NAS/Media Server Sanity Check

[Hawkeye5450]

I am planning on building my first NAS out of an old Optiplex 7010 that I have. I just wanted to see if I was missing anything obvious.

 

Already have:

CPU: Intel I7-3770

MOBO: Dell proprietary

RAM: 2x8 DDR3 1600MHZ

GPU: Nvidia GT630

 

Buying:

HBA: LSI 9211-8i

Storage: (6) Seagate Exos x12 12 TB (used)

PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower GX2 600w

Case: Coolermaster N400

 

I plan on using the NAS as a data backup for my main rig and laptop as well as a jellyfin share.

 

The main question that I have is what level of RAID to use. I am trying to decide between two raidz1 vdevs with three drives each and one raidz2 across all the drives. Is there any kind of performance difference or redundancy difference?

Any help with hardware would also be greatly appreciated.

[DarkSwordsman]

I'd personally probably just go for a single a raidz1 vdev, though since you're getting used drives, raidz2 would probably be better. Having more drives in a single pool would improve performance, and having more redundancy drives obviously improves redundancy. Though I'm sure a lot of people have a lot of opinions about value, redundancy, performance, etc.

And if you have the chance (you should since DDR3 is super cheap), I'd bump it up to 32 or 64 GB. The ARC (RAM) cache on ZFS helps a ton. I've been able to edit 4+ hour long H264 video directly off a NAS with 1 Gbps connection on Resolve, and it was as good as if it was directly on my PC.

If it's stuff you care about, raidz2, one pool. If it's stuff you can recover easily through other means, raidz1 to take advantage of storage.

By the way: Make sure you have the SFF to SATA breakout cables, and make sure you have enough SATA power connectors on your PSU (you might be able to get away with 1-2 adapters, just note the max rating of 1.5A per SATA connector. W = V x A).

My only other concern is, if you're using this for Jellyfin, transcoding. The QuickSync on the 3770 might be... acceptable, but in the cases where the video is not supported and you want high quality, I wouldn't be surprised if you can't transcode more than 1 video at a time, if that. I am not sure if the GT 630 even has an encoder, and if it does, it is probably awful and can't even hardware decode much at all. I'd probably go for a Quadro P400, there's even ones on sale for $80 right now. It is Pascal based and you can probably use the firmware hack to unlock the NVENC encoder. It has H265 10 bit decode support as well, so you can do full-GPU transcoding (very fast).

I have a 1070 which has 2 NVENC chips, and I think last time I checked, it is physically capable of probably about 20-25 1080p24 -> 1080p24 transcodes at once. Though I had issues getting more than 4, likely due to the subtitles baking it had to do.

[svmlegacy]

GT 630 has NVDEC encode / decode for H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and VC-1.

 

QuickSync on Ivy Bridge only has H.264 and MPEG-2.

 

Run with what you have, and only upgrade if it becomes a problem.

[LIGISTX]

I’d go z2. If you google “RAID 5 is dead” you will find plenty of good info on why a single drive of redundancy these days is just not enough. 
 

FWIW, I have had a second drive fall out of my array while rebuilding it from a previous drive failure. If I was Z1…. Bye bye data. Thankfully I run Z2. 

[DarkSwordsman]

19 hours ago, svmlegacy said:

GT 630 has NVDEC encode / decode for H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and VC-1.

 

QuickSync on Ivy Bridge only has H.264 and MPEG-2.

Many video files are likely H265 these days. Perhaps the 3770 can software decode 1080p, but I'd be doubtful it can do 4K reliably.

I do think you're right that they should only upgrade if its a problem. Just giving them a path, and figure just grabbing a cheap P400 would be easier than testing and debugging a really old, low tier GPU.