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The Mini NAS Project

Eniqmatic

I know. Original Name. 

 

So, we are going to be building another NAS for someone and decided to put this up for anyone interested. Very early stages at the moment, hardware hasn't been finalised, apart from the disks which arrived today.

 

post-115539-0-00210200-1427382741_thumb.
 

However, we do know the following:

 

Mini ITX

Intel Chipset/CPU

ECC Memory

4TB WD Red's in RAIDZ1

FreeNAS for the OS

 

You will probably be asking, why did we only go 4TB? Answer is in this situation, it would be overkill for the client. However we are going to have space to expand.

 

Your also asking, why did I buy 4 x 1TB when I could have went for 3 x 2TB for similar price? The answer in this situation is for redundancy, by having a few more drives we can get better redundancy and have more drives for parity.

 

The hardware is going to be along the lines of:

 

Fractal Design Node 304
16GB of ECC Memory
Corsair CX430M (Or similar, don't get hung up on this)

 

with either

 

ASRock Rack C2750D4I with the 8-core Avoton chip

 

Or

ASRock Rack E3C226D2I/E3C224D2I

with: Pentium G3258
or: I3 4160 3.6Ghz

 

However, there is the possibility that unfortunately they may want to re-use an older HP microserver which has dual core Celeron.

 

That's all for now, I'm about to start burning in these drives with some performance tests to make sure they are suitable for production environment.

 

Any questions, queries or suggestions, do let me know!

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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How much are you paying for this setup atm? (roughly)

 

For which build?

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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I will also throw up some screenshots of how to burn in your guide, I'll be using the methods of another guide on the internet, however I will show you what the commands look like and what they output incase anyone is interested.

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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Beautiful case but it's almost a nightmare. The standoffs should came preinstalled!

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Beautiful case but it's almost a nightmare. The standoffs should came preinstalled!

 

I can see what you mean, cable management is going to be a nightmare. But it's not destined to be a looker I guess! It has the advantage of being one of the only ITX cases that support 6 x 3.5 drives so that's why it was chosen.

 

Quick update, drives have been stressing for the past 5 hours or so, no errors detected yet. I think there will be around another 7 hours or so left of stressing them till they can go into production.

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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I can see what you mean, cable management is going to be a nightmare. But it's not destined to be a looker I guess! It has the advantage of being one of the only ITX cases that support 6 x 3.5 drives so that's why it was chosen.

Quick update, drives have been stressing for the past 5 hours or so, no errors detected yet. I think there will be around another 7 hours or so left of stressing them till they can go into production.

Yeah, same here with the 6 hard drives. The most annoying part about the case for me at least is how difficult it is to install the motherboard standoffs. :D

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~snip~

 

Hey Eniqmatic,
 
Good plan for the project. What is the NAS going to be used for? If it's for simple home usage, you could go with less RAM and a simple RAID10 array. :) How many more drives are you thinking of adding to the array? I would consider a more spacey case because of the cable management, ease of access to the drives and proper airflow.
 
Captain_WD.

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
WDC Representative, http://www.wdc.com/ 

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Hey Eniqmatic,
 
Good plan for the project. What is the NAS going to be used for? If it's for simple home usage, you could go with less RAM and a simple RAID10 array. :) How many more drives are you thinking of adding to the array? I would consider a more spacey case because of the cable management, ease of access to the drives and proper airflow.
 
Captain_WD.

 

Hi Captain_WD,

 

Thanks for the comment, the RAM will be required as 8GB is necessary for FreeNAS to run on as a minimum, then you need roughly 1GB of RAM per TB of storage for ZFS to function correctly. So a little bit much but I think it's better to be safe and also have space to expand.

 

It's going to be the main storage box, with daily snapshots and nightly backups, but will also be used to stream to multiple devices simultaneously as well as a couple of other features too.  

 

As for airflow, if we decide to go for the 8-core CPU, it's actually passively cooled with no fan, and uses very little power resulting in very little heat

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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Hi Captain_WD,

 

Thanks for the comment, the RAM will be required as 8GB is necessary for FreeNAS to run on as a minimum, then you need roughly 1GB of RAM per TB of storage for ZFS to function correctly. So a little bit much but I think it's better to be safe and also have space to expand.

 

It's going to be the main storage box, with daily snapshots and nightly backups, but will also be used to stream to multiple devices simultaneously as well as a couple of other features too.  

 

In that case, good plan :) looking forward to the build log and some photos :)

 

Captain_WD.

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
WDC Representative, http://www.wdc.com/ 

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In that case, good plan :) looking forward to the build log and some photos :)

 

Captain_WD.

Thanks for the kind words, I'll be updating the log shortly once the WD Red drives complete the burn in, they will have been going for roughly 20 hours once it completes I estimate. They are looking very good so far with 0 errors reported.

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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The last drive is so close to finishing, the other 3 have completed. After this I have one more 2 hour stress to run and I will post up the SMART results here.post-115539-0-63809400-1427471815.png

post-115539-0-63809400-1427471815.png

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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Here's is a sample of one of the drives, all passed with absolutely no errors so that's all good, ready for production!

 

post-115539-0-81928600-1427484655.png

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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OK so a slight update, I've chucked the setup into a HP Proliant N54L Gen 7, it won't be the final resting place for it as it's not suitable for Freenas really, however it does sport 8GB of ECC memory at the moment which is nice. The whole setup is very portable to another system as it's all installed on a memory stick, which you shall see below. So I stripped down the Proliant do tidy up a little bit before putting out system and drives into it, it's actually quite amazing how small the footprint of this case is! Anyways, enjoy, more to come soon hopefully.

 

post-115539-0-19776600-1427705044_thumb.

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post-115539-0-19776600-1427705044_thumb.

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post-115539-0-66808500-1427705050_thumb.

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post-115539-0-46124200-1427705062_thumb.

post-115539-0-32401900-1427705065_thumb.

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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Great job!

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
WDC Representative, http://www.wdc.com/ 

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Great job!

Thanks!

 

More exciting news is that we shall be ordering all the new hardware today, it's going to be:

 

Asrock Mini ITX board with 8-core CPU, 12 SATA ports, 2 Intel NICs, IPMI and 4 full size DIMM slots (I know, how can they get that much on there?)

Fractal Design Node 304

3/400w PSU (this chip is super power efficient)

Extra 8GB of ECC giving us 16 in total

 

Let me know your thoughts!

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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that is one small motherboard bro

It is, very appealing for this type of application, and even many others!

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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Thanks!

 

More exciting news is that we shall be ordering all the new hardware today, it's going to be:

 

Asrock Mini ITX board with 8-core CPU, 12 SATA ports, 2 Intel NICs, IPMI and 4 full size DIMM slots (I know, how can they get that much on there?)

Fractal Design Node 304

3/400w PSU (this chip is super power efficient)

Extra 8GB of ECC giving us 16 in total

 

Let me know your thoughts!

 

Would you mind dropping the exact model/ modelnumber here for the motherboard?

Edit: Found it.

 

You will not be able to run more then a 6 drive RAID afaik. You can raid with all 12 ports. You simply can't have a 12 drive raid.

Reason:

3 seperate controllers

That time I saved Linus' WiFi pass from appearing on YouTube: 

A sudden Linus re-appears : http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/390793-important-dailymotion-account-still-active/

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Would you mind dropping the exact model/ modelnumber here for the motherboard?

Edit: Found it.

 

You will not be able to run more then a 6 drive RAID afaik. You can raid with all 12 ports. You simply can't have a 12 drive raid.

Reason:

3 seperate controllers

The case would be limited to 6 drives anyways and I wouldn't need more than that for this application. 

 

However I wanted to I could, ZFS won't use the RAID controller to create it's RAID as it needs to see every drive individually and won't be creating the RAID in the BIOS.

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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  • 4 weeks later...

A few updates!

 

We didn't end up going with the previous hardware for this, we came across a HP Proliant Gen8 1610T for £120 brand new from an online retailer. The customer couldn't refuse this especially when it supports ECC, 4 drives, Mini-ITX, 2 Gigabit NIC's with an ILO port etc etc. 

It has a dual-core celeron at the moment - I know - but the interesting part is it does support a Xeon which could potentially be killer for this. 

 

Here's some pictures:

 

post-115539-0-93010900-1430144125_thumb.

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post-115539-0-84556700-1430144175_thumb.

 

 

Any comments please feel free!

 

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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Nice plan, thinking of doing something similar myself, subbed!

Sleepy: |  R7 1700@ 3.7GHz (NHD-15) | MSI B350 Tomahawk Arctic | GIGABYTE Windforce GTX 1080 | 16GB of RAM | 8TBs of HDD | 128GB SSD| S340 Tempered Glass | XFX 550w Bronze 80+ PSU | 40" 4K panel, and 3 1080p bois

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Nice plan, thinking of doing something similar myself, subbed!

Drop me a link so I can check it out when you do! :)

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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Ah, a storage build!

excellent.gif

BUILD LOGS: HELIOS - Latest Update: 2015-SEP-06 ::: ZEUS - BOTW 2013-JUN-28 ::: APOLLO - Complete: 2014-MAY-10
OTHER STUFF: Cable Lacing Tutorial ::: What Is ZFS? ::: mincss Primer ::: LSI RAID Card Flashing Tutorial
FORUM INFO: Community Standards ::: The Moderating Team ::: 10TB+ Storage Showoff Topic

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Ah, a storage build!

 

 

That made me chuckle! :D

System/Server Administrator - Networking - Storage - Virtualization - Scripting - Applications

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  • 10 months later...

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