i want to build a NAS for business use

[littlelegsone]

hi guys and girls 

 

I want to build a NAS for my business to act as a central file storage. My home is my office but the job involves travelling to other peoples property to do the work so my intention was to tether a laptop to my phone to use the cellular data. I also have a few other guys that work for me so several people could be hitting it at the same time.

 

What hardware will I need? I was going to use unraid? as it appears to tell you if a drive has failed so easy to upkeep and maintain redundancy. 

 

thanks in advance 

[KuJoe]

Have you considered using online storage like Google Drive or Dropbox for something like this? Sure you can spend some money to build a NAS yourself with good redundancy but if you're at a client's house and your home internet goes down or the power goes out you're stuck either waiting for it to come back online or you'll need to take a trip to fix it. As a small business owner myself, I wouldn't trust a consumer ISP with anything business related.

[chicksoup]

Basically you need the hardware for a normal PC, except for a weaker specs. I would look into a case with a lot of hard drive bays for future expansion, but as others mentioned you would rely on the system never shutting down or doing something weird.

[chicksoup]

If you are sketchy about storing data online this service might be worth looking into: https://www.teamdrive.com/en/ 

[littlelegsone]

6 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

Have you considered using online storage like Google Drive or Dropbox for something like this? Sure you can spend some money to build a NAS yourself with good redundancy but if you're at a client's house and your home internet goes down or the power goes out you're stuck either waiting for it to come back online or you'll need to take a trip to fix it. As a small business owner myself, I wouldn't trust a consumer ISP with anything business related.

I hadn't thought of that. I will look into it. I think I would still rather build one myself as I am unfortunately one of those people who dose not like having their data in the hands of someone else. as for the reliability I have lived in the same house for over 10 years and I think we have lost broadband once in all that time. even if power or broadband was lost though. the files being shared don't need to be uploaded instantly, they can wait a few hours 

[littlelegsone]

5 minutes ago, chicksoup said:

Basically you need the hardware for a normal PC, except for a weaker specs. I would look into a case with a lot of hard drive bays for future expansion, but as others mentioned you would rely on the system never shutting down or doing something weird.

what motherboards are there with a lot of sata ports? or do motherboards have sas ports for use with enterprise drives?

[KuJoe]

2 minutes ago, littlelegsone said:

I hadn't thought of that. I will look into it. I think I would still rather build one myself as I am unfortunately one of those people who dose not like having their data in the hands of someone else. as for the reliability I have lived in the same house for over 10 years and I think we have lost broadband once in all that time. even if power or broadband was lost though. the files being shared don't need to be uploaded instantly, they can wait a few hours 

In that case just go grab a 2 bay Synology NAS. It has some awesome features for sharing/collaboration, has extremely low power consumption, and is easy to use and setup. Just make sure to setup the mail feature so you'll receive an e-mail if there are any SMART errors on your drives so you can swap out the bad drive before or when it fails. I personally use the Synology Cloud Station to replicate a shared directory between 4 devices so all of the files are the same on each device and my NAS keeps 4 versions of files so I can go back to older versions if I overwrite the wrong one.

[littlelegsone]

1 minute ago, KuJoe said:

In that case just go grab a 2 bay Synology NAS. It has some awesome features for sharing/collaboration, has extremely low power consumption, and is easy to use and setup. Just make sure to setup the mail feature so you'll receive an e-mail if there are any SMART errors on your drives so you can swap out the bad drive before or when it fails. I personally use the Synology Cloud Station to replicate a shared directory between 4 devices so all of the files are the same on each device and my NAS keeps 4 versions of files so I can go back to older versions if I overwrite the wrong one.

now those i have already looked into but the interface is a bit janky and i'm intending to use at least 6 drives so i have good redundancy but still have a lot of available storage 

[KuJoe]

1 minute ago, littlelegsone said:

now those i have already looked into but the interface is a bit janky and i'm intending to use at least 6 drives so i have good redundancy but still have a lot of available storage 

Gotcha. What RAID were you going to do? RAID6 is your best bet so you can lose 2 drives and still retain your data.

[littlelegsone]

raid 6 i think was what i was looking at doing. that requires 5 drives right? 

[littlelegsone]

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/KWrK6h what do you guys think to this?

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, littlelegsone said:

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/KWrK6h what do you guys think to this?

Looks fine, but I would pick a better power supply. A 24/7 system is extremely reliant on a decent power supply so I would spend a few extra and get a higher tier model, doesn't need any more wattage just a more reliable better built one.

 

CPU is a little over kill for a basic NAS but the price seems good enough it's not worth down grading it.

[littlelegsone]

Just now, leadeater said:

Looks fine, but I would pick a better power supply. A 24/7 system is extremely reliant on a decent power supply so I would spend a few extra and get a higher tier model, doesn't need any more wattage just a more reliable better built one.

 

CPU is a little over kill for a basic NAS but the price seems good enough it's not worth down grading it.

i thought these were a solid power unit? was looking on pc part picker and that's the cheapest cpu i can get which will support the ecc memory 

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, littlelegsone said:

i thought these were a solid power unit? was looking on pc part picker and that's the cheapest cpu i can get which will support the ecc memory 

You could use an E3-1220v3 but at less than 10 pounds difference doesn't seem worth the effort since you have to change motherboard/socket. Also most desktop CPU models support ECC now, even as low as the Pentium G series and i3.

 

As for the power supply it's not bad but it's not the best in it's price range either, but more fundamentally for the type of system you are building never go for one of the cheapest you can find. SeaSonic G 550W would be a good replacement and same price.

 

http://www.overclock.net/t/1455892/why-you-might-not-want-to-buy-a-corsair-rm-psu

[KuJoe]

Your build is extremely overkill and overpriced for a NAS. Go pick up a used Dell R710 with 6x 3.5" bays, redundant power supplies, an H700 (w/ BBU) RAID card, 2x Quad-Core Xeons (16 threads total), and 16-72GB of RAM (Dell ECC DDR3 RAM is really cheap on eBay) for around $400 on eBay, throw in 6 hard drives, configure the H700 for RAID6, install any OS you want, and you're done.

[KuJoe]

I should also point out that my recommendation is extremely overkill also, but if you want to go all out you might as well use a real server.

[littlelegsone]

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/nmNtwP with a ups.

 

that server costs the same as what iv'e chosen and does not have half decent ecc memory i also don't have anywhere to put a 2u server rack so its realy not practical for me. also in the video that linus made not so long ago when using unraid the drives don't display correctly when used in a raid card 

[TonyStark]

If you are serious about building a NAS then you need to consider the following.

1) you should and must use a static IP address in your internet connection

2) If you do not want to go to a ready built solution and want to make a NAS server on your own then most likely you'd want to go with Freenas

3) Use Intel based hardware for your build (AMD based hardware will work as well, but Intel is more reliable when it comes to business)

4) Be sure to use ECC ram in your system. You do not want to encounter data corruption.

5) The drives you'll be using for storage must be NAS/Server certified... e.g. WD RE edition, ED NAS edition or Seagate NAS edition)

6) Be sure to use RAID (RAID 5 or above) for hardware fault tolerance.

7) ALWAYS AND I MEAN ALWAYS backup your NAS, both system configuration and data. This will mitigate the downtime and the time required to have the system back online

8) It would be a good idea to use a small SSD (let' say 20-30GB) for system drive.

9) If you want an extra *OMPF* to be added to your NAS try a hardware RAID controller. In a Case of a system downtime You will not need to re-arrange the disk array(s) and you can port the configuration (RAID controller and Drives ) to a new system if needed.

 

If you need anything else, contact me.

[littlelegsone]

1 minute ago, TonyStark said:

If you are serious about building a NAS then you need to consider the following.

1) you should and must use a static IP address in your internet connection

2) If you do not want to go to a ready built solution and want to make a NAS server on your own then most likely you'd want to go with Freenas

3) Use Intel based hardware for your build (AMD based hardware will work as well, but Intel is more reliable when it comes to business)

4) Be sure to use ECC ram in your system. You do not want to encounter data corruption.

5) The drives you'll be using for storage must be NAS/Server certified... e.g. WD RE edition, ED NAS edition or Seagate NAS edition)

6) Be sure to use RAID (RAID 5 or above) for hardware fault tolerance.

7) ALWAYS AND I MEAN ALWAYS backup your NAS, both system configuration and data. This will mitigate the downtime and the time required to have the system back online

8) It would be a good idea to use a small SSD (let' say 20-30GB) for system drive.

9) If you want an extra *OMPF* to be added to your NAS try a hardware RAID controller. In a Case of a system downtime You will not need to re-arrange the disk array(s) and you can port the configuration (RAID controller and Drives ) to a new system if needed.

 

If you need anything else, contact me.

im looking at using unraid for the software using a usb as the boot device. look at my pc part picker list in the comment above yours. im intending to use raid 6  with 5 drives 

[Tyrius]

1 minute ago, TonyStark said:

If you are serious about building a NAS then you need to consider the following.

-snip-

You recommend freeNAS and using RAID? I thought ZFS (which freeNAS uses, right?) works by having direct access to the disks (and not to a RAID-Array).

 

[TonyStark]

It does. I simply recommended a raid controller for data portability. ZFS works great too.

[TonyStark]

7 minutes ago, littlelegsone said:

im looking at using unraid for the software using a usb as the boot device. look at my pc part picker list in the comment above yours. im intending to use raid 6  with 5 drives 

I haven't tried unraid, so I cannot have an opinion there. It looks promising though....

[littlelegsone]

Just now, TonyStark said:

I haven't tried unraid, so I cannot have an opinion there. It looks promising though....

only found out about it from the video linus made the other day. it appears to give feedback on the health of the drives so if up to two fail you can just swap them out and it automaticly replaces data to the new drives 

[Aditya_V]

5 hours ago, littlelegsone said:

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/KWrK6h what do you guys think to this?

For RAID 6 you definitely need a RAID CARD.

I recommend getting a Xeon E5-2620V3. This CPU is much more powerful than E5-2603v3.

Also, note neither the processor nor the MoBo you have chosen has on-board graphics so you will have to buy some cheap used Graphics Card.

Edited February 21, 2016 by Aditya_V

[jasonvp]

6 hours ago, littlelegsone said:

What hardware will I need? I was going to use unraid? as it appears to tell you if a drive has failed so easy to upkeep and maintain redundancy. 

http://www.jasonvanpatten.com/2015/11/26/freebsd-as-my-network-storage-server/

http://www.jasonvanpatten.com/2015/11/26/freebsd-as-my-network-storage-server-part-2/

 

I have more to add to all of this as I've recently revived the 4-bay QNAP and put in place purely as a local backup destination for TimeMachine (Macs) and the NAS itself (via rsync).  When I've the energy, I intend to write up s'more.