Questions regarding NAS

[Moonzy]

I've been wanting to build a NAS for a while

i wanna store larger than 3TB (and expanding) of files, preferably in "one" drive

4TB drives costs as much as 3 2TB drives here, so i thought i might as well build a NAS with redundancy

 

but i have several questions, hope you guys can give me some answers

 

1) is it possible for my NAS to go to sleep when im not accessing it after 30 minute, and resume when i access it? having it constantly draw idle power is not great, but sleep power draw is fine

 

2) can i mix 2TB drives with higher capacity drives in the future? HDD with SSD? (if SSD becomes cheaper than HDD in the future)

 

3) raid 5 or 6? not storing too important stuffs but i dont want to lose it, leaning towards raid 6

 

4) raid card? or nah?

 

5) would like to access it like i would a local disk, through file explorer

 

6) remote access thru DDNS service maybe? how would that work? (ie what's the interface i can expect to be like)

 

currently i have some spare PC parts lying around, only need the drives and an enclosure, im fine with low speed, 100mbit is fine (or whatever the motherboard LAN supports)

just want some storage to backup, and occasionally i'll access them to find photos and such

probably access it once or twice a month

as for budget, let's assume it's minimal, or whatever makes sense for my needs

 

any tips and advice? anything i should know?

[mahyar]

1: as far as i know it wont be easy

2: if in raid not recommended

3:6 is okay

4:its better to have it

5:you can its easy

6:sorry idk about that 

[Master Disaster]

43 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

I've been wanting to build a NAS for a while

i wanna store larger than 3TB (and expanding) of files, preferably in "one" drive

4TB drives costs as much as 3 2TB drives here, so i thought i might as well build a NAS with redundancy

 

but i have several questions, hope you guys can give me some answers

 

1) is it possible for my NAS to go to sleep when im not accessing it after 30 minute, and resume when i access it? having it constantly draw idle power is not great, but sleep power draw is fine

 

2) can i mix 2TB drives with higher capacity drives in the future? HDD with SSD? (if SSD becomes cheaper than HDD in the future)

 

3) raid 5 or 6? not storing too important stuffs but i dont want to lose it, leaning towards raid 6

 

4) raid card? or nah?

 

5) would like to access it like i would a local disk, through file explorer

 

6) remote access thru DDNS service maybe? how would that work? (ie what's the interface i can expect to be like)

 

currently i have some spare PC parts lying around, only need the drives and an enclosure, im fine with low speed, 100mbit is fine (or whatever the motherboard LAN supports)

just want some storage to backup, and occasionally i'll access them to find photos and such

probably access it once or twice a month

as for budget, let's assume it's minimal, or whatever makes sense for my needs

 

any tips and advice? anything i should know?

1) Yes but with but with a big why would you. The point of a NAS is that its always available, having it sleep would mean you waiting for the entire boot up before you can access it. To do it at all you need a router that support Wake On Lan and you would have to manually open the routers interface and send the WoL packet to get it to wake up.

 

2) In the same Array, no however you can create as many arrays as you need.

 

3) Which suits your needs best is something only you can decide.

 

4) Depends on what you run. Something like DSM (you can run it through Xpenology on any PC) or FreeNas won't require it at all since they are designed to use software RAID. If you plan to run Windows then absolutely yes, Storage Spaces is pretty not good.

 

5) Yep, thats the point. It would create an SMB Share which you map to File Explorer.

 

6) You mean remote access to the web interface or remote access to file storage? The first is very simple, the second is possible but not recommended since your files will be open for anyone on the internet to access.

 

[Moonzy]

45 minutes ago, mahyar said:

1: as far as i know it wont be easy

24 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

1) Yes but with but with a big why would you. The point of a NAS is that its always available, having it sleep would mean you waiting for the entire boot up before you can access it. To do it at all you need a router that support Wake On Lan and you would have to manually open the routers interface and send the WoL packet to get it to wake up.

thing is that i would only access it like once or twice a month, or even less, so it wouldnt be efficient to have it on all the time

i dont mind having to wait like 1 minute for it to boot when i click it, that's acceptable for my use case as it's primarily used as an archive, not frequent access.

having to boot it up manually every time i want to access it is a pain, but if i have to then i guess i have no choice

 

47 minutes ago, mahyar said:

2: if in raid not recommended

26 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

2) In the same Array, no however you can create as many arrays as you need.

does different array appear as 1 drive? that's all that matters to me

 

48 minutes ago, mahyar said:

3:6 is okay

27 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

3) Which suits your needs best is something only you can decide.

afaik, 6 have a higher write penalty but i can lose up to 2 drives at once, which is pretty rare for less than 10 drive array, i would assume. i think 6 is fine, since it's just losing 1 more hard disk worth of space compared to 5, and put my mind at ease.

 

50 minutes ago, mahyar said:

4:its better to have it

29 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

4) Depends on what you run. Something like DSM (you can run it through Xpenology on any PC) or FreeNas won't require it at all since they are designed to use software RAID. If you plan to run Windows then absolutely yes, Storage Spaces is pretty not good.

hmm... im not too sure what im running, what do you think suits my needs the best? that PC wont be doing much so i dont mind if the cpu is being used to calculate RAID stuffs or smth

what are the solutions?

what are the pros and cons or each solution?

im really at a lost regarding this. (i dont even know what's DSM or xpenology lol, and only heard of FreeNAS)

 

52 minutes ago, mahyar said:

5:you can its easy

31 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

5) Yep, thats the point. It would create an SMB Share which you map to File Explorer.

neato

 

53 minutes ago, mahyar said:

6:sorry idk about that

32 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

6) You mean remote access to the web interface or remote access to file storage? The first is very simple, the second is possible but not recommended since your files will be open for anyone on the internet to access.

yes this is a valid concern, and i guess even the best security can be hacked, huh

what can i do in the web interface btw?

[tikker]

3 hours ago, Moonzy said:

currently i have some spare PC parts lying around, only need the drives and an enclosure

It's not free, but I have been using unRAID for a while now after reassinging my old pc to NAS duties. It doesn't use RAID in the traditional sense of striping data across drives, but still allows e.g single or dual parity drives akin to RAID 5 or 6. I don't know about remote access as I only use it locally for movies and occasional backups.

 

All other boxes it ticks:

3 hours ago, Moonzy said:

1) is it possible for my NAS to go to sleep when im not accessing it after 30 minute, and resume when i access it? having it constantly draw idle power is not great, but sleep power draw is fine

There's a plugin available that spins down the drives and makes it go to sleep once it is idle for X minutes. In my case idle means no network activity above a certain spee (i.e. watching something). It won't wake up on access, but I just hit the power button or send a WOL packet from my phone to wake it up (check if your motherboard supports it though).

3 hours ago, Moonzy said:

2) can i mix 2TB drives with higher capacity drives in the future? HDD with SSD? (if SSD becomes cheaper than HDD in the future)

unRAID can mix drive sizes and use them to their full extent as it doesn't stripe data but fills up each drive on its own. The only constraint is that the parity drive must be as large or larger than the largest data drive. This was the biggest pro for me, as I had a bunch of 2, 3 and 4 TB drives laying around that would've otherwise gone to waste. It also makes it easy to grow the array.

3 hours ago, Moonzy said:

3) raid 5 or 6? not storing too important stuffs but i dont want to lose it, leaning towards raid 6

Up to you I guess. I'm at 5 now; may switch to 6 once it grows beyond a certain size.

3 hours ago, Moonzy said:

4) raid card? or nah?

No personal experience with hardware RAID. unRAID is all software.

3 hours ago, Moonzy said:

5) would like to access it like i would a local disk, through file explorer

You setup shares, which can then be accessed as a network drive from other computers.

[Moonzy]

7 minutes ago, tikker said:

It's not free, but I have been using unRAID

from what u described it, sounds neat

i'll keep this software in mind if nothing is better than it

10 minutes ago, tikker said:

There's a plugin available that spins down the drives and makes it go to sleep once it is idle for X minutes. In my case idle means no network activity above a certain spee (i.e. watching something). It won't wake up on access, but I just hit the power button or send a WOL packet from my phone to wake it up.

WOL packet from phone hmm... hope it's not too complicated

11 minutes ago, tikker said:

unRAID can mix drive sizes and use them to their full extent as doesn't stripe data. The only constraint is that the parity drive must be as large or larger than the largest data drive. This was the biggest pro for me, as I had a bunch of 2, 3 and 4 TB drives laying around that would've otherwise gone to waste. It also makes it easy to grow the array.

hmm... so it'll auto assign my files to the drives right? say if i have a 300gb file while the drive has 150gb left, it'll put it on a new drive

and if one drive failed beyond the available drives, i only lose what's on the drive yes? think i've heard of this before

12 minutes ago, tikker said:

unRAID is all software.

yea would prefer softwar raid, raid cards arent cheap

[Master Disaster]

2 hours ago, Moonzy said:

thing is that i would only access it like once or twice a month, or even less, so it wouldnt be efficient to have it on all the time

i dont mind having to wait like 1 minute for it to boot when i click it, that's acceptable for my use case as it's primarily used as an archive, not frequent access.

having to boot it up manually every time i want to access it is a pain, but if i have to then i guess i have no choice

 

does different array appear as 1 drive? that's all that matters to me

 

afaik, 6 have a higher write penalty but i can lose up to 2 drives at once, which is pretty rare for less than 10 drive array, i would assume. i think 6 is fine, since it's just losing 1 more hard disk worth of space compared to 5, and put my mind at ease.

 

hmm... im not too sure what im running, what do you think suits my needs the best? that PC wont be doing much so i dont mind if the cpu is being used to calculate RAID stuffs or smth

what are the solutions?

what are the pros and cons or each solution?

im really at a lost regarding this. (i dont even know what's DSM or xpenology lol, and only heard of FreeNAS)

 

neato

 

yes this is a valid concern, and i guess even the best security can be hacked, huh

what can i do in the web interface btw?

1) In that case you could very easily shut it down and boot it back up as needed though WoL would also handle booting it up.

 

2) No, different arrays are different volumes but as suggested above, UnRAID has the ability to handle drives in the way you need.

 

3) That sounds fine

 

4) There's way to many options for me to list all the pros & cons (plus I couldn't list them all anyway) but you can split them up into groups to make it easier to digest.

 

Operating Systems - Your full fat OS install. Windows & Linux can both do folder sharing.

Dedicated NAS OSes - OSes tailored for use on a NAS. DSM, FreeNAS, OMV, UnRAID (theres plenty more but these are the most common).

 

Going down the full OS route gives you more options for things you can do with the NAS since if its running Linux or Windows you can run anything these OSes also run but it does also make initial setup and deployment more complicated.

 

From what you've said using a NAS OS would be the better choice. Hit YouTube and watch some videos on what each can (and importantly cannot do).

 

DSM is Disk Station Manager. Its a custom OS built by Synology for use on their NASes. Its not officially supported to run it on anything other than a Synology NAS however Xpenology is a custom Linux Kernel that allows you to install & run DSM on any PC. Its not without its own issues though, DSM is incredibly easy to use and is rock solid as a platform but running Xpenology means you cannot upgrade to a new DSM version until its verified as OK.

 

Given your requirement to need to drop HDDs of any size in I'd suggest looking at UnRAID or DSM as I know both of these support that feature. I've never used FreeNAS so cannot comment on that and last time I ran OMV it did not support this at all.

 

6) The web interface is how you'll control your NAS (unless you run a full OS in which case you'll use RDP or SSH). Its what you'll use to setup the RAID, create volumes, create folders on the volumes, create shares, manage permissions for folder access rights, install plugins, install updates etc etc. Think of it like Linux running inside of a Web Browser. This is where DSM really shines for me, its user interface is MILES ahead of anything else that's available. It really is like having an operating system running in your browser.

 

 

[Moonzy]

6 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Windows you can run anything these OSes also run but it does also make initial setup and deployment more complicated.

how complicated would it be? if it's windows then i could do other things on it as well such as host game servers and what not, then it can stay on

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, Moonzy said:

how complicated would it be? if it's windows then i could do other things on it as well such as host game servers and what not, then it can stay on

Windows is not to bad at all, as long as you run 10 Pro or Server you can use remote desktop to set everything up. I'm not 100% sure if Storage Spaces supports hybrid raid though so you might not be able to drop any size drive into the pool. The man who will know for sure is @leadeater

[leadeater]

54 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

I'm not 100% sure if Storage Spaces supports hybrid raid though so you might not be able to drop any size drive into the pool. The man who will know for sure is @leadeater

Yes it does but it there are considerations you need to make around it. You might not be able to use all of the disk capacity added when adding a disk as you cannot violate placement and resiliency rules for existing virtual disks in the pool. When you create a virtual disk, and not via PowerShell, it picks default values based on the current disks in the pool which cannot be changed and it's those default parameters that effect how much capacity the virtual disk can actually use in the pool.

 

Basically you can add as many of and of any size in to the pool from the start and ongoing but you may not be able to create a single virtual disk that uses 100% of the capacity, the good news is the more disks in the pool the higher the percentage of capacity a single virtual disk will be able to use because there is more placement chunks that can be used and spread across the disks to ensure that resiliency you picked.

 

The best thing I can advise is to go in to Disk Manager and create a bunch of VHDX virtual disks then add those in to a Storage Pool and actually try it out and see the affects of using different size disks and how it affects expanding virtual disks. Start with like two 10GB disks, create the pool and a virtual disk then create a new 20GB disk and add it to the pool then see how large you can actually expand the current virtual disk. Then add a 5GB disk, then add another 10GB disk. Then add a 100GB disk and notice how little capacity you can use of it until you add another 100GB disk or enough extra disks to balance the data across the pool. Think of it like a set of scales but each disk is a leaver off the pivot point, tip the scales too much and it hit the floor that deficit is capacity you cannot use until you can add counter balance.

 

Do note however you can create a new virtual disk and use the capacity in the pool that another virtual disk may not be able to use.

 

I've made it sound more complicated than it actually is, really it's just plug and play and if you do hit a situation where you can't fully expand your virtual disk to the full size after adding a new disk you will be able to use the capacity later when you add another disk, sometimes you get bigger boost in usable space than the size of the disk you add in those situations.

[Moonzy]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I've made it sound more complicated than it actually is

god bless my potato brain trying to comprehend that

but from what i understand, it's possible

1) try to have more than 1 of the largest capacity drive due to the nature of such method

2) more drives = more efficient

 

58 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

as long as you run 10 Pro

and i'll need win 10 pro for this?

[Master Disaster]

16 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

god bless my potato brain trying to comprehend that

but from what i understand, it's possible

1) try to have more than 1 of the largest capacity drive due to the nature of such method

2) more drives = more efficient

 

and i'll need win 10 pro for this?

You'll want either 10 Pro or Server. Home doesn't allow remote connections so you would need a monitor connected to the NAS to be able to control it. With Pro or Server you can fire up RDC on any Windows PC or even an RDC Client for Linux/macOS and connect as though you are sat in front of it.

[Moonzy]

Just now, Master Disaster said:

you would need a monitor connected to the NAS to be able to control it.

hmm... teamviewer?

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, Moonzy said:

hmm... teamviewer?

Yeah I suppose but since you can pick up a 10 Pro key for less than $5 these days there would be no real reason to use Home on your server, you might run into other issues since Home has a lot of networking stuff removed.

[Moonzy]

Just now, Master Disaster said:

you can pick up a 10 Pro key for less than $5 these days

i did not know that... huh...

what are the minimum spec you would reckon for these type of project

cpu, ram etc

[Master Disaster]

32 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

i did not know that... huh...

what are the minimum spec you would reckon for these type of project

cpu, ram etc

For a file server, literally what ever you have. I ran a NAS on a Ras Pi for over 12 months.

 

What are the components you have already?

[tikker]

2 hours ago, Moonzy said:

WOL packet from phone hmm... hope it's not too complicated

It was new for me as well. I just downloaded a wake-on-lan app, entered the IP and MAC address, and it worked for me. Of course only as long as the phone is on the local wifi. Not sure how to do this remotely.

2 hours ago, Moonzy said:

hmm... so it'll auto assign my files to the drives right? say if i have a 300gb file while the drive has 150gb left, it'll put it on a new drive

and if one drive failed beyond the available drives, i only lose what's on the drive yes? think i've heard of this before

Yeah. You create a share and assign all the disks you want to that share. Externally it'll just look like one big folder. and under the hood it'll take care of placing your files. You may want to tune what scheme you want it to use (e.g. always pick the drive with the most space or fill up drives in order) and how it's allowed to split folders.

 

Also indeed if you lose more data drives than parity drives you only lose what is on those specific drives instead of the entire array.

[Moonzy]

3 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

For a file server, literally what ever you have. I ran a NAS on a Ras Pi for over 12 months.

 

What are the components you have already?

some core 2 quad, core 2 duo, or i5 6600

or is it possible to use the NAS as a normal PC? then idm making my 3900x rig a NAS for my other computers

[Master Disaster]

5 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

some core 2 quad, core 2 duo, or i5 6600

or is it possible to use the NAS as a normal PC? then idm making my 3900x rig a NAS for my other computers

i5 6600 is more than enough for a simple storage server.

 

No LOL, you want to keep the 3900X as your main PC. Not only is that way overkill for a NAS but it makes no sense to use a smart car as your main rig and have the F1 car sat in a closet doing nothing 99% of the time.

[Moonzy]

58 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Not only is that way overkill for a NAS but it makes no sense to use a smart car as your main rig and have the F1 car sat in a closet doing nothing 99% of the time.

hahahhaha yea  (-games on my i5 more than my desktop because bed is more comfortable-)

 

but still, can it be used as a normal PC or?

[Jarsky]

On 7/26/2020 at 8:52 PM, Moonzy said:

1) is it possible for my NAS to go to sleep when im not accessing it after 30 minute, and resume when i access it? having it constantly draw idle power is not great, but sleep power draw is fine

Using something like UnRAID, this is where it shines. While you cant sleep the system; the disks that are idle can go to sleep. 

Especially if you use their high-water configuration, which fills a disk to a predetermined amount 1 at a time (e.g 50%), it means files that are common to a certain time period of being written, are on the same disk. 

 

Quote

2) can i mix 2TB drives with higher capacity drives in the future? HDD with SSD? (if SSD becomes cheaper than HDD in the future)

Depends on the software you use, but this is a feature of UnRAID (Your largest disk always needs to be parity though)

 

Quote

3) raid 5 or 6? not storing too important stuffs but i dont want to lose it, leaning towards raid 6

RAID5 is cheaper and in cases of writing data its slightly faster. RAID6 is a bit more expensive giving up 1 extra disk, but its considerably safer. 

 

Quote

4) raid card? or nah?

Depends...hardware RAID is more flexible than some software solutions like ZFS, and is generally one of the fastest.

For most home users though software is better. 

 

Quote

5) would like to access it like i would a local disk, through file explorer

That's what SMB/CIFS protocol is for. Windows sharing protocol. 

Quote

 

6) remote access thru DDNS service maybe? how would that work? (ie what's the interface i can expect to be like)

You don't generally want your NAS to be internet facing. If you want to be able to access shares from the internet you're best to use dockers such as ownCloud or NextCloud, or setup a VPN...or setup SFTP....or a combination of the more secure internet services. 

 

Quote

any tips and advice? anything i should know?

Personally i'd try to get a motherboard or network card that supports Gbit...10MB/s can be very slow for transsferring files locally...especially if you want to run Plex or something on there, which could use a couple MB/s in speed.

Check out UnRAID, I think it might tick all the boxes for what you're after. 

[Dravinian]

If you access it once or twice a month, why are you bothering with a NAS at all?  Why not just have a back-up system that you can access.

 

A NAS is Network Attached Storage, the whole point of it is that it is always there for you to access on the Network, but for your use case, that doesn't really seem necessary.

 

You can buy an 8tb USB external drive for £200 in the UK, works out to be about $250 dollars or so, plug it in once a month when you need it.

 

Why spend all that money on building a NAS and running a NAS, when all you want is extra storage to dump some files you rarely use.

 

Bear in mind in the UK, a 2tb HDD is £50 best price, so 4 of them is £200 anyway.

[Dravinian]

You could buy two of these in the UK for roughly £200.

 

That would give you a total of 10tb of storage, or simply a back-up of your back-up with zero running costs...

 

It is a 5tb USB external HDD on USB 3.0 make your own Raid

 

https://www.ebuyer.com/882371-seagate-backup-plus-5tb-black-portable-hard-drive-sthp5000400

[Moonzy]

2 hours ago, Dravinian said:

Why not just have a back-up system that you can access.

right now i have 3TB+ of data im backing up

and i dont have redundancy, so i made 4 copies of it in various places/drives

if i have redundancy of raid 6, i would only need 2 copies, 1 in the NAS and 1 somewhere far away in case fire or something burns my house down

also, 2TB drives are the best bang for the buck for now where im at... for god knows why reasons

i could get 3x 2TB for 1x 4TB drive

 

but yes that's a good point, i might build a NAS if it's not too complicated, i might not

or maybe just run a raid 6 storage on one of my rigs

 

1 hour ago, Dravinian said:

It is a 5tb USB external HDD on USB 3.0 make your own Raid

is it a good idea to raid external drives?

[Dravinian]

4 hours ago, Moonzy said:

right now i have 3TB+ of data im backing up

and i dont have redundancy, so i made 4 copies of it in various places/drives

if i have redundancy of raid 6, i would only need 2 copies, 1 in the NAS and 1 somewhere far away in case fire or something burns my house down

also, 2TB drives are the best bang for the buck for now where im at... for god knows why reasons

i could get 3x 2TB for 1x 4TB drive

 

but yes that's a good point, i might build a NAS if it's not too complicated, i might not

or maybe just run a raid 6 storage on one of my rigs

 

is it a good idea to raid external drives?

No, what I meant was you could buy 2 for £200, which is the same as it would cost you to buy all those hard drives, and then copy the data to each of them.

 

That is what raid is, it gives you redundancy, so that if 1 drive fails, you still have all the data.  Here you would have two copies of the data, so if 1 drive fails, you would still have all the data....so it was a way of saying, create your own raid.

 

These drives have sync abilities, so you just need to plug them in and they will sync to folders that you choose, so you don't have to manually back up your files every time, just plug one drive in, let it back itself up, then plug in the other one. Job done.