Help with my first NAS

[Milzia]

Hi, everyone. I'm brand new here, but I need some help. I'm going to be building a new pc soon to replace my current one and get up to date. I want to turn this current pc into a NAS so that I can keep all my music, movies, etc. in one place as I have several different computers that I might be using at any point. I just need help learning where to start. Most of the tutorials I found either start with server grade hardware, or skip a lot of important details like which OS they would suggest, how to setup your RAID software, or any of the other little details that a beginner in this space like myself wouldn't inherently know. What would you folks suggest?

[SupaKomputa]

What's you current PC?

It may be worth it if you can change the CPU to the lowest grade possible for the power consumption.

For the OS, can be anything, including windows 10.

All you need to do is enable local network sharing, assign user access and folder access.

RAID is not required, as your files is not critical and can be easily redeployed.

[Milzia]

On 9/14/2020 at 2:25 AM, SupaKomputa said:

What's you current PC?

It may be worth it if you can change the CPU to the lowest grade possible for the power consumption.

For the OS, can be anything, including windows 10.

All you need to do is enable local network sharing, assign user access and folder access.

RAID is not required, as your files is not critical and can be easily redeployed.

I have a Ryzen Threadripper 1900x, Aorus x300 Gaming 7, 16 gbs of 3300 speed memory, and an RTX 2070 running Windows 10. It boots off of a SATA M.2 drive with hard drives for larger storage.

 

EDIT: it also has gigabit ethernet on the motherboard.

[SupaKomputa]

Threadripper for a NAS? how many people using it? 1000?

[Milzia]

Mostly just me, maybe my roommate once in a blue moon, but that's it. I just have a lot of computers so I want like a central hub that I can use to access my movies and music from any of them around the apartment. Maybe a small steam library that can hold some of the lighter games I play, but all in all nothing crazy.

[heimdali]

On 9/14/2020 at 8:18 AM, Milzia said:

[...]

Most of the tutorials I found either start with server grade hardware, or skip a lot of important details like which OS they would suggest, how to setup your RAID software, or any of the other little details that a beginner in this space like myself wouldn't inherently know. What would you folks suggest?

Here's some stuff to get you started:

 

https://getfedora.org/en/server/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

https://www.samba.org/

 

Always use redundancy (RAID) for everything.  Not using it is not worthwhile the hassle of not using it.  Always have recent backups.

 

Never run a computer without an UPS (unless it's a laptop with a working battery) and monitor the UPS.  The surge protection is also a good idea to use.

 

I don't know if this is up to date: https://tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/index.html

 

This is up to date: scroll down to 'System Administration': https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/

 

A lot of what applies to RHEL applies to Fedora.  If you use Centos, basically all the documentation applies.  Fedora has its own documentation but its documentation kinda sucks.

 

If you want reliability and certain features, there is a lot to be said for server hardware.

 

[Milzia]

Awesome! I'll check those out and try to go from there. Thank you very much!

[remakethegame]

Absolutely agreed with the heimdali. Linux provides you with a big variety of options. At first glance, it may seem a bit challenging to setup it, but it would provide you with a big variety of options on how to setup your NAS. CentOS/Fedora do the job perfectly fine. With Linux you can choose what storage protocol will share your data. NFS is built-in if you are looking at SMB - install Samba, if iSCSI - tcmu-runner (open-iscsi). 

 

If you are looking to use Windows box as the NAS you can only setup SMB in Desktop version of Windows. But with Windows server, you can setup NFS, SMB and iSCSI using built-in tools or any third party. 

 

Regarding the storage and RAID. With Linux, you are free to use LVM, MDRAID (MDADM), ZFS. They are all different, MDRAID is something that is considered as the default one. With Windows, you are forced to use either 3rd party services or Windows Storage Spaces. 

For the archival storage, you can use Parity RAID (RAID-5) that allows you to sustain a single disk failure. If you require more performance and does not require any redundancy - stripe (RAID-0) is your choice. If you need both, then go with RAID-10. Here is a helpful article about the RAID levels and RAID itself - https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/raid-today

Wish you best of luck!