Need Help with a student file share network/server

BatFan22 · October 1, 2015

Hi guys,

I need a little help. I am looking to build a file server that can share student reading (PDF's) over a LAN that has no internet.

Conditions

I can have up to 80 students at once.

All student files combined are less than 100 MB.

I am looking to use FreeNAS.

Would like decently responsive downloads.

I am looking to purchase used/cheaper parts to build this, but no real budget has been set.

The simpler of a setup the better, I am looking to pass this off to people who are not very tech savvy.

Questions:

How powerful of a processor should I use?

What type of things should I do to help the load of 80 possible logins?

Should I use more than 8 Gigs of RAM? If so how much?

Can i get away with 1 HDD, or maybe 1 SSD?

Do you have any other tips/words of advice?

Thanks in advance,

lekro · October 1, 2015

You shouldn't really need to use FreeNAS for that much storage space. (FreeNAS recommends 1 GB of RAM per TB of storage space in ZFS, and since you're looking to only store <1 GB of data, it's pretty much off the scale. Not sure about this, but you could probably just get away with an rPi, or something really cheap running Arch Linux or some other lightweight Linux distro. The latter would probably be better if you want decent download speeds if all 80 of your students happen to download everything simultaneously, since HDD/SSDs are significantly faster than SD cards, and you can have a gigabit NIC. But in general 80 students really shouldn't be much of a problem.

SnafuPossum · October 1, 2015

id recommend this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157419 with 8gb(what freenas users recommend as a baseline ram quanity from when I look up using it) of ecc memory then a ~120-250gb ssd as the access drive for the students. with upwards of 80 people accessing stuff at once seek times on a regular hdd could become a limiting factor instead of the network throughput. This should give you what you need for $4-500, if it werent for the quanity of users or if you dont mind a so snappy setup when it gets loaded there are cheaper solutions.

BatFan22 · October 2, 2015

id recommend this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157419 with 8gb(what freenas users recommend as a baseline ram quanity from when I look up using it) of ecc memory then a ~120-250gb ssd as the access drive for the students. with upwards of 80 people accessing stuff at once seek times on a regular hdd could become a limiting factor instead of the network throughput. This should give you what you need for $4-500, if it werent for the quanity of users or if you dont mind a so snappy setup when it gets loaded there are cheaper solutions.

What are the cheaper solutions you were thinking of? I was hoping to use consumer grade hardware.

Thanks

BatFan22 · October 2, 2015

You shouldn't really need to use FreeNAS for that much storage space. (FreeNAS recommends 1 GB of RAM per TB of storage space in ZFS, and since you're looking to only store <1 GB of data, it's pretty much off the scale. Not sure about this, but you could probably just get away with an rPi, or something really cheap running Arch Linux or some other lightweight Linux distro. The latter would probably be better if you want decent download speeds if all 80 of your students happen to download everything simultaneously, since HDD/SSDs are significantly faster than SD cards, and you can have a gigabit NIC. But in general 80 students really shouldn't be much of a problem.

What type of hardware are you thinking for Arch Linux? I am currently running a Cirago NUS 1000, and that is slowing down at about 10 users. An it slows down to the point you might have to refresh the page just to get the file list to populate, much less open a file.

techguru · October 2, 2015

What type of hardware are you thinking for Arch Linux? I am currently running a Cirago NUS 1000, and that is slowing down at about 10 users. An it slows down to the point you might have to refresh the page just to get the file list to populate, much less open a file.

buy a second hand tower on craigslist or kijiji

then just throw a http file server on it...or a ftp server

Weetbix39 · October 2, 2015

I recently built a NAS for my family, i used the software NAS4FREE does everything i want it too.

The specs of the system I put together are:

Intel core 2 quad 2.83 ghrtz

4 GB DDR2 RAM

Dunno on the graphics card, bought it for 5$ on trade me. (the equivalent of trade me)

x2 280 HDD's on raid1

System works fine, i can upload and download files easily, and nas4free barley even scratches the system, could probably gone with much lower specs without issue.

However, word of warning, I am not sure about other NAS software, but I do know that nas4free did require a lot of configuration.

P.S. nas4free is basically and earlier community maintained version of freenas, the differences are that it uses less system resources and UPS file setup, rather than ZPS.