller to present them to FreeNAS. The problem was the hardware raid controller would not build out greater than 1.5T and would not complete building the raid group with the new disks. Next challenge was that when the system booted up freeNAS it would fail upon creating a volume on the hardware raid controller. After much research I decided on moving to software raid as the best solution.

1. I added 2 Sata HBA cards to directly hookup the 6 drives

With my new HBA direct connections to the drives, I forged ahead with FreeNAS software Raid setup. In short, it failed miserably. I couldn’t get anything to build out cleanly and never got a stable drive set out of it. Lots of research, many hours of testing, before I finally gave up. Hum, what to do next?

PUNT

Next up I installed Ubuntu Linux onto my existing NAS hardware setup. With great hopes I pushed install with a new CD in the drive…

Well, we finally took the plunge into the 21st century and got a new TV along with a new AppleTV. The system is slowly coming together. The FreeNAS box has all the storage, which an older iMac G5 serves out content via iTunes. The AppleTV then streams it’s TV & Movies from the iMac to allow a larger content store than you can normally sync up to the AppleTV. This solution is very seamless and works great thus far.
(more…)

Well, after a few years of use, my MacBook Pro’s 80gig hard drive was just not cutting it anymore. With the launch of Leopard it’s now a very easy thing to backup / recover your entire system so that was the catalyst to get this job done. First up was ordering the drive. I picked out a Hitachi 250 gigabyte sata drive for the upgrade. Next was to backup the existing drive using Time Machine.
(more…)

FreeNAS configuration for a OSX network

The next key part of our local network is our FreeNAS storage server. It’s primary use is to store encoded media files for projection on our home theater system. We source content from an EyeTV PVR recorder on the mac. Once the shows are recorded we transcode into a variety of codecs as the need arises, usually choosing some form of H264 that can play nicely in quicktime.

The basic setup couldn’t be easier. You need the following kit to get started:

PC hardware for server (any Pentium box should work)

iso disk burned from the FreeNAS image

reboot your pc with the cd and install!

Configure up your FreeNAS box

(more…)