[First NAS Build] Help on NAS Build

[FallenOPhoeniX]

Hi guys, 

 

I need to build a NAS build specific to my case but I don't know how to start: 

My knowledge: 
I have never made a NAS build, I have no Idea what I am doing here but I have built alot of PC's and my knowledge in Linux is simple but I am welling to learn.
My budget:

1800 USD 
My case:
I need a safe storage system . I was thinking of UNRAID, it looks just like just what I need. but in short the NAS system needed will be connected to multiple camera memories cards at once soI will need an interface for all the SDXC cards to be unload all the footage from then the NAS should be connected to multiple PC's that will pull the footage and start rendering it so I believe we will need some good network cards of if anyone have a better idea I am all ears. 
My thinking: 
I was thinking of a motherboard with 8 SATA ports ( ASUS AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus + 5600G + 16gb DDR4 3600Mhz RAM ) and I will fill it with 8 x 6TB Toshiba N300 ( cheapest CMR disk I found) 
and I will install a 1tb NVME (  Western Digital 1TB WD Blue SN570 NVMe ) 
and a Small 256gb SSD for OS to install UNRAID on ( Silicon Power 256GB ) 

My questions: 
1- I don't know if the motherboard PCI lanes can handle all of this 8 SATA + 2 NVME connections or am I overthinking it ? 
2- Will I need a bigger cache SSD Drive if my imported footage is bigger than 1TB ? 
3- Can I get a solution similar to UNRAID but user friendly ? ( I might not be around all the time to fix it if anything happens) 
4- is there a specific powersupply I need for the NAS build ? what should I look for a PSU for such build ? 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Normally Id reccomend plugging the sd cards to the workstations, and copying them to the nas over the network, instead of directly to the nas

 

Id probably go Truenas here. It will have much better performance, and ZFS is better at keeping data safe. Then you can drop the cache ssd too. Id be tempted to start with fewer bigger disks, like start with 4x14tb drives and add more if needed.

 

Id probbly go with the non g part here as those can use ecc, but it probably won't make a difference.

 

3. Id say unrid is pretty user frendly. If you want much more easy to use you probably need a premade system like a synology.

 

4. Nothing specific, any quality psu will work fine here.

[Cavalry Canuck]

1. SATA and PCIe don’t share a bus. NVMe drives eat up PCIe bandwidth, but the SATA HDDs your system will mostly rely on will not.

 

2. You don’t need a cache drive. Having an SSD boot drive, either in NVMe or 2.5” SATA format, is a luxury, not a necessity. The amount of input data doesn’t really matter, so long as your drives can ingest it at the rate you demand. If you have multiple drives connected via SATA, the data transfer rate is basically cumulative. Transferring a TB of data to a bunch of SATA disks takes minutes, not hours.

 

3. I like TRUNAS more than UNRAID.

 

4. Get a PSU from a reputable brand that meets or exceeds the power demands of your system. However, you may want to look into a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). They aren’t something you build into your system. Rather, you plug your system into them, and plug them into your standard home receptacle. A UPS offers some standby power in the event of a power outage, and also serves as a very effective surge protector.

 

 

 

If I may offer a thought:

 

It sounds almost like you want to set up a DVR rather than a NAS. But I am not familiar with Cameras that store and pass on data via SD cards. That said, writing to disk via an SD cache and via a trickle-stream directly from the cameras isn’t all that different. I figure you expect to do a lot of writing to disk, and not as much reading from the disk. You might want to consider HDDs designed specifically for that purpose.

[voyager_]

As much as I support unraid and have two servers running it at home this wouldnt be a good use for it. Unraid is great when speed isn't a main factor is a system usecase. While unraid has some great features its primary claim to fame if you will is UN - Raid. it allows easy expansion and can if the worst occurs data recover is a little more straight forward depending on how the storage was configured since it doesn't split files across the drives like zfs or other raid configs do. (I've had to go done this road with file recovery after a bad storm took out the computer...... not a good week.... those were some bad days/nights/taco bell runs at 2am..... then of course the taco bell runs that follow. - you know what I mean.) While the approach of unraid is great for expansion, add drive - rebuild - BAM - more space - is great for most home users or even small business the read & write speeds SUFFER. Read speeds are limited by individual drives. Write speed though is more complicated, without a cache (why you would do this? I cant say) maybe 40-50mbps depending on the file. This is because it has to calculate parity while writing to the drive. A faster cpu can help, but dont expect to drop an i9 in and be running 300+ to the array, it doesnt scale that way. while writing cpu usage does go up but not alot. With a cache drive you can write as fast as the cache/network can handle as long as you have the space. you would still want these in some sort of array. I run two 500gb samsung ssds in raid 1 through the bios, incase one kicks the bucket. Keep in mind at some point the data on these drives still has to write to the array.

 

TLDR - Unraid - great for smaller use-case or where read/write isn't a key factor. It's great for home backups, running vm, game servers, plex, etc... 

 

TrueNas is going to be your better option for your use-case. You'll get better performance. Downside is storage expansion down the road is more costly/difficult.

 

Also, I would just set up a small ingest workstation for reading from the cards, Even LTT does this. It would also be worth checking the into the motherboard more, many motherboards disable/lose 2 sata ports when using a nvme drive. To connect that many drives i would get an LSI cards. Im running a LSI 9207-8i, there are newer faster options. I dont need/care about that for my use.

 

Please, get a good UPS

 

 

[FallenOPhoeniX]

On 5/12/2022 at 2:42 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Normally Id reccomend plugging the sd cards to the workstations, and copying them to the nas over the network, instead of directly to the nas

 

Id probably go Truenas here. It will have much better performance, and ZFS is better at keeping data safe. Then you can drop the cache ssd too. Id be tempted to start with fewer bigger disks, like start with 4x14tb drives and add more if needed.

 

Id probbly go with the non g part here as those can use ecc, but it probably won't make a difference.

 

3. Id say unrid is pretty user frendly. If you want much more easy to use you probably need a premade system like a synology.

 

4. Nothing specific, any quality psu will work fine here.

First of all I would like to thank you for trying to help me and replying to my question. 

I will look at TrueNas ZFS solution and think about it, my issue is for pre- made solution is the limited number of drives which I know for a fact is going to be a big limitation in the future because we will fill the 14*4 within 2 years max, I wanted something where I can just keep on adding drives. that's why I was thinking of UNRAID with case like FRACTAL DESIGN DEFINE 7 XL. 
Regarding the CPU/ Motherboard / RAM,  should I go with an ECC memory , how important is that ? any suggestion on what should I buy ? I went for X570 for PCI lanes only. 
Can I cut the 5600G down to  AMD Athlon 3000G ? or 2 cores will be too slow for such build ?
For PSU is Thermaltake Smart BM2 750W good for that or should I get a better PSU ? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, FallenOPhoeniX said:

I will look at TrueNas ZFS solution and think about it, my issue is for pre- made solution is the limited number of drives which I know for a fact is going to be a big limitation in the future because we will fill the 14*4 within 2 years max, I wanted something where I can just keep on adding drives. that's why I was thinking of UNRAID with case like FRACTAL DESIGN DEFINE 7 XL. 

You can get the premade nas units with a good amount of bays, or use expansion modules. If you want simple thats the way Id go.

 

With truenas you can have it so that you can add drives in multiples of 4 , so start at 4, then 8 then 12, then 16.

 

The issue I see with unraid is the performance is pretty bad, which won't be great when dealing with high bitrate footage. You basically get the speed of a single hdd.

 

a

3 minutes ago, FallenOPhoeniX said:

Regarding the CPU/ Motherboard / RAM,  should I go with an ECC memory , how important is that ? any suggestion on what should I buy ? I went for X570 for PCI lanes only. 

You might as well go with ecc memory. It won't cost you much more here, and the extra protection is nice.

 

3 minutes ago, FallenOPhoeniX said:

Can I cut the 5600G down to  AMD Athlon 3000G ? or 2 cores will be too slow for such build ?

Since you only have a 1gbe network it seems, the althon will be plenty here. But if you want faster speeds(id probably go with 10gbe for video footage), you probably want a bit faster of a cpu.

 

 

[FallenOPhoeniX]

On 5/12/2022 at 12:16 PM, Cavalry Canuck said:

1. SATA and PCIe don’t share a bus. NVMe drives eat up PCIe bandwidth, but the SATA HDDs your system will mostly rely on will not.

 

2. You don’t need a cache drive. Having an SSD boot drive, either in NVMe or 2.5” SATA format, is a luxury, not a necessity. The amount of input data doesn’t really matter, so long as your drives can ingest it at the rate you demand. If you have multiple drives connected via SATA, the data transfer rate is basically cumulative. Transferring a TB of data to a bunch of SATA disks takes minutes, not hours.

 

3. I like TRUNAS more than UNRAID.

 

4. Get a PSU from a reputable brand that meets or exceeds the power demands of your system. However, you may want to look into a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). They aren’t something you build into your system. Rather, you plug your system into them, and plug them into your standard home receptacle. A UPS offers some standby power in the event of a power outage, and also serves as a very effective surge protector.

 

 

 

If I may offer a thought:

 

It sounds almost like you want to set up a DVR rather than a NAS. But I am not familiar with Cameras that store and pass on data via SD cards. That said, writing to disk via an SD cache and via a trickle-stream directly from the cameras isn’t all that different. I figure you expect to do a lot of writing to disk, and not as much reading from the disk. You might want to consider HDDs designed specifically for that purpose.

First of all I would like to thank you for trying to help me and replying to my question. 

1- So I dont need x570 can I go with another motherboard ? 
2- my idea of a cache drive is the below ( correct me if I am wrong) 
I want to create this cache drive with very good speed to store all videos / pics from all cameras in it and then the people who going to edit these videos and render them will pull them from the server edit them and take them back and at the end of the day all videos will be sent to the main storage. 
main reason for the cache drive is to not make the transfer from and to the rendering PC's take time. 

3- I have no idea what is  TRUNAS I guess I will do some good research and watching multiple YouTube videos to understand it. I choose UNRAID because Linus would not stop talking about it and when I looked at below picture it looks like exactly what I need :

 

4- For power supply I was thinking of Thermaltake Smart BM2 750W but I have no Idea if its good enough or not, I have build many computers using these PSU but all of them for gaming not server use. 

[FallenOPhoeniX]

On 5/12/2022 at 6:16 PM, voyager_ said:

As much as I support unraid and have two servers running it at home this wouldnt be a good use for it. Unraid is great when speed isn't a main factor is a system usecase. While unraid has some great features its primary claim to fame if you will is UN - Raid. it allows easy expansion and can if the worst occurs data recover is a little more straight forward depending on how the storage was configured since it doesn't split files across the drives like zfs or other raid configs do. (I've had to go done this road with file recovery after a bad storm took out the computer...... not a good week.... those were some bad days/nights/taco bell runs at 2am..... then of course the taco bell runs that follow. - you know what I mean.) While the approach of unraid is great for expansion, add drive - rebuild - BAM - more space - is great for most home users or even small business the read & write speeds SUFFER. Read speeds are limited by individual drives. Write speed though is more complicated, without a cache (why you would do this? I cant say) maybe 40-50mbps depending on the file. This is because it has to calculate parity while writing to the drive. A faster cpu can help, but dont expect to drop an i9 in and be running 300+ to the array, it doesnt scale that way. while writing cpu usage does go up but not alot. With a cache drive you can write as fast as the cache/network can handle as long as you have the space. you would still want these in some sort of array. I run two 500gb samsung ssds in raid 1 through the bios, incase one kicks the bucket. Keep in mind at some point the data on these drives still has to write to the array.

 

TLDR - Unraid - great for smaller use-case or where read/write isn't a key factor. It's great for home backups, running vm, game servers, plex, etc... 

 

TrueNas is going to be your better option for your use-case. You'll get better performance. Downside is storage expansion down the road is more costly/difficult.

 

Also, I would just set up a small ingest workstation for reading from the cards, Even LTT does this. It would also be worth checking the into the motherboard more, many motherboards disable/lose 2 sata ports when using a nvme drive. To connect that many drives i would get an LSI cards. Im running a LSI 9207-8i, there are newer faster options. I dont need/care about that for my use.

 

Please, get a good UPS

 

 

First of all I would like to thank you for trying to help me and replying to my question. 

thanks for much needed information, I needed some information like this from a super user perspective. seems everyone is pushing me towards TRUNAS, I will check them out this night and try to understand that NAS OS and how it works. easy adding drives to the server is good but I might do it each 2 years so I don't think its a big issue if it will take a me a full day each 2 years. 

I might change the CPU / motherboard / ram to get a ECC option so I might end up with a better CPU.
and having information about the  LSI 9207-8i looks promising that means I can keep on adding drives till I fill the PCI express lanes too. 

UPS are not common in our country, power outages are super rare but it happens, currently I have no budget for it but I will put it on the list to be bought next.

[FallenOPhoeniX]

52 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can get the premade nas units with a good amount of bays, or use expansion modules. If you want simple thats the way Id go.

 

With truenas you can have it so that you can add drives in multiples of 4 , so start at 4, then 8 then 12, then 16.

 

The issue I see with unraid is the performance is pretty bad, which won't be great when dealing with high bitrate footage. You basically get the speed of a single hdd.

 

a

You might as well go with ecc memory. It won't cost you much more here, and the extra protection is nice.

 

Since you only have a 1gbe network it seems, the althon will be plenty here. But if you want faster speeds(id probably go with 10gbe for video footage), you probably want a bit faster of a cpu.

 

 

I will try to keep my self away from prebuilt solutions till I have no option else. 
I will search for an ECC option for the build, but do you have any good picks ? 
10gbe is 100% happening if not during this project it will be the next project, so if a better CPU would help with that I will pick one from now. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, FallenOPhoeniX said:

I will try to keep my self away from prebuilt solutions till I have no option else. 
I will search for an ECC option for the build, but do you have any good picks ? 
10gbe is 100% happening if not during this project it will be the next project, so if a better CPU would help with that I will pick one from now. 

The best option would be something like the asrock rack X470D4U2-2T. It supports ecc, hs impi. for remote management, os intalls, bios configuration and other goodies. And built in 10gbe. I have one in my server and its working great.

 

Otherwise, I believe most asus, asrock, and gigabyte b550. and x570 boards support ecc.

 

If your going 10gbe, you really want truenas or a more traditional raid setup. Some setups like mdadm support adding drives one by one to a raid 6 array(and truenas will support this sometime.)

[FallenOPhoeniX]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

The best option would be something like the asrock rack X470D4U2-2T. It supports ecc, hs impi. for remote management, os intalls, bios configuration and other goodies. And built in 10gbe. I have one in my server and its working great.

 

Otherwise, I believe most asus, asrock, and gigabyte b550. and x570 boards support ecc.

 

If your going 10gbe, you really want truenas or a more traditional raid setup. Some setups like mdadm support adding drives one by one to a raid 6 array(and truenas will support this sometime.)

It looks I need to do alot of reading on trunas and mdadm then I will come back. 
I totally forgot that x570 supports ECC that just went right above my head. 
for 10 gbe cant I install something like this 10Gb PCI-E?