I'm thinking of building a NAS and need some trusted opinons!

ThatAngryGnome · March 3, 2016

Hey guys! I know you see a lot of these, so I'm sorry for my ignorance!

Although my father works at an office, he also has a PC at home that he loads CAD/PDF files from. Because he may work from either his office or his home, he needs the two PC's to be in sync with each other. Right now, he uses Google Drive to sync the files. He also has a 4TB external HDD that he uses to back up his computers every month.

I advised him to back up his computer more regularly but that obviously takes time. I started thinking and realized a NAS could (maybe?) be his solution. I'm posting this to see how viable of an option a NAS can be.

So here are the details: He has two PC's, each with quadcore processes and 8+ gigs of RAM. I have another computer with a 4570k and 8 gigs of RAM that I'm willing to repurpose to be used as the NAS. So my plan is to buy two WD Reds (4TB each) and run them in RAID 1 in case of a drive failure. Then, I want them to be hooked up to my home internet (that is 20 mbs) and all of his data is backed up there every night. I imagine that if he was working on a file and saves it, it saves a copy on his local machine and one on his NAS that he can then use to access in the office through the internet (office wifi is an ethernet connection, 60 mbs). The idea is that the two computers are always in sync with each other and there's always at least two copies of the files on his computers, one on a local machine and another on the NAS.

Here are a few questions:

I want to use FreeNAS since I've heard great things about it. How easy would it be to have a setup as I described above?

Is my old computer I plan to use good enough for NAS? Is 8 gigs enough or should I upgrade to 16?

Are the two internet connections good enough to handle the load? Will there be a significant slowdown in network speeds?

I need some ideas here since I have no experince with NAS's. Thank you so much for helping me out!

highly_unlikely1 · March 3, 2016

I've just finished building my own FreeNAS box and can offer a few pieces of advice. Read up on FreeNAS compatible hardware. Here is my (overbuilt for this purpose) box http://pcpartpicker.com/p/c9qtjX. I am also using this as a Plex server and as a host machine for some work.

A few things I want to mention, but I am in no way an expert.

1. 8GB is the bare minimum thats recommended for ZFS, and you will likely see ECC RAM come highly recommended.

2. Mirrored vdev is the ZFS equivalent of RAID1. (http://www.zfsbuild.com/2010/05/26/zfs-raid-levels/)

3. It was recommended to me that I run in a RAIDZ2 (see link above) for good parity/performance as well as drive failure tolerance.

4. One thing I wish I'd done going in was buy HDDs from two manufacturers just in case this whole run of WD Reds has some manufacturers defect.

To answer your questions the best I can, FreeNAS setup is fairly simple, but that is coming from someone who works in the industry. 8GBs should be enough ram for what you're planning, but again look into ECC. Is the connection 20MB/s or 20Mb/s? Either way just have backups runs late at night and you should be fine.

ThatAngryGnome · March 4, 2016

5 hours ago, highly_unlikely1 said:

I've just finished building my own FreeNAS box and can offer a few pieces of advice. Read up on FreeNAS compatible hardware. Here is my (overbuilt for this purpose) box http://pcpartpicker.com/p/c9qtjX. I am also using this as a Plex server and as a host machine for some work.

A few things I want to mention, but I am in no way an expert.

1. 8GB is the bare minimum thats recommended for ZFS, and you will likely see ECC RAM come highly recommended.

2. Mirrored vdev is the ZFS equivalent of RAID1. (http://www.zfsbuild.com/2010/05/26/zfs-raid-levels/)

3. It was recommended to me that I run in a RAIDZ2 (see link above) for good parity/performance as well as drive failure tolerance.

4. One thing I wish I'd done going in was buy HDDs from two manufacturers just in case this whole run of WD Reds has some manufacturers defect.

To answer your questions the best I can, FreeNAS setup is fairly simple, but that is coming from someone who works in the industry. 8GBs should be enough ram for what you're planning, but again look into ECC. Is the connection 20MB/s or 20Mb/s? Either way just have backups runs late at night and you should be fine.

Thanks for the heads up on the RAM, RAID, and HDD's! I have 20 Mb/s (megabits) of internet speed (20 up, 5 down). I just needed to know it was fast enough to handle the over-the-air transfers.

WaterproofBeanie · March 4, 2016

6 hours ago, highly_unlikely1 said:

-snip-

ECC is not any more important with ZFS/FreeNas than any other operating system. As long as the RAM passes a memtest, then it will work fine with ZFS. The only situation in which the 'Scrub of Death' (the FreeNAS forums horror stories) could occur is if you had RAM which always gives an error every time.

Of course, for a data integrity-essential backup server, then of course ECC would be better - but that would require an entirely new motherboard, CPU and RAM so for equivalent performance would cost hundreds of dollars.

Personally, I am running a backup server without ECC ram. It has passed 8 hours of memtest, so that is good enough for me, and given that the data is already in other locations and these backups are more for convenience, I did not see the need for ECC - especially as I got all the components for no cost.

79wjd · March 4, 2016

12 hours ago, ShaolinBear said:

ECC is not any more important with ZFS/FreeNas than any other operating system. As long as the RAM passes a memtest, then it will work fine with ZFS. The only situation in which the 'Scrub of Death' (the FreeNAS forums horror stories) could occur is if you had RAM which always gives an error every time.

Of course, for a data integrity-essential backup server, then of course ECC would be better - but that would require an entirely new motherboard, CPU and RAM so for equivalent performance would cost hundreds of dollars.

Personally, I am running a backup server without ECC ram. It has passed 8 hours of memtest, so that is good enough for me, and given that the data is already in other locations and these backups are more for convenience, I did not see the need for ECC - especially as I got all the components for no cost.

ECC is most definitely more important in FreeNAS than it is with other operating systems. In ZFS ECC is directly used to prevent data corruption and OS corruption whereas in non-ZFS systems it is mainly used to prevent the system downtime (thereby potentially avoiding corruption). While it sucks having to buy new hardware when you have good hardware lying around, it is definitely important if he cares at all about the data being stored on the NAS -- if it's going to be backed up elsewhere and/or he doesn't care if it gets damaged/corrupted then he can reuse what he currently has.

@ThatAngryGnome FreeNAS is somewhat easy to setup. With a bit of help from the FreeNAS forums and the various guides you should get something workable in a few hours/days depending pn how complex you end up making it. And then over the course of a few weeks/months, depending on how much you play around with it, you'll make some tweaks/iron out some bugs. The workload you're describing is pretty light, so if you care about your data, then I would highly recommend going with ECC memory (Haswell Pentium, 8gb ECC, compatible board -- total cost would be $250~).