Should build a mini PC or get a NAS enclosure?

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

i have right now 3x4 TB WD My Book with power supply. and i've ran out of space and plug ports to power them, i desperately need some more space

should i get another 4TB WD my book? and just manage another power port, or should i now start getting into combining them to make a NAS ? 
i really need help, i cant afford NAS cases that are stupidly costly, but what i can do is open up all the 4TB my book and rip our the HDD's inside which are basically wd 4tb Green drives so i can make a personal NAS.
Guide me, i have no clue. PS i have no backups, so i dont want to loose anything while doing this. 

 

 

[pagani123]

i would say get a nas similar hardware would cost just as much as a nas from what i have seen plus nas's tend to have better software than any thing you can download onto hardware to make it into a nas (without knowing how to modify it to make it work well) . I would recommend pretty much anything made by synology. also holy crap that is a lot of drives on a pc 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

4 minutes ago, Maybach123 said:

i would say get a nas similar hardware would cost just as much as a nas from what i have seen plus nas's tend to have better software than any thing you can download onto hardware to make it into a nas (without knowing how to modify it to make it work well) . I would recommend pretty much anything made by synology. also holy crap that is a lot of drives on a pc 

all the NAS i can buy in India are like 2 bay Nas and they are expensive as hell.

[Guest]

Start off by getting some more 4TB drives and backing up the most important stuff (or all of it, if you can afford 3 or more drives at once).

Then either get a ready-built NAS or throw something together from old hardware you have lying around or can get for free/dirt cheap (and then install something like FreeNAS) and set up a RAID.

Which, yeah, RAID is not an equivalent of a backup, but it's better than nothing.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

8 minutes ago, Svinsparbriivu said:

Start off by getting some more 4TB drives and backing up the most important stuff (or all of it, if you can afford 3 or more drives at once).

Then either get a ready-built NAS or throw something together from old hardware you have lying around or can get for free/dirt cheap (and then install something like FreeNAS) and set up a RAID.

Which, yeah, RAID is not an equivalent of a backup, but it's better than nothing.

i dont think i can find any ready-built NAS in India or one that's more than 2 bay so i'm out of options, and i dont have any sort of backup, so i dont want to mess anything using freenas os

[Mark77]

I agree with the others, its not realistic to expect to just plug the existing drives directly, without reformatting, into a NAS of any kind, whether home-built, or something packaged and pre-built. 

 

So to manage the data, you're probably going to have to buy more hardware.  And WD Green drives are often unsuitable for RAID arrays, so you'll probably need different drives for NAS use.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

3 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

I agree with the others, its not realistic to expect to just plug the existing drives directly, without reformatting, into a NAS of any kind, whether home-built, or something packaged and pre-built. 

 

So to manage the data, you're probably going to have to buy more hardware.  And WD Green drives are often unsuitable for RAID arrays, so you'll probably need different drives for NAS use.

what would you have me do ? even if i wanted to get a NAS. it still only supports 4 hdd's max,  and i diffidently will be needing more than that in the future 

[Mark77]

Just now, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

what would you have me do ? even if i wanted to get a NAS. it still only supports 4 hdd's max,  and i diffidently will be needing more than that in the future 

Sounds like you'll have to go the full-fledged server/NAS route.  And/or figure out what's really important to you, and throw the rest out.  Build a machine, throw FreeNAS on it, and go from there. 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

5 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

Sounds like you'll have to go the full-fledged server/NAS route.  And/or figure out what's really important to you, and throw the rest out.  Build a machine, throw FreeNAS on it, and go from there. 

the thing is, i dont know what am i suppose to buy, can you hand me out some examples ? 

[Staniel]

Another thing you could consider if you only need on when your PC is on is interesting with your current setup, and the only thing extra you would need is a raid card and possibly another drive to create a raid. Also if you don't always use all your system recourses then you could make an unRaid so that you NAS is always on and then you turn on your PC when you need it, of cause this would take up some system resources 

[79wjd]

7 hours ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

the thing is, i dont know what am i suppose to buy, can you hand me out some examples ? 

It depends what specifically your doing with the nas. I would recommend wd reds as they're designed for 24/7 use and support TLER (which is important for raid). Your greens would be fine (if you run wdidle to disable the aggressive head parking that greens have), but for future drives I would buy reds. If you're just running a basic file server (or only streaming two or less 1080p streams)then I would go with a pentium. If you're planning on running some form of raid, then I would recommend FreeNAS, 16gb of ECC memory and a c2xx chipset (depending on whether you go with haswell, ivy, or skylake). If you don't want to spend the extra $100~ for ECC then I would choose a something that isn't using ZFS file system (unraid or some Linux distro). 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

6 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

It depends what specifically your doing with the nas. I would recommend wd reds as they're designed for 24/7 use and support TLER (which is important for raid). Your greens would be fine (if you run wdidle to disable the aggressive head parking that greens have), but for future drives I would buy reds. If you're just running a basic file server (or only streaming two or less 1080p streams)then I would go with a pentium. If you're planning on running some form of raid, then I would recommend FreeNAS, 16gb of ECC memory and a c2xx chipset (depending on whether you go with haswell, ivy, or skylake). If you don't want to spend the extra $100~ for ECC then I would choose a something that isn't using ZFS file system (unraid or some Linux distro). 

i dont plan to steam anything, i just want to store data for now. and i also dont plan to run the system for 24/7, for the most part the drives will be in sleep until i access it. hence i'm conflicted, should i just buy another external 4 tb hdd MY book's and go on or like rip all my existing 4 tb hdd's internal HDD and add them to my existing PC ? so i can free up space since i cant keep on adding new power adapters every time i add a new 4 tb HDD my book.

a friend reccomended just buy an PCI sata controller and add it to my existing PC since my case can support 8 drives and i've only occupied 2.

i also searched for hotswap drive cages and found this https://www.startech.com/HDD/Enclosures/8-bay-removable-hard-drive-enclosure~S358BU33ERM

but i dont have the skills to operate a raid environment, i dont know if i buy that cage if i can just add the existing drives without formatting and messing with them and stuff.

 

[79wjd]

5 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

i dont plan to steam anything, i just want to store data for now. and i also dont plan to run the system for 24/7, for the most part the drives will be in sleep until i access it. hence i'm conflicted, should i just buy another external 4 tb hdd MY book's and go on or like rip all my existing 4 tb hdd's internal HDD and add them to my existing PC ? so i can free up space since i cant keep on adding new power adapters every time i add a new 4 tb HDD my book.

a friend reccomended just buy an PCI sata controller and add it to my existing PC since my case can support 8 drives and i've only occupied 2.

i also searched for hotswap drive cages and found this https://www.startech.com/HDD/Enclosures/8-bay-removable-hard-drive-enclosure~S358BU33ERM

but i dont have the skills to operate a raid environment, i dont know if i buy that cage if i can just add the existing drives without formatting and messing with them and stuff.

 

If you did any raid you would need to format and copy the data over. You could do that, but that card just adds sata ports, which you already have enough of. If you wanted to do any raid on Windows I would recommend hardware raid over software raid (and raid cards are fairly expensive), so a dedicated nas wouldn't be that much more. Plus if you'd leave your desktop powered on a lot more then electricity costs would also negate the cost of a NAS.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

42 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

If you did any raid you would need to format and copy the data over. You could do that, but that card just adds sata ports, which you already have enough of. If you wanted to do any raid on Windows I would recommend hardware raid over software raid (and raid cards are fairly expensive), so a dedicated nas wouldn't be that much more. Plus if you'd leave your desktop powered on a lot more then electricity costs would also negate the cost of a NAS.

dedicated NAS meaning i'd have to build a new pc for it ? 

[79wjd]

1 hour ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

dedicated NAS meaning i'd have to build a new pc for it ? 

Yep

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

44 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Yep

so help me out with cheap parts, i dont know what i should go for a cheap NAS build. 

[79wjd]

12 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

so help me out with cheap parts, i dont know what i should go for a cheap NAS build. 

If you're going to run some form of raid, then I'd do a pentium, 8-16gb ECC memory, c2xx chipset board (server board), and run FreeNAS. If you're not going to do raid, then you can get by without ECC (although if you go with a ZFS based file system I would still go with ECC) and some Linux server distro, unraid, or windows with 4-8gb of ram.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

1 hour ago, djdwosk97 said:

If you're going to run some form of raid, then I'd do a pentium, 8-16gb ECC memory, c2xx chipset board (server board), and run FreeNAS. If you're not going to do raid, then you can get by without ECC (although if you go with a ZFS based file system I would still go with ECC) and some Linux server distro, unraid, or windows with 4-8gb of ram.

suppose i'd want to mirror all my drives, suppose i have 4x4 tb Hdd's that means i'll be needing abother 4x4 tb hdd's. that means i need a case that can support 8 drives isnt it ? that's what confusing me, i dont know what to build, what raid controller do i even need to get? and i dont know much about linux so i'll be sticking to windows, given that, can i upgrade the drives in the future? what raid card does even support 8+ sata ports etc... 

[79wjd]

21 hours ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

suppose i'd want to mirror all my drives, suppose i have 4x4 tb Hdd's that means i'll be needing abother 4x4 tb hdd's. that means i need a case that can support 8 drives isnt it ? that's what confusing me, i dont know what to build, what raid controller do i even need to get? and i dont know much about linux so i'll be sticking to windows, given that, can i upgrade the drives in the future? what raid card does even support 8+ sata ports etc... 

I have the most experience with FreeNAS, so that's what I'll be assuming you're going to use for an operating system (it's free and is a very good NAS OS that provides excellent data integrity). 

 

I can't help much with hardware RAID, but with something like FreeNAS you would use software RAID and so you would just use the sata ports on the motherboard c206/c226/c236 boards all have 8+ sata ports. And if you needed more sata ports then you could get an HBA card (LSI HBA cards are generally what I've seen recommended with FreeNAS systems). 

 

I personally wouldn't do RAID 1, I would actually go with six 4tb drives in Raid Z2 (RAID 6 equivalent). I prefer parity raid over mirror raid due to the fact that it's more durable in my mind. In a RAID 6 array any two drives can fail and you're still able to rebuild the array, in a RAID10 array if two drives fail you may or may not be able to rebuild the array depending on which drives fail. Of course there is also a performance hit with parity RAID, but it's worthwhile imo (especially since you don't seem to be doing something where the performance hit would matter). Plus RAID Z2 would also save you money on drives. 

 

In FreeNAS, you can replace/upgrade drives, but you can't increase the number of drives in an array, AND the array will be limited to the smallest drive in the array. So if you have a RAID Z2 array consisting of six 4tb drives, then you'd have a usable capacity of 16tb. If you were to upgrade any 1-5 of those drives to 6tb drives then you'd still only have 16tb of usable space, but if you upgraded all six of them (one at a time) then you would have 24tb of usable space once all six drives have been replaced. 

 

For a case, there are expensive server (rack) chassis or you can just use any desktop case (a Define R4/R5, an NZXT Source 210, etc....). 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

1 hour ago, djdwosk97 said:

I have the most experience with FreeNAS, so that's what I'll be assuming you're going to use for an operating system (it's free and is a very good NAS OS that provides excellent data integrity). 

 

I can't help much with hardware RAID, but with something like FreeNAS you would use software RAID and so you would just use the sata ports on the motherboard c206/c226/c236 boards all have 8+ sata ports. And if you needed more sata ports then you could get an HBA card (LSI HBA cards are generally what I've seen recommended with FreeNAS systems). 

 

I personally wouldn't do RAID 1, I would actually go with six 4tb drives in Raid Z2 (RAID 6 equivalent). I prefer parity raid over mirror raid due to the fact that it's more durable in my mind. In a RAID 6 array any two drives can fail and you're still able to rebuild the array, in a RAID10 array if two drives fail you may or may not be able to rebuild the array depending on which drives fail. Of course there is also a performance hit with parity RAID, but it's worthwhile imo (especially since you don't seem to be doing something where the performance hit would matter). Plus RAID Z2 would also save you money on drives. 

 

In FreeNAS, you can replace/upgrade drives, but you can't increase the number of drives in an array, AND the array will be limited to the smallest drive in the array. So if you have a RAID Z2 array consisting of six 4tb drives, then you'd have a usable capacity of 16tb. If you were to upgrade any 1-5 of those drives to 6tb drives then you'd still only have 16tb of usable space, but if you upgraded all six of them (one at a time) then you would have 24tb of usable space once all six drives have been replaced. 

 

For a case, there are expensive server (rack) chassis or you can just use any desktop case (a Define R4/R5, an NZXT Source 210, etc....). 

ok so, i have like no idea how to install or use a FreeNas OS, and i'm confused as to raid Z2 ? if have 4 x 4 tb hdd, am i to assume i need another 4 for raid z2? 
assuming what i said until now is correct, if i needed to add another 4 tb to the array, i need to add 2 of them ? i'll move forward to buy the components as soon as i can understand the quarries i mentioned above. i'm just a newbie in Nas stuff. my raid knowledge was never that great, i've never used any other OS except windows. 

[79wjd]

24 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

ok so, i have like no idea how to install or use a FreeNas OS, and i'm confused as to raid Z2 ? if have 4 x 4 tb hdd, am i to assume i need another 4 for raid z2? 
assuming what i said until now is correct, if i needed to add another 4 tb to the array, i need to add 2 of them ? i'll move forward to buy the components as soon as i can understand the quarries i mentioned above. i'm just a newbie in Nas stuff. my raid knowledge was never that great, i've never used any other OS except windows. 

FreeNAS isn't too difficult to learn (at least what you need to know to get things working well). Windows 10 has storage spaces, which I believe is a decent (possibly very good?) software raid (other than that Windows software raid isn't great). I don't really have much experience outside of FreeNAS, so I wouldn't really feel comfortable making certain recommendations for a different OS. I was able to figure out FreeNAS fairly easily (with a bit of help from the FreeNAS community). 

 

Raid z2 is the FreeNAS equivalent to raid 6. So if you wanted 16tb of usable space you would need six 4tb drives. Raid z2 allows for any two drives to fail. If you wanted to grow the capacity of the array you would have to replace every single drive in the array with a larger capacity drive. You can't add drives to an already created array. Unraid may allow resizing of the array, I know it's more friendly with drives of different capacities.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

8 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

Raid z2 is the FreeNAS equivalent to raid 6. So if you wanted 16tb of usable space you would need six 4tb drives. Raid z2 allows for any two drives to fail. If you wanted to grow the capacity of the array you would have to replace every single drive in the array with a larger capacity drive. You can't add drives to an already created array. Unraid may allow resizing of the array, I know it's more friendly with drives of different capacities.

so you're implying i need to upgrade all 4 tb HDD's to 8tb's to upgrade but i cant added 2 more 4 tb drives to increase the capacity ? well that breaks my goal to upgradability, i couldnt possible buy a whole set of new drives and discard all the old drives, is there any better solution ? 

[79wjd]

43 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

so you're implying i need to upgrade all 4 tb HDD's to 8tb's to upgrade but i cant added 2 more 4 tb drives to increase the capacity ? well that breaks my goal to upgradability, i couldnt possible buy a whole set of new drives and discard all the old drives, is there any better solution ? 

Create another array for any new drives, or just have a bunch of raid 1s and segregate the data between them. In general you can't resize arrays. But since you can have as many arrays as you want (in any configurations that you want) uogradability generally isn't much of a concern.