Budget NAS for small video business

[pgoodyear]

(Honestly, any help or other suggestions would be greatly appreciated)

 

I've been looking at solutions for my data problems for a long time now. I run a video production company and just hired my first employee. We have a total of 10TB of (non-current) data that is not currently backed up anywhere (terrible I know). In short, I need a NAS. preferably one with 10Gig and with a minimum of 40TB of usable space. Linus has a few videos on NAS building, but not one at this level. The closest one I've seen is the "reliable data storage video" (

synology 8 bay nas that is like $900. I also looked at buying an old server (for tons of ECC memory, but I have limited server hardware experience) or repurposing an old PC (32GB Ram and i5, but I'd know what I'm). I would love it if I could buy the basics and add drives as we go, because dropping $2000 on drives at once is always a hard pill to swallow. In an ideal world, I could have a nas that has 4 drives installed and I can keep adding to it up to like 100TB or more. Any budget solutions people have? How important is more than 32gb of ram? How important is ECC? Could an old server work? Would a 2nd gen i5 with 32gb of ram be ok? Or should I just bite the bullet and go with an off the shelf Synology that people say works well? But if I can go with an old server, what are the things I should watch out for? Should I ZFS or RAID (or something else)?

 

PS...

(I was looking at a board like this on ebay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro-Super-X8DTI-F-Mother-Board-Dual-Intel-XEON-E5630-2-53GHz/222922713188?_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D51377%26meid%3De1f8ee33477f4e37a1b3b836e671efbd%26pid%3D100675%26rk%3D6%26rkt%3D15%26sd%3D123086324973%26itm%3D222922713188&_trksid=p2481888.c100675.m4236&_trkparms=pageci%3A7747ec54-48b6-11e8-8080-74dbd180e117|parentrq%3Afe107aca1620ab6ac9bc7176fff22523|iid%3A1 )

[grimreeper132]

new or second hand???

Second hand

Buy an old cheap PC off of ebay, craigslist gumtree or similar and from that. A core 2 duo or better would do probably about 15 people paired with 6-8GB of RAM, or get an old xeon with ECC RAM, probably about $20-30 more maybe for a similar one. The 10Gb/s LAN is going to be expensive if you want ethernet, fiber buying second hand fibre card and a 1Gbp/s switch with 1/2 fibre inputs will be fine (I got a 24 way one for £20 including shipping so they anit that expensive) 

 

and an i5 with 32GB should be more than enough,

 

how much you willing to spend for version 1 of this thing???

 

Servers PCs in general are just PCs with a few extra buttons and settings, they anit too much more complicated... normally

 

 

This is about $750 US (I think including shipping) and one of these gives you enough space to expand and  you only really need 1 at the moment and you should be able to get a decent OS on it, you will need drives though

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-STORAGEWORKS-P4500-G2-BQ889A-SAN-STORAGE-NAS-GST-no-hard-drives/332611790013?epid=1480862463&hash=item4d713524bd:g:T~cAAOSwi8xaASYX

[pgoodyear]

I'm perfectly ok with used gear. I want to keep it under $1000 without drives if I can. But it needs to be substantially "better" than the Synology. I'm cool with paying for the 10gig nic's for all three machines (the NAS, my PC, and my employee's). I can get a 2nd gen i5 with 32gb of ram from a guy here in town for like $200. So what if I got that with an LSI card flashed to HBA mode and used 8x 8TB iron wolf drives. Then for networking use a 10gig nic and direct wire both PC's to the NAS preferably using Cat7 (the networking part is what I know the least about).  I'd be fine with that hardware investment. But if I could start with 4 drives with the option to upgrade in the future that would be my preferred method, but with my understanding, you can't change zfs once they are up. If I do need a switch, I could get the netgear 8 port 10gig switch. It's $700, but it seems like the cheapest one available.

[GDRRiley]

5 hours ago, pgoodyear said:

Then for networking use a 10gig nic and direct wire both PC's to the NAS preferably using Cat7 (the networking part is what I know the least about).  I'd be fine with that hardware investment. But if I could start with 4 drives with the option to upgrade in the future that would be my preferred method, but with my understanding, you can't change zfs once they are up. If I do need a switch, I could get the netgear 8 port 10gig switch. It's $700, but it seems like the cheapest one available.

SFP+ is way cheaper that 10gb over Ethernet for a few connections. 

an i5 with 32gb of ram should do fine. I would start with 5 or 10 8tb drives and run them in a raid5 and the 2nd set if you need more and just have them shared over different names. 

(serverName)Block1 (serverName)Block2 (example.)

8tb drives are the sweet spot and iron wolf nas are great drives. 

[pgoodyear]

Thanks! I feel way more confident about the 32GB of ram now.  You mentioned 5 or 10 drives. Did you mean 5 to 10, or are those numbers important for some reason. (I was probably gonna do 8 drives.) Just for my info. What would be required for two computers and a NAS to be connected by RJ45 10gig? I saw 10gig nics that had RJ45 for like $150. And the SFP cards were like $125. Are there other costs that I'm missing? Also, are there performance differences between the two? For extra info, in one PC there is only a single HDD in the other there are three HDD's in RAID 0 (there are SSD boot devices but the HDDs are for video storage and will be the read and write drives in this setup).

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 minutes ago, pgoodyear said:

Thanks! I feel way more confident about the 32GB of ram now.  You mentioned 5 or 10 drives. Did you mean 5 to 10, or are those numbers important for some reason. (I was probably gonna do 8 drives.) Just for my info. What would be required for two computers and a NAS to be connected by RJ45 10gig? I saw 10gig nics that had RJ45 for like $150. And the SFP cards were like $125. Are there other costs that I'm missing? Also, are there performance differences between the two? For extra info, in one PC there is only a single HDD in the other there are three HDD's in RAID 0 (there are SSD boot devices but the HDDs are for video storage and will be the read and write drives in this setup).

You can run with less than 32gb if you want, 8gb will probably be fine here.

 

Id go sfp as its normally about 20 usd for a nic, and cables are about the same price. get something like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/RT8N1-0RT8N1-DELL-MELLANOX-CONNECTX-2-PCIe-10GBe-ETHERNET-NIC-SERVER-ADAPTER/351416547732?hash=item51d20ef994:g:YDIAAOSwcONazkt-

 

Performance between 10gbe standards is the same.

 

Id personally get something like thishttps://www.ebay.com/itm/RT8N1-0RT8N1-DELL-MELLANOX-CONNECTX-2-PCIe-10GBe-ETHERNET-NIC-SERVER-ADAPTER/351416547732?hash=item51d20ef994:g:YDIAAOSwcONazkt-

 

Put a 10gbe card in, and your favorite nas os(id probably go freeNAS here)

 

 

[pgoodyear]

Dang, that's way cheaper. I'm for sure going that route. Thanks! I feel like I'm getting close to knowing what I need. Thoughts on FreeNAS vs unRaid or other OS? Any other tips?

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, pgoodyear said:

Dang, that's way cheaper. I'm for sure going that route. Thanks! I feel like I'm getting close to knowing what I need. Thoughts on FreeNAS vs unRaid or other OS? Any other tips?

With FreeNAS, you are using ZFS. Which is great for data integrity. It really helps to protect your data from corruption or drive loss.

 

The main downside to ZFS is that expanding a pool is really difficult, and not practical. There are a few ways around that though:

 

Option 1:

Create the first pool the way you want (Eg: a 8x 8TB RAIDZ2). Name the share. When you run low on space, create another identical pool (eg: 8x 8TB RAIDZ2). Name the share something different. Now you have 2 shares to work with.

 

Option 2:

Do everything the same above. Except, then you stripe them together (Creates an effective RAID 60 volume). This allows you to keep a single "Share", better for organization. Downside: slightly higher risk of data loss

 

Option 3:

Replace one of the drives with a larger drive, then rebuild the pool. Repeat, one at a time, until all drives have been replaced. Expand volume to new size. Downside: Takes forever - lots of downtime.

 

Another thing to keep in mind is that RAID is not a backup, so make sure that your data is in at least 2 places - on the NAS, and somewhere else. If the data is only living on your new NAS, then it's not being backed up.

 

RAID will not protect you against accidental file deletion, or malware/ransomware, etc.

[Salv8 (sam)]

On 4/26/2018 at 4:29 AM, pgoodyear said:

synology 8 bay nas that is like $900. I also looked at buying an old server (for tons of ECC memory, but I have limited server hardware experience) or repurposing an old PC (32GB Ram and i5, but I'd know what I'm). I would love it if I could buy the basics and add drives as we go, because dropping $2000 on drives at once is always a hard pill to swallow. In an ideal world, I could have a nas that has 4 drives installed and I can keep adding to it up to like 100TB or more. Any budget solutions people have?

getting an old rack mount server with a lot of drive slots can work, but depending on the age it might cause speed problems when accessing footage and/or other data

 

On 4/26/2018 at 4:29 AM, pgoodyear said:

How important is more than 32gb of ram?

depends on what OS you are running and what RAID setup you are going to use, some RAID setups require 1GB of ram per 1TB of storage ( i think, not sure i don't screw with Linux much)

for 100TB of storage you need 100GB of ram PLUS some of the os itself so about 104GB of ram or more of you are running virtual machines as well

On 4/26/2018 at 4:29 AM, pgoodyear said:

How important is ECC?

how important is having non corrept data? to be fair, computers now can handle a litle bit of corrept data and deal with it

if you really want to get ECC, watch this first and then decide if you really need it

 

On 4/26/2018 at 4:29 AM, pgoodyear said:

Could an old server work?

so long as it was really quick at the time as had a really fast access time, an old cache server from a datacenter might be good, but it might be limited on storage (some are i think, not sure)

sometimes it's better to buy brand new if pre-existing options can't fit your needs or are having trobbel with the workload you are going to put on them, so be careful and look online for others who bought that server second hand recently (in the last year) and see how it go's for them, now in saying that it won't reflect what you are going to do with it, but it gives you an idea on what to expect and hopefully solve potential problems with the system if it has one

On 4/26/2018 at 4:29 AM, pgoodyear said:

Would a 2nd gen i5 with 32gb of ram be ok?

so long as it isn't rendering out the final product, then it should be able to handle it (take with a grain of salt)

On 4/26/2018 at 4:29 AM, pgoodyear said:

Or should I just bite the bullet and go with an off the shelf Synology that people say works well?

NO! don't do that! they are NOTORIOUS for being hard to expand and upgrade! they are fine for simple home and business storage and thats it! stay away from those NAS box's as they will not be able to handle the amount of storage you will need in the future!

On 4/26/2018 at 4:29 AM, pgoodyear said:

But if I can go with an old server, what are the things I should watch out for?

older servers are known for having issues with newer OS's are they were never designed to run them, drivers and random incompatibility are the biggest issues you will come across, drivers are less of an issue if you are using Linux and know what you are doing, windows however is a different story, you have to hope that the windows has the drivers pre-installed because the drivers provided by the manufacturer aren't designed for that version of windows and will certainly cause issues that might be unable to be fixed/solved, i was lucky that windows had the drivers for my server because the drivers from the manufacturers didn't work at all

also don't use the old drives that came with the system, most of the time they will have problems or might just be dead, most of the time businesses just throw out the server if it's got an issue that can't be fixed, so if you are getting an older server, get new drives for it

On 4/26/2018 at 4:29 AM, pgoodyear said:

Should I ZFS or RAID (or something else)?

they each have their advantages but i don't have enough experience on the forums, i think one of the mods on the forums has experience with this (i think his name is leadeater or something), he usually is willing to help out with this type of stuff, tag him about this and he can help find what would be best for you

Edited April 26, 2018 by Salv8 (sam)
fixed some errors