October 2020 NAS Build v. FrankenNAS vs Ol' Faithful

[semi-lol]

A newbie around here, I’d like to say hello.

 

 

TL;DR - need small NAS recco with some speed, but no VMs.

 

 

I have been trying to figure out what direction to go for a NAS for the past couple months and frankly, I’m overloaded.

 

My needs are pretty basic compared to everything ya’ll do.
I need to have high data protection and the ability to edit RAW photos and low bitrate video (100MB/s) directly off my NAS.
I have been using a QNAP for 10 years and it’s relatively ok, but I am starting to worry about bitrot. Also, the interfaces on it are just slow/old (sata2, 1gbe NIC).

 

I do have some parts I can reuse:

• 2 x 2 TB sata3 SSDs
• 2 x 1TB m.2 NVME
• 10Gbe switch

I don’t have a lot of data, < 10TB, and frankly, some will get reduced when I deduplicate.
Originally I was going to use my old NUC skull canyon with the m.2 drives and usb 3.0 external since I just have it laying around, but I’ve realized that was not only sacrilegious, but not a good idea for integrity. Though, I can be convinced otherwise, as I could add a 2.5Gbe NIC via TB…

 

Leaning towards ZFS and TrueNAS (though have seen some bugs with file shares on v12)

or

A prebuild with QNAP w ZFS / Synology w btrfs

 

ECC vs non RAM?

I’d like to keep power usage down and I don’t have use for VMs right now (have a pi running pi-hole, but can consolidate if ya’ll think it’s best), so I don’t need high specs.

 

Frankly, a 2 bay with NVME slots and 10GBE NIC would probably work but I can’t find one.

At the end of the day, I don’t want to have to baby this thing, just for it to run, but I don’t have a lot of $ or space to throw at it. Something that is reliable, usable for local editing and enables me to setup an offsite rsync/rclone or the likes to back blaze or similar.

 

Thanks in advance if you made it this far!
~semi

 

[Pixel5]

10 gig NIC and low number of bays does basically not exist at all, you may be able to find something with 2.5G or 5G but even that is pretty rare.

 

Overall i would always recommend doing work locally and using a NAS only as a data grave, for that a pre made solution from Synology is always a good choice.

[mariushm]

You could buy a 1U-2U server, add a 10g card and a nvme - pci-e adapter card and you're good to go.  It will be somewhat noisy though. 

 

Here's an example, they sell for 100$ + shipping : https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1818147

 

Pick one with at least two pci-e x8 slots, ideally 3 (one for a pci-e 10g card, one for a pci-e nvme adapter card to put at least one ssd) and you're good to go.

 

 

[semi-lol]

8 hours ago, mariushm said:

You could buy a 1U-2U server, add a 10g card and a nvme - pci-e adapter card and you're good to go.  It will be somewhat noisy though. 

 

Here's an example, they sell for 100$ + shipping : https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1818147

 

Pick one with at least two pci-e x8 slots, ideally 3 (one for a pci-e 10g card, one for a pci-e nvme adapter card to put at least one ssd) and you're good to go.

 

 

Thanks. Though this makes a lot of sense, I think the size / power / noise would be a problem would be an issue for my environment. 

 

9 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

10 gig NIC and low number of bays does basically not exist at all, you may be able to find something with 2.5G or 5G but even that is pretty rare.

 

Overall i would always recommend doing work locally and using a NAS only as a data grave, for that a pre made solution from Synology is always a good choice.

 

Yea, seems strange. I guess only people with heavy 4K+ video editing want 10gbe.

 

Curious why you suggest Synology vs QNAP. I'm not partial to either (only experience with an old QNAP).

 

 

[Pixel5]

14 hours ago, semi-lol said:

 

 

Curious why you suggest Synology vs QNAP. I'm not partial to either (only experience with an old QNAP).

 

i am personally using synology for some years now and have compared the systems before i have gone for Synology.

back then QNAP used to offer more performance usually in terms of CPU but Synology undoubtedly has the better software.

 

Synology still has the software advantage and the perfromance gap basically does not exist anymore for normal consumer systems.

QNAP seems to be the better choice if you want a system that has an HDMI port and can be directly connected to your TV for media consumption but thats about the only advantage i could find till now.

 

Personally im using a Synology 918+ and the big advantage for me was that it has 4 bays and also two extra slots for SDD Cache before this model came out SSD Cache was only possible by blocking some of your normal bays with SSD´s

[semi-lol]

20 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

i am personally using synology for some years now and have compared the systems before i have gone for Synology.

back then QNAP used to offer more performance usually in terms of CPU but Synology undoubtedly has the better software.

 

Synology still has the software advantage and the perfromance gap basically does not exist anymore for normal consumer systems.

QNAP seems to be the better choice if you want a system that has an HDMI port and can be directly connected to your TV for media consumption but thats about the only advantage i could find till now.

 

Personally im using a Synology 918+ and the big advantage for me was that it has 4 bays and also two extra slots for SDD Cache before this model came out SSD Cache was only possible by blocking some of your normal bays with SSD´s

 

Cool, thanks. Yea, a NVME cache would be very beneficial. 

Guess I'll wait for something to go on sale.