Help with picking NAS components + OS needed

[FSKN]

Hi guys,

 

I'm looking to get a small home server for the living room. It should act as a NAS (mostly used for backups + a few small shares), Plex server, and should be able to run a webserver as well as owncloud. 

 

I have not yet decided between FreeNAS and unRAID --- are there any differences in my use case? Also there seems to be a lot of contradictory information on how much processing power you really need. Recommendations go from an old Celeron, the Avoton Atoms up to 8core Xeons. Unfortunately I have no experience with NAS builds and need your opions. 

 

I would like to stay under 1000€ including the initial ~10TB of HDDs. The current part list is as follows (all German prices):

 

ASRock C2550D4I quad core Avoton --- 290,99€ / 316$

Western Digital WD Red 3TB x 3 --- 110€ / 120$ each 

Crucial DIMM 8GB ECC x 2 --- 56€ / 61$ each

Fractal Design Node 304 --- 77€ / 83$

Fractal Design Edison M 450W --- 60€ / 65$

 

---

Total: 870€

 

 

Is this good value for the money? Am I spending way too much on useless stuff? Am right in assuming that this will last for a couple of years and could be easily extended with another 9TB of HDDs?

I hope you can give me some hints and tips.

 

[Jarsky]

Thats a good build, given your budget - if youre going for something small and compact, that looks good.

 

You might also want to look at the Silverstone DS380 as a potential case idea -  it holds 8 x 3.5" disks and 3 x 2.5" (e.g SSD's)

Also as far as PSU's you might want to look at the SFX options available from Silverstone - much smaller PSU formfactor, which would help with thermals in a small enclosure.

[FSKN]

Thanks for the hints. The Silverstone PSUs are almost twice as expensive (at least over here). Is the high price worth it?

 

Also, I discovered Seagate's 8TB Archive drive for only 220€. Does anybody have experience with that drive? I am aware of the technical differences; the question is whether there is a notable difference in real life performance in my (low-load) use case.

[Jarsky]

I use the 8TB Archives, but they're shingled drives and not really suited if youre going to be constantly writing new data to them. They're really a write once, read many type of drive. Reading from them is fine, but I get quite inconsistant dips in speed writing to them - so if fast write is of concern, or many writes, then i'd stick with NAS drives. I only use the archives for what theyre intended, a large capacity cold storage solution - I use my other arrays for stuff that im swapping a lot.

 

As far as PSU's really up to you, there isnt such a big price difference here between them and the Silverstone SFX PSU's are 80+ Gold, where the Fractal's are Bronze rated I believe.

Probably isn't worth the price if theyre that twice as much there though.

 

As far as OS, FreeNAS is built on FreeBSD and it only supports ZFS as far as arrays. It requires quite a bit of ram to run the array properly, but you have plenty in your build.

unRAID uses a "Parity JBOD" approach, where each disk is independant but they store parity across other disks so its kind of like a hybrid RAID5/6. IMO, ZFS is more robust and introduces a lot more features like scrubbing, that help to maintain the array - FreeNAS would be more my NAS OS of choice.

[HappyChubbs]

I say you have a good setup.  Both OS can support Plex and Owncloud.

 

Few things about the C2550, it does heat up.  So you will need to have a decent amount of air going over the heatsinks.  I have the C2750 in the DS380 case and had to install two mini fans on top of the heat sink.  With your case, I do not think it is an issue.  

It also does not support VT-d, so if you plan on passing devices to a VM, it will not work (unRAID).

 

 

 

As far as OS, FreeNAS is built on FreeBSD and it only supports ZFS as far as arrays. It requires quite a bit of ram to run the array properly, but you have plenty in your build.

unRAID uses a "Parity JBOD" approach, where each disk is independant but they store parity across other disks so its kind of like a hybrid RAID5/6. IMO, ZFS is more robust and introduces a lot more features like scrubbing, that help to maintain the array - FreeNAS would be more my NAS OS of choice.

 

Covered it pretty well for filesystems.  I would like to add that it is much easier to expand an array in unRAID.  So if you plan on adding more drives in the future, unRAID might a good place to start.  

[Aekim]

If you want to stay small it's good but if you could live with a bigger case get a server mobo and a Celeron/Pentium. For 300€ you could even get a i3 Combo^^.

The red drives have much better reviews so i would stay with them and perhaps get one archive drive for backups

[FSKN]

I use the 8TB Archives, but they're shingled drives and not really suited if youre going to be constantly writing new data to them. They're really a write once, read many type of drive. Reading from them is fine, but I get quite inconsistant dips in speed writing to them [...]

 

Well the question is how you define "constantly" I guess? I would write one incremental backup per computer per day, and (hopefully) never read it again. For the media server part of things, it's also a write-once type of thing. I put the movie file, stream it once or twice, and forget about it/delete it again. Can you provide some performance numbers, i.e. how low does the write speed drop? 

 

Edit: As far as the power supplies are concerned, the fractal one is gold rated as well. 

 

 

Few things about the C2550, it does heat up.  

[...]

 I would like to add that it is much easier to expand an array in unRAID.  So if you plan on adding more drives in the future, unRAID might a good place to start.  

 

I guess I'll just ghetto mount a small fan then, thanks. Expanding the array is certainly planned - are there any constraints on doing that in unRAID? I believe I can even mix and match different disk sizes? 

 

If you want to stay small it's good but if you could live with a bigger case get a server mobo and a Celeron/Pentium. For 300€ you could even get a i3 Combo^^.

The red drives have much better reviews so i would stay with them and perhaps get one archive drive for backups

 

Isn't this a server motherboard? And how does i3 performance and power usage compare to the C2250? And: the NAS is the backup

[FSKN]

Trying to cut down on the price of the processor I found a board with an N3150 for 80€. http://geizhals.eu/asrock-n3150-itx-90-mxgz10-a0uayz-a1273690.html

I could use that with 4GB of old notebook RAM and safe quite a bit of money. Did anybody try to use Plex on that thing?

[Aekim]

I've read some reviews about the archive drive in raids and they failed a lot ( much more than the reds) so I would go the save way

The N3150 would be too slow for plex (my guess), if you got only one 1080p stream a haswell celeron should do it.

Mainboard I meant sth like this. With an i3 it would be ~300€ and much more powerfull and upgradable. Perhaps try it first with a cheaper cpu if that fits your needs.

http://geizhals.eu/asrock-rack-e3c224-v-90-sxg1c0-a0uayz-a1025286.html

If you want to go without ecc ram just grab a cheap mainboard (alternate.de outlet has great stuff sometimes) and a cheap cpu. In that case I would recommend you use unraid or openmediavault instead of freenas.

I don't think the power usage is that much higher in idle. My server with a g1820 and H87ws-dl draw about 30w with 2 wd reds 3tb and ssd