Major Server Refresh

[bigo93bronco]

Getting ready to do a major overhaul on my sage server in the next couple weeks. The current hardware is about 10 years old now and is starting to show its age. Its a rackmounted 4U server case and the current system is an old X86 system with a Core2 Quad processor. I'll also be tackling what to do about the pending EPG shutdown while i'm rebuilding it. Anyway, I figured I'd post the new specs and see if anyone has any thoughts, concerns, tips, etc

New MOBO ASUS Z270 Tuff2 (6 PCI Express ports)

Intel Core i5 7400 Kaby Lake

Windows 10 X64

Corsair AIO watercooler

16 GB Ripjaws DDR4 RAM (got it for super cheap)

OS Drive(s) 2X Samsung EVO 850's (120GB) These are connected to an OS-independant mirroring device for fault tolerance. It wall also auto rebuild drives if one ever does fail.

Recording Drive(s) 1 WD 4TB Purple drive (considering adding a 2nd one) If I do would it be better to let Sage manage them, or put them into RAID 0 to make sure the recordings get balanced between the drives?

Capture cards - 6X Win-TV HVR 2250's (I already have 2 of these and I'm adding 4 more because they have worked really good for me)

Other things - Case has a redundant power supply plugged into 2 different Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS's)

Server is on 24/7, no sleep modes or anything

Server will also soon be running Homeseer HS3

[JustFred]

I strongly advise against using the WD purple (or any surveillance) drives for Sage content. They're not designed for this kind of application. Sooner or later you'll encounter playback problems, as others have already reported.

Sage is quite capable of dealing with having recordings spread across multiple physical & logical drives. In contrast, using Raid 0 (striping) is a distinct disadvantage here, since failure of a single drive in the pair would loose access to all data stored on both drives.

Be aware that there have been some reported PCIe compatibility problems with certain vintages of the 2250's (h/w rev C3F2, I believe) plugged into newer PCIe chipsets. The mobo fails to recognize the presence of the 2250. It's a h/w bug in the 2250. Ref: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Deskto...9/td-p/2912729

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by JustFred

I strongly advise against using the WD purple (or any surveillance) drives for Sage content. They're not designed for this kind of application. Sooner or later you'll encounter playback problems, as others have already reported.

Sage is quite capable of dealing with having recordings spread across multiple physical & logical drives. In contrast, using Raid 0 (striping) is a distinct disadvantage here, since failure of a single drive in the pair would loose access to all data stored on both drives.

Be aware that there have been some reported PCIe compatibility problems with certain vintages of the 2250's (h/w rev C3F2, I believe) plugged into newer PCIe chipsets. The mobo fails to recognize the presence of the 2250. It's a h/w bug in the 2250. Ref: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Deskto...9/td-p/2912729

I had an issue with my 2250. New board didn't see it. Ended up with an HDHR and never looked back.

RAID0 fo recording drives would get you nothing. The speed gain isn't necessary especially since the newer drives are already so fast. You'll never even get close to using all the write bandwidth the drive is capable of.

[bigo93bronco]

Thanks for the replies

I agree about the Purple drives, I think I'll pull it and move it over to my security DVR. Do you think a single WD Black drive at 8TB could handle (worst case scenario) 6X HD recordings and 6X SD at the same time?

Thanks for the info about the 2250's, I had not heard about that. I already more of them, so hopefully it works out. I've noticed that ASUS mobo's let you force legacy settings to the PCIX slots, maybe that can resolve the issue?

Virtually all of my sagetv problems over the years have been network issues, so I steer away network tuners that might add more congestion

[JustFred]

WD Black drives are great performers, although I'm not aware that the 8TB capacity is available from WD in the Black (7200 rpm) series.

My brother is pleased with running an HGST 8TB 7200RPM NAS drive (in a single-drive config) on his Sage system. That drive has been in use for about 6 months now.

I'm currently running several HGST 4TB Coolspin (5400 rpm) drives, and find that they perform well with Sage. Formatted with a 64KB allocation size. My test load was 3 HD recordings + 6 HD playbacks + running a continuous R/W surface scan under Seagate's Seatools diagnostic. Didn't see any issues.

I've sworn off of using any more high-capacity Seagate drives since having had more than a dozen 1.5TB & 2TB drives fail, where they suddenly develop dozens of re-allocated sectors. The most recent failure this month was a Seagate 2 TB which went from 0 to 2K reallocated sectors over a period of about 4 hours. The drive was only 3 years old and never ran hotter than 37 deg C. YMMV.

[graywolf]

Originally Posted by JustFred

WD Black drives are great performers, although I'm not aware that the 8TB capacity is available from WD in the Black (7200 rpm) series.

Then there is always the 8 & 10TB WD Gold (7200 rpm)
not sure of the price point differences between the Black & Gold.

Either way, too much $$$ for my taste currently

[bigo93bronco]

I'm now considering doing a little TLC to my old hardware, and throwing it into a cheap 2U rackmount case as an emergency/testing Sagetvserver. The main issues with the old server is the MOBO and OS (Vista X86). I could pickup a socket 775 MOBO and case for a couple hundred bucks.

I know some of you guys run more than 1 server, do you know of any easy ways to automatically backup the WIZ.bin to a secondary server every night? I have a Netgear Nightwawk router with an attached NAS drive which my server auto backups the entire sagetv directory too currently. I guess I would just need the backup server to wake up once each night and automatically update its WIZ.bin to the latest version?

[JustFred]

My backup strategy automatically runs Acronis every night to backup the entire C drive. Sage periodically writes out Sage.properties and wiz.bin while it's running, but there doesn't appear to be any way to control exactly when the files are written, short of shutting down the Sage service.

Since there's no synchronization between Acronis and Sage, it's possible that Acronis captures slightly stale files. But I'm not too worried about the consequences of that.

I have another box that has Sage installed, but not running. There's no attempt to automatically keep the two sync'd. In the event of failure of the primary, I would manually copy the necessary files. Although there have been a couple of disk failures, in the nearly 10 years of running Sage, I've never needed to use the secondary box (crosses fingers).

[bigo93bronco]

I would be plenty happy with the 2 servers being within 24 hours of each other in terms of updates. I'm not worried about backing up recordings, I just want live TV and scheduled recording to be able to happen if the primary server is down. I travel alot for work and no one else in the household knows enough about sagetv to get it backup and running if a hard reset doesn't do the job.

I need to make the primary server shut down the sage service at around 2am, then have it do the automatic update to the NAS about 2 minutes later, then restart a couple of minutes after that (each night).

Then I need the secondary server to wake up about 2am, shutdown the sagetv service, copy the latest wiz.bin, relaunch sagetv server, then go back to sleep

[Fuzzy]

Just because it hasn't been mentioned yet (or I hadn't noticed it if had), Look into using unRAID. If you are going to be upgrading to a new OS anyway (to get away from that Vista), then might as well go to an OS that's really designed for how our SageTV servers are used - headless and untouched. unRAID is going to be cheaper than any windows upgrade you might be looking at, and will simply perform better, and be easier to manage going forward.

[bigo93bronco]

UnRAID looks interesting, but my server will also be handling Homseer server duties, and I need remote desktop capabilities and certain other windows features.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by bigo93bronco

UnRAID looks interesting, but my server will also be handling Homseer server duties, and I need remote desktop capabilities and certain other windows features.

I think there is a Linux homeseer server, n which case, is be surprised if there wasn't a homeseer docker container in unraid's community applications. I also run at least 2 windows VM's for some Windows only software that access via RDP.

[NetworkGuy]

Just curious why no one has mentioned Red drives? Since they are designed for NAS storage they would seem to be perfect for servers that are running 24/7.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by NetworkGuy

Just curious why no one has mentioned Red drives? Since they are designed for NAS storage they would seem to be perfect for servers that are running 24/7.

I use some red drives myself. I get the sense that red drives cost more. I think WD uses red drives in their MyBook NAS solutions, since I've taken a couple apart and used the drives in my UnRAID setup