DIY NAS

[leonidasnp]

Hi guys. 

 

I want to build a small server or NAS for my father's bussines. I talked to my professor, he suggested using WD Red Pro HDDs and FreeNAS software. To be perfectly honest, I know nothing about this and I need some help.

All I know is what my father would like. The main idea is to have storage space that would be in office and can be accessed remotely at any time from anywhere. Also, it would need to back up 5 or more PC's as frequently as possible. Professor told me about some technique that takes a "screenshot" every minute and does backup only for data that have been changed in past period. If possible, it should be safe since there is delicate data. We don't need like 100TB, we don't have that much data. Now we use QNAP NAS and we are not quite happy with it. 

 

Please don't judge me, I'm mechanical engineer, I don't quite undersant that kind of stuff...

 

P.S. We would use two disks mirrored for every case

[Drama Lama]

25 minutes ago, leonidasnp said:

NAS for my father's bussines.

Honestly in that case I‘d go with a prebuilt because in a business you probably want to work with your NAS not on your NAS ( what I mean is that in a professional environment you want something that is reliable, easy to set up and maintain ) don’t get me wrong DIY NAS solution can be cool and fun projects where you learn a lot but In your case I‘d go with a prebuilt NAS solution.

 

[shoutingsteve]

Yes, FreeNas is awesome.  I use it and love it.  The method he is refering to is called "snapshots".  And I think that every minute is too often.  Every hour is still likely too often. I do nightly snapshots, and i keep the most recent 14 of each volume.  See below for the exact parameters.  You will see that is it labeled as every hour, but the active window is only 15 minutes a day.

 

 

Regarding hardware, I recommend that you do redundancy +2.  It is called ZFS RAIDZ2.  It allows for one drive to fail and then it isn't so risky during rebuilding the array (when suddenly all drives are working at 100% for 3 straight days).

I also recommend that you use all avaible SATA slots on the board for storage drives and a USB drive for the boot volume, as it only has to be read from once in a while and there is no other activity on the boot drive while the OS is running.  And make all your drives the same size, but different brands and models.  Why? it spreads out the drive failures.  WD red is a goo NAS drive, but you should diversify.

OH! and obviously hardwire your LAN connection for it.

[leonidasnp]

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

can I bother you for a minute more to get your oppinion on the setup I plan to build:

 

-motherboard: Gigabyte H310N 2.0

-processor: Intel Core i9-9900KF

-RAM: Samsung 32GB DDR4-3200 2Rx4 LP ECC RDIMM M393A4K40DB3-CWE

-memory for OS: SSD 128GB SAM PM881 M.2 SATA

-HDD: WD Red Pro 6TB
           Toshiba N300 6TB

 

I don't know if I need any more components for it, please let me know if I'm right.

 

And I belive that the rest of the job is installing OS and setting it up by my preferences??

[Nick7]

That will not work.

First, that CPU is waaay overkill for NAS.

Second, you put Registered RAM, which will not work in standard motherboards and standard CPU's. That RAM is meant for servers.

Also, for OS, you don't need SSD. Any HDD will do. Literally, any HDD.

And for data - you want same disks. The more, the merrier. If you put 2x6TB, that will be 6TB usable space since you want redundancy.

 

All in all, my sincere advice is get prebuilt NAS, like Qnap or Synology as you don't have any experience in computers, and doing it this way is just too much for you atm, especially since it will be used for business.

If you can choose to do it cheap or well, choose well.

[MG2R]

As much as I am all for learning and experimenting, Get a Synology. Their systems are rather foolproof, efficient, and cost effective. Figure out how much storage you need, then make sure you get a system that supports that many drives + one or two for redundancy. 
 

Play around with setting it up the way you want, learn about the cloud-like storage options, backups, VPNs. Synology provides you with a safe platform to learn these things with minimal chance of losing data if you follow the manual. 
 

Then learn about hardware outside of the business. It’s clear you don’t have the expertise you need to guarantee data protection... yet. That’s ok. Now is the perfect time to learn. In the mean time pay for Synology’s expertise in NAS devices.
 

Last thing: think about backups! RAID is NOT a backup. Use redundant storage for business continuity and also back up everything to an offsite location for data protection. Encrypt your backups. Use snapshotting to provide point-in-time recovery. I like using Borg Backup, but there’s many tools out there

[leonidasnp]

On 2/24/2021 at 12:59 PM, Nick7 said:

That will not work.

First, that CPU is waaay overkill for NAS.

Second, you put Registered RAM, which will not work in standard motherboards and standard CPU's. That RAM is meant for servers.

Also, for OS, you don't need SSD. Any HDD will do. Literally, any HDD.

And for data - you want same disks. The more, the merrier. If you put 2x6TB, that will be 6TB usable space since you want redundancy.

 

All in all, my sincere advice is get prebuilt NAS, like Qnap or Synology as you don't have any experience in computers, and doing it this way is just too much for you atm, especially since it will be used for business.

If you can choose to do it cheap or well, choose well.

We now have Qnap and it does not work for us at all. I won't be building the server myself, I just wanted to get some reference here so I could understand what and how, regarding building it, my professor will help me out with setting it up, I wanted second oppinion from world wide cre. Thank you for your comment, much appreciated.

 

On 2/24/2021 at 10:56 PM, MG2R said:

As much as I am all for learning and experimenting, Get a Synology. Their systems are rather foolproof, efficient, and cost effective. Figure out how much storage you need, then make sure you get a system that supports that many drives + one or two for redundancy. 
 

Play around with setting it up the way you want, learn about the cloud-like storage options, backups, VPNs. Synology provides you with a safe platform to learn these things with minimal chance of losing data if you follow the manual. 
 

Then learn about hardware outside of the business. It’s clear you don’t have the expertise you need to guarantee data protection... yet. That’s ok. Now is the perfect time to learn. In the mean time pay for Synology’s expertise in NAS devices.
 

Last thing: think about backups! RAID is NOT a backup. Use redundant storage for business continuity and also back up everything to an offsite location for data protection. Encrypt your backups. Use snapshotting to provide point-in-time recovery. I like using Borg Backup, but there’s many tools out there

Do you think I might have more luck with Synology compared to Qnap? does it work outside of the US? We are based in Europe. 

 

My main goal is here:
1: Have a server that can be used simultaneously by 5 PCs (for now). Not only from the office but also from home due to unpredictability (Covid stuff....) every pc has its own 1TB HDD that I'd like to be available to other PCs at any time since multiple guys work on the same project. 
2: Have a "snapshot" taken quite frequently to avoid any data loss due to crashes. We don't have them often, but when we do, it's a mess, and losing 5 hours of worktime is a problem. 
3: Have the server copied to the cloud (open drive or something like that) at the end of the day
4: Backup at the end of every week. backup would be done to separate HDD. Now, this is quite a reach but I need to have it since there were quite a few hacker attacks in the business, one of my PCs was hit. So basically, I would like to have an external HDD that would be disconnected from everything, but once I connect it to the server by cable, it starts the automatic backup. once it is done, it should be disconnected and stored in a closet or somewhere else. 

 

I was not aware of Synology, but if I can use it as mentioned above, I would avoid building my own server. 

[Nick7]

13 minutes ago, leonidasnp said:

1: Have a server that can be used simultaneously by 5 PCs (for now). Not only from the office but also from home due to unpredictability (Covid stuff....) every pc has its own 1TB HDD that I'd like to be available to other PCs at any time since multiple guys work on the same project. 

What does 'simultaneously 5 PC's' mean in your case? How much I/O are we talking about? Is it constant I/O from all 5 PC's?

14 minutes ago, leonidasnp said:

2: Have a "snapshot" taken quite frequently to avoid any data loss due to crashes. We don't have them often, but when we do, it's a mess, and losing 5 hours of worktime is a problem. 

In case of power loss on a PC, snapshot will not help you. Snapshot is just 'state of disk at time XYZ'. It does help in case you erase something by mistake or similar. It does not help with power loss situations.

 

16 minutes ago, leonidasnp said:

We now have Qnap and it does not work for us at all.

Can you specify a bit more what is the issue with Qnap?
Missing functionality? Performance? Something else?

[leonidasnp]

40 minutes ago, Nick7 said:

What does 'simultaneously 5 PC's' mean in your case? How much I/O are we talking about? Is it constant I/O from all 5 PC's?

In case of power loss on a PC, snapshot will not help you. Snapshot is just 'state of disk at time XYZ'. It does help in case you erase something by mistake or similar. It does not help with power loss situations.

 

Can you specify a bit more what is the issue with Qnap?
Missing functionality? Performance? Something else?

 

Three PCs work at the same time, some of the software do not support working on the document at the same time. So any changes made on one pc should be available to all the users as soon as it's saved. 

 

We dont have power crashes, we use UPS's, but recently, one software on one PC crashed few times so we lost like 8 hours of work. Does a snapshot help with that? 

 

Missing functionality mostly, losing connection while away, can't access some data... 

[Nick7]

1 hour ago, leonidasnp said:

Three PCs work at the same time, some of the software do not support working on the document at the same time. So any changes made on one pc should be available to all the users as soon as it's saved. 

That does not mean much. Is there constant I/O there? Does it just sporadically check some config file?

It's huge difference if you have like just some small file/config accessed or really high I/O.

You could have 100 PC's connected, and they do less I/O than one PC who does like video editing or something similar.

1 hour ago, leonidasnp said:

We dont have power crashes, we use UPS's, but recently, one software on one PC crashed few times so we lost like 8 hours of work. Does a snapshot help with that? 

Nope, that's problem with PC. If it were on NAS, it wouldn't matter if there are snapshots or not.

 

1 hour ago, leonidasnp said:

Missing functionality mostly, losing connection while away, can't access some data... 

Is Qnap properly configured?

Qnap is quite configurable, and other solutions are not really much better in that regard, if at all.

[Jameszy]

Buy a preconfigured TrueNAS.. then it comes with support & warranty..  (https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/)... The Mini X+.. Enough drive space for expansion, 10g for upgraded network connectivity... configure the drive capacity to whatever you'd like...

 

Hardware and Software are all variants of the same thing....  its the support afterwards that make or break a product and a company.. You can have the greatest product in the world.. someone will find a fault with it and if the support is shit... the whole product suffers..

 

For the "Immediate" backup... you may want to set up "Syncthing" to monitor the work directories on the PC and sync them to the server as soon as it detects a change.. (https://syncthing.net/)

 

access to work server from home can be facilitated thru the use of a VPN.. your companies internet gateway/router may provide that functionality.

 

offsite backup you may want to look into something that backblaze or their competitors offer.. Full weekly backups can be done on tape... or your online cloud storage may include that in their package...