Phenomenal NAS power, Itty bitty living space

[SergeyB]

Hey all!

 

I finished my new NAS recently. This project has some space limitations (See images)

Wanted to share and ask your opinion about this limited space setup and whether or not I should be... concerned about some of its aspects.

 

Shelf contents:

1. Main network switch (smart switch from TP-Link). 

2. Router (TP-Link) - routes traffic through ethernet to a fiber converter, then off to my ISP.

3. Grandstream gateway for VoIP telephony services.

4. UPS (below black shelf), in charge (pun intended) of power outages for the PC only.

5. PC (top of black shelf) - Runs TrueNAS and Ubuntu on Proxmox.

 

NAS Specs:

Case: Cooler Master Elite 120 Advanced
Board: Biostar Hi-Fi B85N 3D (Mini-ITX)
CPU: Core i7-4790K (LGA1150)
RAM: 16GB (8GB x 2) 1600Mhz

HBA Card: Dell Perc H310

 

Storage:

1 x Crucial 500GB SSD (Proxmox VMs and ISOs)

4 x 3TB SAS HDDs (TrueNAS ZFS storage with 1 parity drive)

 

Air intake: 2 fans at the case front - air flows through the HDDs onto the motherboard

Air exhaust: 1 fan at the side of the case - for which, there's a gap between the case and the shelf wall

PSU exhaust: top of case

 

With all that in mind, what would be your thoughts about this setup?

Any input is greatly appreciated!

 

Cheers!

-Sergey.

 

 

[LIGISTX]

10 hours ago, SergeyB said:

Hey all!

 

I finished my new NAS recently. This project has some space limitations (See images)

Wanted to share and ask your opinion about this limited space setup and whether or not I should be... concerned about some of its aspects.

 

Shelf contents:

1. Main network switch (smart switch from TP-Link). 

2. Router (TP-Link) - routes traffic through ethernet to a fiber converter, then off to my ISP.

3. Grandstream gateway for VoIP telephony services.

4. UPS (below black shelf), in charge (pun intended) of power outages for the PC only.

5. PC (top of black shelf) - Runs TrueNAS and Ubuntu on Proxmox.

 

NAS Specs:

Case: Cooler Master Elite 120 Advanced
Board: Biostar Hi-Fi B85N 3D (Mini-ITX)
CPU: Core i7-4790K (LGA1150)
RAM: 16GB (8GB x 2) 1600Mhz

HBA Card: Dell Perc H310

 

Storage:

1 x Crucial 500GB SSD (Proxmox VMs and ISOs)

4 x 3TB SAS HDDs (TrueNAS ZFS storage with 1 parity drive)

 

Air intake: 2 fans at the case front - air flows through the HDDs onto the motherboard

Air exhaust: 1 fan at the side of the case - for which, there's a gap between the case and the shelf wall

PSU exhaust: top of case

 

With all that in mind, what would be your thoughts about this setup?

Any input is greatly appreciated!

 

Cheers!

-Sergey.

 

 

Looks great to me. Just monitor drive temps via SMART, and if they are ok, you are solid!

[digitalscream]

Looks good to me, although I'm not convinced about the tape finish around the edges of the plinth  Get yourself some iron-on edge tape and paint it!

 

Aside from that...if those 3TB SAS drives are eBay-sourced, I'd be looking to replace them with something more durable (ie with less hours on them) soon-ish. Or, do what I did, and save for a while to get a bunch of 1.6TB Intel DC SSDs. They go surprisingly cheap these days, and they've got ridiculous endurance compared to consumer drives. Mine showed up with 10.8PBW total endurance each, less than 10% used. Spent about £400 on 7 of them, for just shy of 10TB after parity. I have far more confidence in those than I do in spinning rust disks.

[SergeyB]

11 hours ago, digitalscream said:

Looks good to me, although I'm not convinced about the tape finish around the edges of the plinth  

Yeah, you can tell I've never done that part before 

 

11 hours ago, digitalscream said:

Aside from that...if those 3TB SAS drives are eBay-sourced, I'd be looking to replace them with something more durable (ie with less hours on them) soon-ish.

These come from facebook marketplace actually. I found someone who is selling a bunch of hardware, including lots of these drives for about C$25 each and he says they were barely used. Well, for that price, I'm gonna go for it! Had another NAS built for another location with 6 of them. Works like a charm (for now).

 

11 hours ago, digitalscream said:

Or, do what I did, and save for a while to get a bunch of 1.6TB Intel DC SSDs. They go surprisingly cheap these days, and they've got ridiculous endurance compared to consumer drives. Mine showed up with 10.8PBW total endurance each, less than 10% used. Spent about £400 on 7 of them, for just shy of 10TB after parity. I have far more confidence in those than I do in spinning rust disks.

Interesting. I'm gonna look into those for the future. Thanks!

 

11 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Looks great to me. Just monitor drive temps via SMART, and if they are ok, you are solid!

Speaking of those temps, just as I wrote this post, I started seeing an issue I foolishly was hoping I wouldn't run into.
This case is actually made for 3 HDDs, but I put 4 of them in there using the extra space in the 5.25" bay, which does not have a fan. Once the drives started ramping up the work load, 3 of them went up to 40 degrees, and 1 up to 60(!!)
Also this particular CPU has a known overheating issue.

So what I'm gonna do is get a better case - Fractal Design Node 304 - that supports 6 drives with cooling, and a beefier CPU cooler from Noctua.
Too bad, I was hoping to avoid spending more money, but I guess if you care about your data to survive longer, you'd have to invest.

 

Other than that, thanks for for the input guys! Appreciate y'all.

[olimexsmart]

I like it, very compact setup (I have a thing for small systems )

 

I would move the WiFi router off the cabinet if you experience poor signal around the house

[digitalscream]

6 hours ago, SergeyB said:

Yeah, you can tell I've never done that part before 

To be fair, I used to use the same approach when I was making my pedalboards (guitarist) - I figured if it got chipped I'd only be fixing it with gig tape, so I might as well start off that way

 

6 hours ago, SergeyB said:

These come from facebook marketplace actually. I found someone who is selling a bunch of hardware, including lots of these drives for about C$25 each and he says they were barely used. Well, for that price, I'm gonna go for it! Had another NAS built for another location with 6 of them. Works like a charm (for now).

My advice would be to run a SMART test on each of the drives:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX

You'll get a runtime in hours - convert that to years, and if it's more than 3 then you need a succession plan for those bad boys, and if it's more than 5 your data's on borrowed time...

 

6 hours ago, SergeyB said:

This case is actually made for 3 HDDs, but I put 4 of them in there using the extra space in the 5.25" bay, which does not have a fan. Once the drives started ramping up the work load, 3 of them went up to 40 degrees, and 1 up to 60(!!)

...especially if that starts happening for more than a few seconds!

[SergeyB]

21 hours ago, olimexsmart said:

I would move the WiFi router off the cabinet if you experience poor signal around the house

Ah! But that router isn't providing the Wifi. It has wifi technically, but it's turned off and instead I have a Ubiquity access point in the hallway where it's central to all the rooms for maximum coverage. It has PoE and is plugged into the main switch.

 

19 hours ago, digitalscream said:

To be fair, I used to use the same approach when I was making my pedalboards (guitarist) - I figured if it got chipped I'd only be fixing it with gig tape, so I might as well start off that way

lol

 

19 hours ago, digitalscream said:

You'll get a runtime in hours - convert that to years, and if it's more than 3 then you need a succession plan for those bad boys, and if it's more than 5 your data's on borrowed time...

Ah, good to know. In that case I might run the SMART check manually.
TrueNAS has periodic SMART check tasks of all the types (short, long, etc.) but I'm not sure it reports time at the end. Will have to look into it.

 

19 hours ago, digitalscream said:

especially if that starts happening for more than a few seconds!

That 4th drive doesn't have heat dissipation at all. The longer it's working, the worse it's gonna be. Gonna take care of that before officially deploying that machine.  

 

[digitalscream]

1 hour ago, SergeyB said:

 

That 4th drive doesn't have heat dissipation at all. The longer it's working, the worse it's gonna be. Gonna take care of that before officially deploying that machine.  

 

Yeah, you definitely need to deal with that. As a general rule, all time spent above 40C will shorten the life of a drive, and I ideally like to keep it as close to 30C as possible (but then, I've seen a lot of drive failures in my time...which makes a guy very, very paranoid).

[SergeyB]

7 hours ago, digitalscream said:

As a general rule, all time spent above 40C will shorten the life of a drive, and I ideally like to keep it as close to 30C as possible

Right, I'm on it! Will post when I have upgrades haha

Thanks

[SergeyB]

!! FINAL SETUP !!

 

So after an adventure, longer than intended, I finally have my final setup for this location.

The new case is Fractal Design Node 304 (Thanks Linus for a video from 10 years ago. That was informative).
It supports up to 6 HDDs and I'm using that space for my 4 HDDs + 1 SSD for Proxmox and VM disks.

Also added a beefy Noctua horizontal profile cooler. That helped take about 10 degrees off the CPU, compared to the stock cooler.

I did still had to move the case to its own shelf, as it was overheating in that close space. And that also allowed the UPS to have more air to breathe. Not ideal in terms of space, but call it an investment for a better future.

 

And finally in the new setup, I'm left with HDDs having a stable 35 degrees during medium workload and CPU at 35-40 degrees stable!

So now it's time to let the hardware go and focus on the software!

 

Cheers!

[digitalscream]

That looks like a great (if slightly more expensive than planned) result