Noob NAS build

[Accessless]

Hi all,

 

I'm looking into building a NAS for my house, I have never operated one before so I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with options. Software is my main concern at the moment as I have no clue what to go with for my needs.

 

My use case is video streaming (Up to 4K but not more than 3 devices at a time), photo storage and music streaming.

 

Hardware pointers would also be welcome.

I'm planning on re-using a Ryzen 3700x and an Arc A380 for video transcoding. 8gb Ram? Does dual channel affect NAS?

 

HDDs are also vexing me. Do I want 7200rpm drives or is that just pointless extra noise? Do I want drives with extra cache or is this unessary expense? And then what RAID level to use? RAID 10 is the path of least resistance but I'm not exactly thrilled about loosing 50% of my storage to redundancy.

 

All insight is welcome. Thanks

[leadeater]

General NAS usage single channel vs dual channel won't matter.

 

RAID 5/6 are the most suitable here and even ZFS supports vdev expansions now so it is possible to add 1 or 2 disks and expand your usable storage without having to add 4 or more and creating a whole new vdev to add to a pool.

 

TrueNAS Scale is probably the best choice and then add on Plex or Emby for video streaming and music streaming, as well as view and organizing photo galleries if you want that to.

 

You don't need 7200rpm or large cache disks, almost anything will do so long as not SMR based HDD.

 

Unless you want a huge performance SSD NAS and pushing 10Gbps or greater CPU and HDD choice will not matter much at all beyond the "no SMR".

[QuantumRand]

Beyond TrueNAS, I also recommend checking out Unraid. Unlike TrueNAS, it doesn't have a free tier, but I personally feel like it's a bit more approachable for someone new to the NAS ecosystem.

 

Unraid's "array" is kind of like a virtual RAID. Instead of stripes, data is logically copied between drives which gives you a lot more flexibility in upgrading your storage later. It's trivial to add a new drive to the array, regardless of its size and performance. TrueNAS was not created with this use-case in mind, and expanding your storage there usually means creating an entirely new zPool of drives rather than adding to your existing pool one drive at a time.

 

That said, TrueNAS Scale has some major benefits as well. It uses ZFS, which while being a bit more RAM intensive, is a much more robust file system compared to Unraid's XFS. It's also Debian-based, instead of BSD, so you get a bit more flexibility in what you can run on the system natively.

 

I recommend trying out both and seeing which interface you find most approachable, and consider if/how you might want to expand your storage in the future.

[Accessless]

Cheers leadeater,

 

I'm going for an itx build and I'm struggling to find AM4 motherboards with RAID 5 support. I could Frankenstein a controller into an m.2 slot with a riser and double sided tape the thing somewhere but I would certainly entertain alternative ideas. The choice of 3700X is just because I have one in the drawer, but if intel boards have better raid support I'm not opposed to switching out. The extra cost of a cpu would still probably be cheaper than a raid controller.

[QuantumRand]

18 minutes ago, Accessless said:

Cheers leadeater,

 

I'm going for an itx build and I'm struggling to find AM4 motherboards with RAID 5 support. I could Frankenstein a controller into an m.2 slot with a riser and double sided tape the thing somewhere but I would certainly entertain alternative ideas. The choice of 3700X is just because I have one in the drawer, but if intel boards have better raid support I'm not opposed to switching out. The extra cost of a cpu would still probably be cheaper than a raid controller.

I'd say don't worry about hardware RAID support. Most off the shelf NAS operating systems are going to default to a software RAID/RAID-like solution anyway. Modern CPUs are more than fast enough to handle software RAID in a home-sized NAS no problem.

[Accessless]

47 minutes ago, QuantumRand said:

I'd say don't worry about hardware RAID support. Most off the shelf NAS operating systems are going to default to a software RAID/RAID-like solution anyway. Modern CPUs are more than fast enough to handle software RAID in a home-sized NAS no problem.

Surely that spoils the fun.

[voyager_]

i would really take a good look at unraid, especially for beginner and home user it is a great platform. You can mix and match drives and i prefer the way it handles storage for a few reasons. As far as usable capacity the only loss is from either one or two parity drives depending on how you set it up. Unraid also will let you easily swap or add to the array and drive sizes don't need to match as long as they are equal to or smaller then your parity drives. (I think truenas now supports this but I could be wrong. It wasn't supported when I first set mine up) This makes it easier to expand down the road if you need to. Just stop the array, add the disk then restart the array and let it rebuild. Unraid also doesn't split files to multiple drives, it put the complete file on a single drive. The reason I really like this method is I had a bad hardware failure that took out power supply, motherboard, HBA card, two drives and since the files are stored on each drive  I mounted them in a linux vm and transferred them to another system. I was able to recover nearly everything. Some media was corrupted to the point it wasn't playable but I still recovered probably 95% of the files. Fortunatly these were just media and anything really important was backed up elsewhere. 

 

Unraid will support cache drives and you can run two in essentially raid 1 incase on dies, I use my cache not only as a faster way to write to the server but also as the storage drives for any vms, plex meta data, etc... basically anything that I want faster access to and that I don't want writing to the array. You can also use a plug-in called unassigned devices to mount drives that you want to store to but not be included in the array. I use this as storage for downloads, storing video from my security cameras, etc..

 

Unraid is defiantly not perfect I just find it the best solution for what I am looking for. Read/write times are going to be slowing then what truenas or similar setups are capable of. When writing to the array it is also doing parity calculations slowing the write time. Read speeds are limited to the individual drive speeds. So when I copy files they dump to the cache ssd drives as fast as the network will allow then I let unraid move them to the array. 

 

As far as your drive selection I wouldn't worry about 7200rpm drives, just make sure to get cmr and try and get nas rated drives if you can. I have had good luck with wd reds. Unraid does support gpu transcoding with plex (im not 100% on the other similar programs, I just use plex) but you do need plex pass. I am not sure if it will support intel gpus though. I know Nvidia is supported and im using a Quadro k2200 that I got for $100 a couple of years ago. I can transcode 4k and I often will but the general rule of 4k is don't transcode 4k. 8Gb of ram is probably fine if it's just serving media and storing files, as you start going down the rabbit hole and add things like vms and home assistant you may want to add more. If you go the plex route I would also look at setting it up to transcode to ram rather then the drives, it supposedly saves some wear and tear but I don't know how much of a difference that will make. As far as the cpu goes your good, my main server runs a 2700x and it has never been a limiting factor.

 

If you go unraid look up space invader and byte my bits on youtube, they have excellent content to walk you through setting up unraid, additional functions, and plex setup. The facebook and forum groups for both are also very helpful.

 

 

 

TLDR - Unraid or Truenas, both have their pros and cons. Im partial to unraid and have had great luck. Im sure there are videos that cover the basics of both and I would post on their forums or facebook groups and see which one fits your needs best. You could also try them both and see which you prefer. 

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, Accessless said:

I'm going for an itx build and I'm struggling to find AM4 motherboards with RAID 5 support.

There aren't going to be many, most will actually have it since it's done by AMD technically but this is not anything you want to use. Motherboard RAID is not hardware RAID, it's still software based and uses CPU cycles as well has being extremely poor performance for RAID 5/6 which is why most of the time this is not even an option with consumer motherboard RAID.

 

You'd be giving yourself more pain trying to use it and it'll probably bug out anyway, its' never been good. If you want hardware RAID then PCIe card is the only viable option to not have problem or lose your data.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, voyager_ said:

I have had good luck with wd reds

WD Reds are now SMR, you'll have to get WD Red Plus to have CMR/PMR again. Just fyi so you don't make a purchasing mistake in future.

[Bersella AI]

20 hours ago, Accessless said:

8gb Ram? Does dual channel affect NAS?

Dual channels matter if an integrated GPU is utilized for transcoding, but since the Arc A380 takes this job, it would not matter any more in performance. I had a Pentium G4600 processor tested by transcoding the same 4K HDR clip, which yielded ~60 fps with single-channel, or ~75 fps with dual-channel.

 

20 hours ago, Accessless said:

HDDs are also vexing me. Do I want 7200rpm drives or is that just pointless extra noise? Do I want drives with extra cache or is this unessary expense?

Faster spinners are not necessarily required for an NAS. Slower drives like WD Red Plus, Purple, or Seagate IronWolf/SkyHawk, would definitely work pretty well for home use.

Cache size won't affect performance so much in practice. Newer models would come with a larger cache, for example, newer WD Purple drives (WD42EJRX) has 256 MB of cache, with negligible performance uplift over older WD40PURX models equipped with 64 MB cache. Actually, utilizing an SSD as a dedicated cache pool would be more beneficial in most applications.

 

20 hours ago, Accessless said:

And then what RAID level to use? RAID 10 is the path of least resistance but I'm not exactly thrilled about loosing 50% of my storage to redundancy.

RAID is meant to higher service availability, and is not necessarily required in NAS. Generally RAID 6 or RAID Z2 is recommended in most scenarios, although RAID 1/ Mirror can be considered for more resilience, or even Stripe for more flexible configurations.

[LIGISTX]

On 1/18/2024 at 1:56 AM, leadeater said:

even ZFS supports vdev expansions

Wait, is this actually mainlined now? I know it’s been coming for years, but I didn’t think it has ever made it to production. 
 

23 hours ago, Accessless said:

I'm struggling to find AM4 motherboards with RAID 5 support.

You don’t need hardware RAID as mentioned. Completely useless since you will be using software RAID (which is much better, and more importantly, it’s portable and not tied to specified hardware). 
 

You say multiple 4k streams… do you mean direct play? If so, you don’t need any horsepower for that. The only thing they does require transcoding and thus either a fast CPU or preferably GPU is if you try and play 4k content at lower resolution, or any content at a lower resolution than source. I literally only play 4k content on my 4k tv, so I can get away with my Plex VM having 2 cpu cores and no video card whatsoever. If all you plan to do is direct play, you don’t need a GPU at all here. 

[QuantumRand]

2 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Wait, is this actually mainlined now? I know it’s been coming for years, but I didn’t think it has ever made it to production.  

It's merged into the master branch, but probably still a while before it makes it into a release. As of now, it doesn't look like it'll get into 2.2.3. It might show up in a 2.3.0-rc release in the next few months though. Probably 6+ months before it'll be released for real though.

[LIGISTX]

27 minutes ago, QuantumRand said:

It's merged into the master branch, but probably still a while before it makes it into a release. As of now, it doesn't look like it'll get into 2.2.3. It might show up in a 2.3.0-rc release in the next few months though. Probably 6+ months before it'll be released for real though.

6 months is sooner then I anticipated, so I’ll take that. Once this is in a TrueNAS release, it’ll make TrueNAS and ZFS so much more compelling for folks who can’t afford the initial jump into a wide vdev. 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Wait, is this actually mainlined now? I know it’s been coming for years, but I didn’t think it has ever made it to production. 

I'm typically guilty of "I want that so I'll get it", I did that with SAMBA and SMB Multichannel too.