TBS 6983

[goaliebob99]

I ordered a TBS 6983 a while back and am putting it into my gaming rig I am building. The question I have for you all is what OS to run with it? I have seen a mixed bag of people running windows and linux. I am almost tempted to partition my SSD hard drive for both and dedicate 100 gigs to linux. What is the best choice as far as 4k compatibility codecs IE H.265 and 4:2:2 playback.

This is going to dual as my movie storage machine as I move all of my MKV's that I have backed up from my bluray collection over to this machine on fresh hard drives. I am going to take all of the 4 gb hard drives and RAID them as one. Plus this will give me extra room for 4k movies and HDR movies as they are released on bluray. Here is my list of parts as I am building out. Let me know what you all think or if you have any recommendations.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD FX-9590 4.7GHz 8-Core OEM/Tray Processor ($219.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: LEPA AquaChanger 240 103.6 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($77.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock 990FX Extreme9 ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($189.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($139.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Mushkin ECO2 512GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($119.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB SuperSC ACX 2.0+ Video Card ($159.99 @ NCIX US)
Case: Fractal Design Define R5 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($109.99 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: EVGA 750W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($99.99 @ Amazon)
Optical Drive: Pioneer BDR-209DBK Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer ($53.98 @ Newegg)
Total: $2353.84
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-02-25 12:49 EST-0500

 

[goaliebob99]

Also, will GTX 960 pass Atmos and DTSX? Does anyone know? I really wish I knew someone close by a microcenter that could pickup parts and ship them to me. Tons of savings.

 

[Magic Static]

I found when running multiple OS, Linux plus versions of Windows, Ubuntu likes to be in charge of offering the OS boot selection. I had issues when keeping it out of the boot process. Then there is setting up the Linux as a file server and making it play with a windows network

 

[goaliebob99]

Yea, setting up the SMB settings for file sharing isn't hard in linux, so an all linux box isn't out of the question. I am trying to figure out if that would be worthwhile or not and what distro to go with. I also would like to play games, and can always install steam on it, but I am unsure if game makers are supporting the linux platform. OSX is hit or miss when it comes to games.

 

[FaT Air]

http://store.steampowered.com/browse/linux/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS

 

[Magic Static]

I wonder how much space you lose in a your RAID plan. 24TB of listed space equals 21.6TB of usable space and RAID consumes some space as well I think. But I have never set up JBOD RAID

 

[fred555]

I ordered a TBS 6983 a while back and am putting it into my gaming rig I am building. The question I have for you all is what OS to run with it? I have seen a mixed bag of people running windows and linux. I am almost tempted to partition my SSD hard drive for both and dedicate 100 gigs to linux. What is the best choice as far as 4k compatibility codecs IE H.265 and 4:2:2 playback.

This is going to dual as my movie storage machine as I move all of my MKV's that I have backed up from my bluray collection over to this machine on fresh hard drives. I am going to take all of the 4 gb hard drives and RAID them as one. Plus this will give me extra room for 4k movies and HDR movies as they are released on bluray. Here is my list of parts as I am building out. Let me know what you all think or if you have any recommendations.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD FX-9590 4.7GHz 8-Core OEM/Tray Processor ($219.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: LEPA AquaChanger 240 103.6 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($77.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock 990FX Extreme9 ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($189.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($139.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Mushkin ECO2 512GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($119.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($196.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB SuperSC ACX 2.0+ Video Card ($159.99 @ NCIX US)
Case: Fractal Design Define R5 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($109.99 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: EVGA 750W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($99.99 @ Amazon)
Optical Drive: Pioneer BDR-209DBK Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer ($53.98 @ Newegg)
Total: $2353.84
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-02-25 12:49 EST-0500

Just curious why you picked black (7200) versus red (5400) for long term storage/NAS when the main OS drive is SSD anyway?

I'm assuming your array is just for long term/network attached storage, Reds are cheaper, run cooler, have a 5 year warranty and are meant for NAS use (longevity, optimized for running 24/7). I know blacks are faster but, The bottle necks will be your network anyway when streaming movies from the array, and possibly the RAID controller.
Programs would run from the SSD.
Plus you would save $300 with the Reds.

From Toms hardware guide forum:
Depending on your NAS setup, Blacks may be about the worst choice you can make. If there's any chance those drives will end up in hardware RAID then go with the RED, otherwise make sure you have a great backup plan in place because Black+RAID=Data Loss.

Amazon product ASIN B00EHBERSE

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=wd+nas+black+vs+red&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8



Also why not 2.5' drives instead of the old legacy 3.5 form factor?
2.5'' is what enterprise servers use now exclusively.
smaller, less heat, etc, etc....
And now for PC cases they have 4 bay removable drive cages for 2.5 '' drives
that fit in the space of a cdrom bay.

Amazon product ASIN B005SILX6O

 

[goaliebob99]

Couple of things, I wanted the faster speed. This server will only be on while I am watching movies, playing games or watching satellite and won't be up 24/7. Network speed won't be much of an issue. I am gigabit from incoming fiber internet through internally. My entire network is gigabit hardwired. All switches and routers are gigabit. I never really thought about using 2.5's and may consider it. The hard drives are going to be for long term storage yes, but I wanted to the extra speed to accommodate 4k streaming over the network. I didn't want hard drive speed to be a bottle neck when you are starting to run high bitrate video, especially if I end up recording video from an 80 megabit stream. Plus Blacks are better and more reliable. I also am going to do the raid differently as per say a RAID1, depending on the OS I go with. If I go with a Windows OS, I can keep all of the hard drives separately but create a virtual hard drive under windows disk managment that will combine them under one drive letter, and make them appear as one large drive even though they all are their own. I have done this before and it works really well for network sharing to my popcorn hour.

 

[Magic Static]

I use a pair of Linksys NAS300 units. 8TB of video. They are gigabit rated. But I can only run 3 HD movies at one time from a unit before it's too much. They have the green drives in them. And are mostly just a backup and turned off. I have the collection in my main computer also.

 

[fred555]

Plus Blacks are better and more reliable

Blacks are a little faster, but less reliable. That's why they came out with Reds.
Blacks are also not optimized for RAID arrays, Reds are.

But if you don't plan on 24/7 operation then blacks are OK.

Transfer speed on a WD red is 143 MB/s or 1.114 Gbits/sec, Black 1.368 Gbits/sec.
You will not get anywhere near gigabit network speed with a Desktop Windows OS out of the box.
You would be lucky to approach half that speed. The network will be your choke point, not the drive.
Switch quality also plays into the equation.
Enterprise class servers with expensive Cisco switches, then yes you can get closer to 1 Gbps from what I've seen. Also be prepared to tweak NIC parameters and be able to reliably measure results to get the most speed from your NIC.

I went with Cisco Gigabit switches at home for streaming around the house.

There are network tools you can setup using SNMP to poll individual switchports to see true network speed live. That's if the switches are manageable. You could also setup SNMP on the Windows box as a last resort and poll from a different PC. PRTG or something similar would give true throughput data at all times if you wanted to actually measure then tweak network performance.


Now, windows software RAID may possibly slow down the effective hard drive transfer rate, not sure.
Never used it, hardware RAID would guarantee best performance, but $$$.


The 2.5'' drives are great in a mini ITX case you can have an SSD OS drive and 3 raid drives all in the space of a cdrom. How big a case were you going to use for all those 3.5 '' drives?

 

[fred555]

I use a pair of Linksys NAS300 units. 8TB of video. They are gigabit rated. But I can only run 3 HD movies at one time from a unit before it's too much. They have the green drives in them. And are mostly just a backup and turned off. I have the collection in my main computer also.

Green transfer speed 1.2 Gbits/sec, more than likely the fault lies with the RAID array (or software RAID probably, might be the issue) sata or network interface quality used in the Linksys NAS or possibly your network switch. Testing true switch throughput would give you an answer of where the fault lies, either the NAS itself or the network.

Timing transers is not an accurate method of measuring throughput speed. SNMP and measuring tools are the best way.

 

[Magic Static]

Green transfer speed 1.2 Gbits/sec, more than likely the fault lies with the RAID array (or software RAID probably, might be the issue) sata or network interface quality used in the Linksys NAS or possibly your network switch. Testing true switch throughput would give you an answer of where the fault lies, either the NAS itself or the network.

It's the NAS, the network switches and router perform very well Almost like transferring data from one HDD to another in the same computer. Love that gigabit speed

 

[fred555]

It's the NAS, the network switches and router perform very well Almost like transferring data from one HDD to another in the same computer. Love that gigabit speed

Gigabit is Awesome.
I got frustrated trying to stream video on my old LAN.
I broke down and went with Cisco 3560G Gigabit switches and Cisco 1140 series APs (older but cheaper than the new models).
I can get connected at 300Mbps on Wifi. Have not measured the true speed yet, but its pretty damn fast for wifi. When you hardwire to the network, NAS is hardwired too, forget about it, it screams.

I'm working on my NAS slowly, It's in a mini-itx case with a four drive cdrom sized cage.
SSD for the OS, on Debian. All it does is NAS. Have and old single WD drive in it now for storage, but plan to order some WD Reds, as it is in 24/7 operation. Since it is Linux with a hefty CPU, and doing nothing but NAS, it is recommended to do software RAID in this case, using mdadm. I will test it when its all done.

 

[fred555]

Also RAID 0 will double disk transfer speeds. Or RAID 10 Even.
Was used a lot when disk speeds were slower. RAID 0 offers no redundancy.

 

[goaliebob99]

Where are you getting that Blacks are less reliable? Everywhere I have read and seen blacks are more reliable including WD's own specs. While yes reds are better for long term storage and NAS duties at 24/7 because they are cooler and have more load and unload cycles, but if I was looking at that I would have went with the RE's instead. I want performance based on this. I am thinking UHD not HD. I have been able to get full gigabit speeds out of my network but this was through OSX. On my Win 10 machine, I have seen a bit of a degradation but nothing substantial that wouldn't be unusual. The choke point on the network would be the router and the throughput of the router. The router I am running with Merlin's Asus WRT on it, runs just as good as some cisco switches. I dont need full buisness class switches. That would be over kill for me. I have not had any issues in getting full gigabit throughput on my network between PC's and the Internet.

Basically when it comes to WD hard drives this is the lowdown.

WD Blue for something cheap
WD Black for performance HDD.
WD Red for cheap nas
WD Red Pro for good nas
WD RE for very good nas.
But one fact that is more important than all else. Dont buy a WD green ffs

Source: 10+ years of using WD drives in personal and customer systems

 

[fred555]

Where are you getting that Blacks are less reliable? Everywhere I have read and seen blacks are more reliable including WD's own specs. While yes reds are better for long term storage and NAS duties at 24/7 because they are cooler and have more load and unload cycles,

I am under the impression that the point of the various Reds was they slowed them down and reprogrammed them to be more reliable for 24x7 operation. WD wont even publish MTBF and AFR stats for blacks, the only true measures of reliability. If you can find MTBF and AFR for Blacks, please show me.
These stats are published for Reds. Why wont they publish the stats for Blacks? Kinda fishy to me.
Everything I read says use Red models over Blacks for RAID/NAS.

Reds also have a longer park time setting, quick park times cause wear among other things.
For WD drives there is an application wdidle3.exe to read and set park times.
I have read Blacks park to quickly too, here is a snippet that explains the benefits of setting this on non Reds to act more like Reds:

(Article uses Greens as an example)

In order to minimize energy usage, WD Green disks are configured to very aggressively park the head of the disk: this happens after 3 seconds. That setting is OK if you're using this as your OS disk, because disk usage tends to be grouped in peaks. This setting is fatal for a disk if it gets used in a server. Disk usage on file servers is much wider spread, causing the disk heads to move a lot. So much so that some bits of plastic will wear out in the first year. WD Reds wait much longer to park the disk head, eliminating this issue.

Fortunately for us, there is a tool that allows you to set this value yourself. On windows this a tool released by WD themselves: wdidle3.exe
On Linux some folks reversed engineered this and released it as idle3-tools.


I'm from the school that you leave electronics on all the time, especially a NAS you may access at any time of day or night. The various Red drives are supposedly better for that, so that's why I prefer them. You may prefer a little more speed and non 24x7, that's OK too.

 

[N6BY]

I ordered a TBS 6983 a while back and am putting it into my gaming rig I am building. The question I have for you all is what OS to run with it?...

I also have a TBS 6983 and have used it exclusively with Windows 7, EBS Pro and VLC. I'm happy with that combination. I did try Linux but had errors installing the TBS drivers and gave up quickly.

 

[goaliebob99]

I am under the impression that the point of the various Reds was they slowed them down and reprogrammed them to be more reliable for 24x7 operation. WD wont even publish MTBF and AFR stats for blacks, the only true measures of reliability. If you can find MTBF and AFR for Blacks, please show me.
These stats are published for Reds. Why wont they publish the stats for Blacks? Kinda fishy to me.
Everything I read says use Red models over Blacks for RAID/NAS.

Reds also have a longer park time setting, quick park times cause wear among other things.
For WD drives there is an application wdidle3.exe to read and set park times.
I have read Blacks park to quickly too, here is a snippet that explains the benefits of setting this on non Reds to act more like Reds:

(Article uses Greens as an example)

In order to minimize energy usage, WD Green disks are configured to very aggressively park the head of the disk: this happens after 3 seconds. That setting is OK if you're using this as your OS disk, because disk usage tends to be grouped in peaks. This setting is fatal for a disk if it gets used in a server. Disk usage on file servers is much wider spread, causing the disk heads to move a lot. So much so that some bits of plastic will wear out in the first year. WD Reds wait much longer to park the disk head, eliminating this issue.

Fortunately for us, there is a tool that allows you to set this value yourself. On windows this a tool released by WD themselves: wdidle3.exe
On Linux some folks reversed engineered this and released it as idle3-tools.


I'm from the school that you leave electronics on all the time, especially a NAS you may access at any time of day or night. The various Red drives are supposedly better for that, so that's why I prefer them. You may prefer a little more speed and non 24x7, that's OK too.

No they slowed them down to save on energy. Also, WD doesn't use MTBF and AFR stats as clearly explained here,

We no longer measure the reliability of our hard drives using Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF). Our current drive reliability is measured using Component Design Life (CDL) and Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). The Component Design Life of the drive is 5 years and the Annualized Failure Rate is less than 0.8%.

http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=665

Nothing Fishy about it. Also, everywhere I have seen says to use blacks over reds.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/291194-32-black
http://www.overclock.net/t/1408474/deciding-between-wd-black-and-wd-red-3tb
http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1741-wd-blue-vs-black-comparison-best-drive-for-gaming

 

[fred555]

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/291194-32-black

But link you provided clearly says use Reds over Blacks for RAID/NAS?????
Blacks are for sinlge drive setups, Reds for RAID, which is what you are doing:

"I would easily recommend the WD Black for gaming, simply because it is a 7200 RPM drive vs a 5400 RPM drive. WD Red is intended more for storage/NAS type setup. There are several articles you can read on the comparison between the drives, but this is the main point"

I am seeing your setup and my setup as RAID, You are seeing your setup as gaming I think is the difference.

 

[goaliebob99]

You got to read further down in the comments. There are several comments that say go for the blacks.

RED is marketed for the NAS crowd however the Black editions are performance oriented drives and as such I would lean towards the performance drive.

Is this going to be your primary drive or just simply a storage drive?

I would easily recommend the WD Black for gaming, simply because it is a 7200 RPM drive vs a 5400 RPM drive. WD Red is intended more for storage/NAS type setup. There are several articles you can read on the comparison between the drives, but this is the main point

Since both are only a difference of 1 KD... I would say go with the Black.

The black is more performance and the red is for storage. so for you what are looking for the black would be a better choice, though it can be a little noisy.

Also, I have clearly said that I wanted the performance as I wanted a quicker write time.