NAS build for multiple uses

[Draconicwraith]

Budget (including currency): 1000 USD

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: PLEX server, backup, and possibly steam/origin library

 

Other details

possible parts list:

CPU - Ryzen 5 5600G

Motherboard - Asus B550-I

RAM - 16GB DDR4 I have a 2 stick set, can't remember latency though if I remember right it's a set of vengeance.

Case - Silverstone CS280

700w gold PS, preferably by Corsair

 

I will be redoing my network at home to hopefully 10GB, so transmission speed shouldn't be TO much of an issue. I mainly play RPGs, so I don't needassive framerates.

 

[RONOTHAN##]

I'd probably swap the CPU and mobo to an i3 10100 and some B560 board. It's lower power and with your workload, you won't use the extra cores. Plus the H.264 encoder on Intel integrated graphics is better than that on AMD. 

[Draconicwraith]

8 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

I'd probably swap the CPU and mobo to an i3 10100 and some B560 board. It's lower power and with your workload, you won't use the extra cores. Plus the H.264 encoder on Intel integrated graphics is better than that on AMD. 

As much as I will sound like a fanboy for saying this, I prefer AMD.  I have always had amazing luck and performance with them compared to intel.  However, I will definately look into this as an option.  My other overall question that I just thought of is which 2.5" drives would be good for this?  I am planning to run the OS off of a nice M.2, then run RAID 5 for my storage.

[RONOTHAN##]

2 minutes ago, Draconicwraith said:

As much as I will sound like a fanboy for saying this, I prefer AMD.  I have always had amazing luck and performance with them compared to intel.  However, I will definately look into this as an option.  My other overall question that I just thought of is which 2.5" drives would be good for this?  I am planning to run the OS off of a nice M.2, then run RAID 5 for my storage.

What OS are you planning on running (TrueNAS, UnRAID, Ubuntu Server, ProxMox, etc.)? They will determine what drives you should use. Also by 2.5" do you mean SSDs as a cache or are you planning on using a bunch of laptop hard drives for your RAID array? Plus, for basically every NAS server OS I know of, you install your OS on a ~32GB drive, and all your services and everything run off the RAID array.

 

Also, Intel is still probably the better option, especially since the 10100 costs under half as much as the 5600G before Black Friday deals. 

[Draconicwraith]

12 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

What OS are you planning on running (TrueNAS, UnRAID, Ubuntu Server, ProxMox, etc.)? They will determine what drives you should use. Also by 2.5" do you mean SSDs as a cache or are you planning on using a bunch of laptop hard drives for your RAID array? Plus, for basically every NAS server OS I know of, you install your OS on a ~32GB drive, and all your services and everything run off the RAID array.

 

Also, Intel is still probably the better option, especially since the 10100 costs under half as much as the 5600G before Black Friday deals. 

THis is my 1st foray into building a NAS, so I know I have a LOT to dig into as far as OS goes.  I am HOPING to get a lot of advice here that is not massively conflicting, lol.  Was planning on using a single SSD as the cache, though I was also planning on uing a 256Gb Crucial M.2 as my boot drive, since I have a few of those lying around unused.  I was thinking about having 2 arrays, sine I will have 8 Hdd bays on my server.  5 for standard drives and 3 for SSDs, Plex/storage/backup and games respectively.

 

If I am to go Intel, I want to get an 11th gen chip which will allow me to use all the nice things in my Motherboard like PCIe 4.0.  However, I am finding it hard to actually FIND an i3 11th gen to buy.

[RONOTHAN##]

3 minutes ago, Draconicwraith said:

THis is my 1st foray into building a NAS, so I know I have a LOT to dig into as far as OS goes.  I am HOPING to get a lot of advice here that is not massively conflicting, lol.  Was planning on using a single SSD as the cache, though I was also planning on uing a 256Gb Crucial M.2 as my boot drive, since I have a few of those lying around unused.  I was thinking about having 2 arrays, sine I will have 8 Hdd bays on my server.  5 for standard drives and 3 for SSDs, Plex/storage/backup and games respectively.

OK. The two options that would work best for this are UnRAID and TrueNAS. Both are very easy to use NAS operating systems.

 

UnRAID allows for more incremental hard drive expansion, so you could get 2 now and add one at a time. It's got a large community and has a ton of plugins you can use by default. The biggest problems with are that the filesystem isn't as bulletproof as ZFS (but for <8 HDD it's fine) and a license costs ~$100. 

 

TrueNAS Core is free, and it uses ZFS by default, largely considered one of, if not the most reliable filesystems available today. It does have a plugin shop for everything you need to use it for, and for setting up the NAS functionality, it has the best setup IMO. The problems with it are that because it uses ZFS, you want to have a ton of RAM installed in the system (my server running ZFS currently has 64GB of RAM installed in it) since ZFS uses RAM as a cache solution (meaning cache SSDs aren't required). It is based off FreeBSD, so while most open source things can work on there, the documentation is a lot scarcer and you'll probably need to have a VM of Ubuntu server if you want to run more than just a Plex server off it. It also doesn't have great hardware passthrough functionality, so using the iGPU for encoding would be a challenge. TrueNAS Scale is Debian-based and fixes a lot of those issues, but it's still in Beta and I wouldn't recommend using it unless you know what you're doing. 

 

UnRAID in particular is designed to run off a USB stick, so if you want to use one of the Crucial M.2s in the server, use it as your cache disk. TrueNAS isn't necessarily designed to run off a USB, but it can do it if you wanna save the M.2 for another project.

[Draconicwraith]

Hm...  I would prefer to run the OS off of a small internal drive, as I have had a lot of issues recently with (unrelated) flash drives failing.  Ultimately I would like to have 2 RAID 5 arrays, one for my game library and one fore plex and storage.  Including the OS, that's 9 drives total.  Would likely start out with 6, as if I remember right RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 disks.

 

With UnRaid, the license fee is a 1 time cost, if I read their site right?  Not a yearly thing?

[brob]

RAID 5 is not a good choice if you have multi terabyte drives. It can literally take days to rebuild an array and during that time another error will result in loss of all array data.

[RONOTHAN##]

Just now, Draconicwraith said:

I have had a lot of issues recently with (unrelated) flash drives failing

I believe UnRAID has the option for you to run the flash drives in a RAID 1, so if one of them fails, you've got a live copy to fail over to and can swap over to that one. With how cheap flash drives are, that's still not a bad option. 

 

1 minute ago, Draconicwraith said:

as if I remember right RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 disks

Well, the way UnRAID works, you select data drives and you select parody drives, so the same array can effectively go from RAID 0 to RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 6. It's not traditional RAID that is used in UnRAID, it's a feature of BtrFS so a single array can have parody while being very easily expandable.

TrueNAS on the other hand, is a bit different. Currently, if you want to expand an array, you need to add in chunks, or "vDevs". If you start out with 3 drives in RAIDz1 (the name for RAID 5 under ZFS), you have to add 3 more drives in RAIDz1 if you ever want more storage in your array, preferably of the same capacity and type. Granted, this is the file system used in the data center for it's fantastic reliability and feature set, so unless you wanna get into the weeds installing it in UnRAID, if you want the most reliable instance, go for TrueNAS. If you want to go from 3 drives to 5 drives, go UnRAID.

11 minutes ago, Draconicwraith said:

With UnRaid, the license fee is a 1 time cost, if I read their site right?  Not a yearly thing?

Yeah it's a 1 time cost. They have a 30(?) day free trial if you wanna give it a shot and see if you like it.

 

One more thing to add, while neither of them thing SMR (cheaper) hard drives are ideal, UnRAID with BtrFS handles them a lot better than TrueNAS and ZFS does, so if you wanna save a buck on the storage, go UnRAID (though that cost difference is probably the same cost as a license)

[Draconicwraith]

I am thinking of going with 2TB drives, since that is the largest capasity I can find for 'standard' drives in a 2.5" format atm.  I currently have 2 4TB drives in my current PLEX computer, but they are to large (physically) to fit in the NAS case.

[Draconicwraith]

Purely out of curiosity, what would be BAD about simply installing win 10/11 on the box and running my PLEX server like I currently do?  Simply use the 'extra' space to install my game libraries to?

[RONOTHAN##]

56 minutes ago, Draconicwraith said:

I am thinking of going with 2TB drives, since that is the largest capasity I can find for 'standard' drives in a 2.5" format atm.  I currently have 2 4TB drives in my current PLEX computer, but they are to large (physically) to fit in the NAS case.

If you are willing to go with another case that supports 3.5" drives, that would be preferred. The 2.5" drives are usually less reliable in my experience, they're a lot slower, and per terabyte they cost a lot more than 3.5" (though still less than SSDs). That case is designed for full SSD arrays, which you don't need for your setup. The Silverstone DS380 is about the same price and supports 3.5" drives, and if you've got space for a long, flat box, this supports 12 3.5" drives and 1 2.5" drives (though the board it comes with doesn't support M.2)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/284139944425?hash=item42280f79e9:g:J2cAAOSwlL5hczaC

Throw some RAM in and install and OS and you're done. It's also got some cool server specific features like IPMI so you can output remotely do everything on the computer.

53 minutes ago, Draconicwraith said:

Purely out of curiosity, what would be BAD about simply installing win 10/11 on the box and running my PLEX server like I currently do?  Simply use the 'extra' space to install my game libraries to?

It's not necessarily bad, it's just not ideal. Windows isn't known for being able to have over a month of uptime like most every Linux server is, and a server isn't doing it's job if it crashes or has to turn off at some point because Windows Update says so. Plus, there'd be a ton of extra things running in the background, so your power bill would feasibly be higher if you're running Windows on the server. The server specific operating systems like TrueNAS and UnRAID are very easy to use, and are managed through a web browser. They might require a slight learning curve, but most people can have one of those up and running in about half an hour. 

 

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