home build nas

[loemoemba]

HI

 

Now im using a nas (qnap ts-212) and its just not good enouf. I want to be able to ad more bays and its to slow.

Im started work on a new pc so i was wondering can i rebuild my old pc as a faster bigger nas/home server? Networking is not realy my thing. Do i add a better raidcard, beter switch, amahi/freenas and BOOM. or is ther more to it.

Can you help out?

 

The old pc is a i7 860, asus pro p7p55d motherboard, 8G ram, amd radeom hd 5800, western digital red hhd that i wil reuse from the nas i have now.

 

thanks

[Vitalius]

HI

 

Now im using a nas (qnap ts-212) and its just not good enouf. I want to be able to ad more bays and its to slow.

Im started work on a new pc so i was wondering can i rebuild my old pc as a faster bigger nas/home server? Networking is not realy my thing. Do i add a better raidcard, beter switch, amahi/freenas and BOOM. or is ther more to it.

Can you help out?

 

The old pc is a i7 860, asus pro p7p55d motherboard, 8G ram, amd radeom hd 5800, western digital red hhd that i wil reuse from the nas i have now.

 

thanks

No, and no to the RAID Card & Switch. Those aren't necessary most of the time. Unless your current Switch is just really old or terrible in general, and this is causing the bottleneck, then you wouldn't need a new one. A RAID card isn't necessary unless you are in a very specific situation, and 95%+ of Home NAS' aren't in that situation. 

I would go with Amahi with that setup so you can have plugins. You could with FreeNAS, it's just that using non-ECC RAM with FreeNAS isn't recommended. 

Amahi has you make an account on their website when setting up the OS. Aside from that, it should be almost no different from a normal OS install.

[loemoemba]

cool even cheaper.

Can you give a rough idea how how fast the read/writh speeds are going to be with this? There is no point of going to al the trouble for 3% incraese in speed.

I know its hard to put a number on. Now i get about 30MB write speed read is better. But wen i move bigger file it realy brings down evrything.

[hannson]

That would depend on your mainboard sata controller, your array type and your drives. Some hdd configurations are faster than others. I'm running 5 wd red drives in raidz6 (2 drive redundancy) and my entire gbit connection is directly writing on the disks, so 120 MB/s write. 

I really wouldn't recommend running ZFS without ECC-memory if you like your data. In this case you are not protected from bit flipping and your entire array can fail just like that. Be aware what you are getting yourself into: 

 

5 In-memory data integrity in ZFS

 

In the last section we showed the robustness of ZFS to disk corruptions. Although ZFS was not specifically designed to tolerate memory corruptions, we still would like to know how ZFS reacts to memory corruptions, i.e., whether ZFS can detect and recover from a single bit flip in data and metadata blocks. Our fault injection experiments indicate that ZFS has no precautions for memory corruptions: bad data blocks are returned to the user or written to disk, file system operations fail, and many times the whole system crashes. This section is organized as follows. First, we briefly describe ZFS in-memory structures. Then, we discuss the test methodology and workloads we used to conduct the analysis. Finally, we present the experimental results and our observations.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1689724

 

With your hardware, maybe a raid is not a bad way to go in order to avoid buying completly new gear. 

Cheers

[Vitalius]

cool even cheaper.

Can you give a rough idea how how fast the read/writh speeds are going to be with this? There is no point of going to al the trouble for 3% incraese in speed.

I know its hard to put a number on. Now i get about 30MB write speed read is better. But wen i move bigger file it realy brings down evrything.

Well, I have a single 4TB Seagate Barracuda and I get 60-80MB/s read/write speeds. However, this is probably because I use FreeNAS with ECC RAM. 

What I would do is test each thing to make sure your networking isn't the bottleneck. Potential bottlenecks are the switch, and the ethernet ports on your machines (both the server and your PC). The easiest way to test that is to have another route to transfer data. i.e. not using whatever you've been using up til now. 

A single WD Red should get around 60-80 MB/s or more unless it's damaged (which I doubt, since it's a Red series drive, unless something bad happened to it). At least that's what I've seen from them. 

Usually, it's the weaker hardware in pre-built NAS' that make the read/write speeds lower. But you can only really know if it's going to increase in speed if you test it out yourself. 

Oh, and you don't need the Radeon HD 5800. There's no reason for it to display video after the first setup. Everything is usually web based at that point. 

[loemoemba]

thank you for the advice. I wil give it a go. Only thing i need to find is a cheap case to put it in and maby a power supply. So realy cheap and it hase good potential.