Setting up a NAS

[TheBlackKey]

So I've been thinking for a while about setting up my own NAS and now that I'm moving I thought about doing it now. My original plan was to buy an older computer used (4 cores processor, at least 8 gb's of ram) and just put some new HDD's in and run FreeNAS. Now in my gaming PC I have a I7-7700, 16gb's of corsair vengeance ddr4 (3000mhz) and the asus prime z170-a mobo. I was thinking that maybe I could just use these for the NAS and upgrade my gaming pc to third gen ryzen 5 or 7 (depending on the budget/performance). I want to use my NAS to store all my music and that it works well with Volumio, run a plex server for my movies/shows and to save some work documents/code and some pictures.

Now I still have some questions:

1. Would it be worth it using my hardware from my gaming pc for my nas, because it would be more expensive upgrading to ryzen than buying an older used PC?
2. Is FreeNAS a good solution for what I want from my NAS (mostly Volumio)? If not what would be a better solution.
3. Can you use RAID to add some redundancy?
4. What hard drives would you recommend?

Good to know: I'm located in the EU, so prices vary from the US/CA

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Windows7ge]

If you don't plan on using server components it should still serve the purpose fine.

 

I've not used Volumio before. If it can access the server over SMB/NFS it should work fine but if it needs to run a server on the NAS and FreeNAS doesn't have a plugin for it them FreeNAS probably isn't your best option.

 

RAID would allow fault tolerance. Note though that it is not a substitution for a backup.

 

I've had pretty good luck with WD Red/WD Gold, and Seagate NAS drives.

[Quickstrike]

5 minutes ago, TheBlackKey said:

1. Would it be worth it using my hardware from my gaming pc for my nas, because it would be more expensive upgrading to ryzen than buying an older used PC?
2. Is FreeNAS a good solution for what I want from my NAS (mostly Volumio)? If not what would be a better solution.
3. Can you use RAID to add some redundancy?
4. What hard drives would you recommend?

Good to know: I'm located in the EU, so prices vary from the US/CA

Thanks in advance for any help.

1 It's Overkill, you can drive a NAS with a Raspberry Pie and a disk enclosure.
2 Can't talk about other products but you need to setup linux for FreeNAS. If setting up Linux is no problem for you then setting up FreeNAS is about the same level of difficulty.
3 Depending on your budget and the place in your case, RAID 1 or RAID 5.
4 Any WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf.

[SupaKomputa]

1. if you have no problem running a pc 24/7 as in electricity, then go ahead. for home use, storing movies it's better getting a low powered device. Nas boxes usually consume around 10-20watt. Compare that to a PC which can consume around 100.

2. freenas have a high requirements, better get openmediavault

3. most nas software support raid.

4. low speed hdd, 5400rpm, lower speed lower temp, longer life.

[TheBlackKey]

1 hour ago, SupaKomputa said:

2. freenas have a high requirements, better get openmediavault

except for the higher requirements, why would you recommend openmediavault more over freenas?

[TheBlackKey]

1 hour ago, Quickstrike said:

2 Can't talk about other products but you need to setup linux for FreeNAS. If setting up Linux is no problem for you then setting up FreeNAS is about the same level of difficulty.
3 Depending on your budget and the place in your case, RAID 1 or RAID 5.

2 Have never set up Linux, but I'm willing to learn/try. Supakomputa recommended openmediavault, would this be easier to setup/use?

3 Budget is somewhat limited, so was thinking about RAID 5

[Quickstrike]

3 minutes ago, TheBlackKey said:

2 Have never set up Linux, but I'm willing to learn/try. Supakomputa recommended openmediavault, would this be easier to setup/use?

3 Budget is somewhat limited, so was thinking about RAID 5

Yeah media vault is easier
Raid five means at least 3 disks where one is used for parity. I say get you disk from different vendors so that they are not from the same batch and, should they fail, wont fail in cascade.
If you have no gear at all, I recommend a Raspberry pie and a sata 3 disk enclosure. 
You'll need the pie, an SB card, an enclosure and your disks.
It's pretty easy to setup and low power consumption. 

[Dutch_Master]

RAID5: 3 disks minimum, capacity: 2x smallest disk size

RAID1: 2 disks minimum, capacity: 1x smallest disk size

 

Both have a fault tolerance of 1 disk, i.e. if you loose just one disk, your data is still available, loose another and it's gone. There's a few measures to negate the issue:

• use different manufacturers for your disks. Equal capacity is a still requirement though.
• use RAID6: 4 disks minimum, fault tolerance of 2, capacity 2x smallest disk size
• combine the above

If high availability and/or high speed are a hard requirement, add an NVMe SSD as cache to the RAID. Not for a low budget though....

[Dutch_Master]

2 minutes ago, Quickstrike said:

Raid five means at least 3 disks where one is used for parity.

No it isn't. Raid 5 distributes the parity across the drives, only Unraid uses dedicated parity drives (although I'm not sure how ZFS-based raid processes the parity).

[TheBlackKey]

OK, thanks for everybody's help. I think I"ll use an old system and add 3 drives in RAID 5 and run open media vault.