Building NAS, need help.

[HeroRareheart]

I took a visit to my local dump and found an older computer with 3 perfectly good, but old, 1.5TB WD greens in it. After digging through the computers bios I found that it does have a raid controller built into it but most forums called that "fake raid" and the general advice is to avoid it. I don't have the hardware necessary to do a proper hardware raid but the Internet seems to say that software raid is decent enough so I've decided to go with that. Seeing as these drives spin slowly I wanted a raid array where the data was striped, like raid 0, to improve the performance but seeing as they are older drives I wasn't sure how reliable they were going to be and also wanted some level of redundancy, like raid 1. To me it looks like raid 10 would be the most optimal but I don't have a 4th drive laying around that's 1.5TB or bigger which I'm willing to sacrifice for this project which leaves me with raid 5. In theory this should be fine but any if you you know a lot about raid should already see the problem, if I'm setting up a software raid in Linux or Windows I need to have the operating system installed first which requires me to put it on 1 of the 3 drives no longer letting me have a raid 5 array. This computer does have ample free usb, sata, esata, firewire (I think), ide, and sd card/memory card headers/ports available so I was wondering if it was possible to do something like plug in a spare usb drive or sd card to install the operating system on.

 

I'm very new to this and it's very possible but I have overlooked some stupidly simple solution to this problem.

[Windows7ge]

You can install your choice of Linux onto a thumb drive and boot from there. Then create a RAID5 with your choice of File System on the 3 HDD's.

 

FreeNAS is pretty popular and uses ZFS as the File System which is regarded as quite resilient. You can create a "raidz1"(RAID5) array.

[Spotty]

6 minutes ago, herorareheart said:

In theory this should be fine but any if you you know a lot about raid should already see the problem, if I'm setting up a software raid in Linux or Windows I need to have the operating system installed first which requires me to put it on 1 of the 3 drives no longer letting me have a raid 5 array. This computer does have ample free usb, sata, esata, firewire (I think), ide, and sd card/memory card headers/ports available so I was wondering if it was possible to do something like plug in a spare usb drive or sd card to install the operating system on.

Yes, you can install the operating system on to a USB drive. I have FreeNAS running on a 16GB USB drive (fits on 8GB drive as well). You just install it like you would a normal operating system but when it comes to choosing what volume to install the operating system to you simply choose the USB drive as the volume. You will need one USB drive for the installer and one blank one for the OS to be installed on to.

 

You'll need to look at what operating system you are going with and whether or not it would be suitable to install on a USB. Generally speaking the lighter the better.

Then you can use all of the hard drives for storage in the RAID array.

[Bacon soup]

i would install linux in raid one on two drives with one as a spare.

[CuBe8021]

I would install FreeNAS on a USB drive for people getting started. Then once your comfortable with Linux / ZFS, you can move to Ubuntu/CentOS installed on a pair of SSD in RAID1 mirror.

[HeroRareheart]

20 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

install your choice of Linux onto a thumb drive

 

20 hours ago, Spotty said:

you can install the operating system on to a USB drive.

Good to know that will work, I may have a spare USB kicking around somewhere. If I don't have one laying about would I be able to use an sd card instead?

[Spotty]

Just now, herorareheart said:

 

Good to know that will work, I may have a spare USB kicking around somewhere. If I don't have one laying about would I be able to use an sd card instead?

I wouldn't recommend an SD card.
8GB USB drives are a few dollars in with the stationary supplies at the supermarket. Just grab one of those.

[HeroRareheart]

1 minute ago, Spotty said:

I wouldn't recommend an SD card.

Alright USB it is. One last question though, if the NAS is using a ZFS file system will my other computers running Windows be able to see whats on it? I guessing yes but I'd like to be certain before I go spend an hour fiddling with installing FreeNAS.

[Windows7ge]

1 minute ago, herorareheart said:

Good to know that will work, I may have a spare USB kicking around somewhere. If I don't have one laying about would I be able to use an sd card instead?

I know on server farms it's common to boot an OS from a SD card. So it should be possible. Weather or not what you have at home is the same quality NAND/Flash I can't say. Probably not.

 

As CuBe8021 stated if you decided you want to dive into the world of CLI Linux I wrote a guide that would give you a good introduction to Debian based File Servers:

 

[Windows7ge]

3 minutes ago, herorareheart said:

Alright USB it is. One last question though, if the NAS is using a ZFS file system will my other computers running Windows be able to see whats on it? I guessing yes but I'd like to be certain before I go spend an hour fiddling with installing FreeNAS.

Over the network you'd enable the SMB protocol for file sharing. This is something Windows developed and knows how to read. ZFS itself doesn't need to be recognized by Windows.

[Spotty]

3 minutes ago, herorareheart said:

Alright USB it is. One last question though, if the NAS is using a ZFS file system will my other computers running Windows be able to see whats on it? I guessing yes but I'd like to be certain before I go spend an hour fiddling with installing FreeNAS.

Yes. Set the drives up as a volume using ZFS. Then you set it up as a Windows (SMB) Share which will be visible to Windows computers over the network.