Building a NAS Box

[Syaoran74]

Hi all,

im putting together a nas box with parts that ive got at home or found online, and its pretty much set then linus' video came out....

so i wanted to know what the go with HBAs? is it that nesscessary or can i run it direct into motherboard sata headers and get the same result?

heres what i have so far

CPU: Intel G2020T

Motherboard: either 1) Gigabtye z68x ud3h-b3 (only has 7 sata ports) 2) ASUS p8p67 pro (no internal graphics)

Ram 16gb ddr3

GPU : gt 520 for the asus if need be
hdd: 6x2tb hitachi hdd (thinking of going raid 1 2 drives then plain drives the rest)
psu corsair hx650 case fractal R3

also no name raid card available if needed.

 

Questions
1) hardware config which motherboard to go with....

2)HBAs nesscessary? or will motherboard headers be sufficient?

3)what software to run? ive heard of a lot of os' floating around ie freenas, rockstor, unraid, windows home server etc etc

uses: photo video storage box, essential files and photos on the raid 1 and everything else where ever they fall...

[Droidbot]

I've got no experience with FreeNAS, but I run Windows 7 on my home server - with plans to switch to OpenMediaVault. It's a Debian based solution with a custom web UI that doesn't require a graphics card. 

[GDRRiley]

37 minutes ago, Syaoran74 said:

Hi all,

im putting together a nas box with parts that ive got at home or found online, and its pretty much set then linus' video came out....

so i wanted to know what the go with HBAs? is it that nesscessary or can i run it direct into motherboard sata headers and get the same result?

heres what i have so far

CPU: Intel G2020T

Motherboard: either 1) Gigabtye z68x ud3h-b3 (only has 7 sata ports) 2) ASUS p8p67 pro (no internal graphics)

Ram 16gb ddr3

GPU : gt 520 for the asus if need be
hdd: 6x2tb hitachi hdd (thinking of going raid 1 2 drives then plain drives the rest)
psu corsair hx650 case fractal R3

also no name raid card available if needed.

 

Questions
1) hardware config which motherboard to go with....

2)HBAs nesscessary? or will motherboard headers be sufficient?

3)what software to run? ive heard of a lot of os' floating around ie freenas, rockstor, unraid, windows home server etc etc

uses: photo video storage box, essential files and photos on the raid 1 and everything else where ever they fall...

get 4tb drive but only 4 and put them in a raid 10 or get the 6 2tb drives and make 2 raid 5 striped together in a raid 0.

[Henry]

Why would you get 6 2tb? Why not 4x3tb? Or 3x4tb? 3TB/4TB drives have great $/gig ratio

[Blake]

1 hour ago, Syaoran74 said:

Hi all,

im putting together a nas box with parts that ive got at home or found online, and its pretty much set then linus' video came out....

so i wanted to know what the go with HBAs? is it that nesscessary or can i run it direct into motherboard sata headers and get the same result?

heres what i have so far

CPU: Intel G2020T

Motherboard: either 1) Gigabtye z68x ud3h-b3 (only has 7 sata ports) 2) ASUS p8p67 pro (no internal graphics)

Ram 16gb ddr3

GPU : gt 520 for the asus if need be
hdd: 6x2tb hitachi hdd (thinking of going raid 1 2 drives then plain drives the rest)
psu corsair hx650 case fractal R3

also no name raid card available if needed.

 

Questions
1) hardware config which motherboard to go with....

2)HBAs nesscessary? or will motherboard headers be sufficient?

3)what software to run? ive heard of a lot of os' floating around ie freenas, rockstor, unraid, windows home server etc etc

uses: photo video storage box, essential files and photos on the raid 1 and everything else where ever they fall...

1. Not sure on pricing, but you need to decide if the cost of a 520 is worth 1 sata port. Keep in mind, you'll end up taking the GPU out after your have everything configured, so you can just run it headless. apart from that your running a NAS, either one will be fine.

 

2. HBA - Not required, just basically an i/o card that adds more SATA ports, not required at all. If you throw the OS on an SSD, that will leave you with 6(or7) ports left, if you throw 7 hdd's in the server, then want to add another disk, you either A) Replace a disk with a larger capacity disk and rebuilt the parity/array/storage media. B) Install a HBA card, install new HDD in addition to the previous one.

 

You do need to be careful about HBA's as some wont be just a straight passthrough, so if you go with FREENAS it will have the occasional hissy fit as it want to 'assume direct control'

 

If you RAID, then don't do a parity RAID, the G2020T will rape your write speeds (unless you're fine with poor writes, I am, so I run a N54L in my NAS, 20MBps write, but 1.2GBps Read, and massive IOPS on the READ side also). Go with a Mirror or strip that doesn't have to borrow CPU cycles for Parity Calculation.

 

3. Depends What your after in the NAS. If your not looking to increase your knowledge, pick any of them, follow a guide and it will work as intended. Wanting to learn more about windows sysadmin stuff? Go with windows server (go with 2012 R2, don't use 2016, you don't want to have to re-configure everything from scratch when the eval finishes) Wanting to learn about linux sysadmin stuff? Don't use unraid, it's all gui, you wont learn a thing. Want to learn about BSD sysadmining? go with FREENAS. Keep in mind this will barely scratch the surface on any of the aforementioned roles.

1 hour ago, GDRRiley said:

get 4tb drive but only 4 and put them in a raid 10 or get the 6 2tb drives and make 2 raid 5 striped together in a raid 0.

Please don't recommend a parity RAID without the qualifier that it will be slow unless A) upgrade the CPU or B) Get a RAID card that Does the parity calculations (expensive). Why Recommend RAID 50? Did you note see what happened to Linus' system (think it was also RAID 50, might be wrong, going off memory)? He doesn't have the need to requirements for that kind of setup, that's just complexity for shits and giggles.

[Syaoran74]

7 hours ago, Droidbot said:

sn't require a graphics card. 

1) right i forgot running headless so i stick with the asus board ( i have both btw just the gigabyte was in my main that i was willing to swap out) i also have a i5-2500 lying around but figured might be over kill for my purposes 

2) i remember readin somewhere that raid 5/6 wasnt recommended so i accepted that and decided to leave it non raided (jbod??) but have 2 drives in raid 1 for important stuff.

 

3)i think for now i just want it up and running asap i'll leave the learning to the next encounter and so forth. so from the sounds of what you've said unraid?

the 4x2tbs were a donation/loot from work so yea why not make a nas hehe while the last 2 were just on hand in other pcs so ripped them out to be the raid 1

[maxtch]

You can get a used LSI 9260-8i (or whatever equivalent part IBM was using that can be flashed with stock LSI firmware) or HP P410i and use that to throw your drives into a hardware RAID-50. A hardware RAID-50 have as good performance as some lower-end SSD in some cases especially when a BBU is used to preserve the cache and enable the use of an write-back cache.

 

If you are going with hardware RAID there is zero point minding the CPU performance or SATA ports as the hardware RAID card handles that instead of the motherboard or processor. Then you can pair this to pretty much the cheapest ECC-capable motherboard and processor you can find and throw some ECC RAM in there. Get ECC memory unless you are okay with occasional data corruption during copy.

 

I have an über-cheap system that runs on a second-hand Asus P5BV-C I acquired for US$30, 8GB of DDR2 ECC memory I bought for US$10 and a Core 2 Quad I acquired for US$25.

[Mikensan]

@Blake made a lot of good points. Just to add to it, I'm using a Celeron G1610 - my Raidz1 (Raid5) does about 400-500mbytes per second read write, and my raidz2(raid6) suffers greatly - ~90mbps. So anything more than a single parity and as he said, the speeds will drop.

 

The i5 might not be a terrible idea if you plan to run virtual machines from the same box :-)

 

It sounds like you'll be using the NAS for live data (stuff you're actively working on) - unRaid operates at the speed of a single disk because it doesn't stripe. You'd have to get creative with a hardware raid to see performance. Otherwise it is a solid and easy NAS. It uses btrfs for data integrity.

 

FreeNAS can be more expensive for a "proper" setup - strongly recommended to use ECC so you need both a CPU and motherboard that support EEC as well as ECC ram. I personally use FreeNAS and find it very pleasant. Initial configuration is not as easy as unraid.. on a 1-10, 1 being easy 10 being hard, unraid is about a 2 and FreeNAS is about a 5. FreeNAS uses ZFS for data integrity.

 

I don't have any experience with Open mediavault or rockstor, but I did read rockstor uses btrfs which uses checksums similar to ZFS to make sure your data doesn't get corrupted. However from looking over rockstor's FAQs, it seems like they don't offer much GUI love.

[Blake]

10 hours ago, Syaoran74 said:

1) right i forgot running headless so i stick with the asus board ( i have both btw just the gigabyte was in my main that i was willing to swap out) i also have a i5-2500 lying around but figured might be over kill for my purposes 

2) i remember readin somewhere that raid 5/6 wasnt recommended so i accepted that and decided to leave it non raided (jbod??) but have 2 drives in raid 1 for important stuff.

 

3)i think for now i just want it up and running asap i'll leave the learning to the next encounter and so forth. so from the sounds of what you've said unraid?

the 4x2tbs were a donation/loot from work so yea why not make a nas hehe while the last 2 were just on hand in other pcs so ripped them out to be the raid 1

Linus has a video, just copy what he did (think it was the 2gamers 1cpu video, but only the first half would apply to you).

Process is (simplified):

1. download iso.

2. copy iso to usb.

3. make usb bootable.

4. boot from usb, choose the install option.

5. At some point in the setup you give it an IP address (just next your way through it).

6. on another computer, open web browser, and navigate to the ip address set.

7. click through the gui to setup shares, etc.

 

If you want to do the RAID one thing, just after the bios posts, there will be a screen for the on board RAID controller initialising, there will be a button it tells you to press to configure a raid, press it and do it here.

 

8 hours ago, maxtch said:

You can get a used LSI 9260-8i (or whatever equivalent part IBM was using that can be flashed with stock LSI firmware) or HP P410i and use that to throw your drives into a hardware RAID-50. A hardware RAID-50 have as good performance as some lower-end SSD in some cases especially when a BBU is used to preserve the cache and enable the use of an write-back cache.

 

If you are going with hardware RAID there is zero point minding the CPU performance or SATA ports as the hardware RAID card handles that instead of the motherboard or processor. Then you can pair this to pretty much the cheapest ECC-capable motherboard and processor you can find and throw some ECC RAM in there. Get ECC memory unless you are okay with occasional data corruption during copy.

 

I have an über-cheap system that runs on a second-hand Asus P5BV-C I acquired for US$30, 8GB of DDR2 ECC memory I bought for US$10 and a Core 2 Quad I acquired for US$25.

Not always, you will find that a lot of the cheaper RAID cards, still offload the Parity Calculation to the CPU.

[maxtch]

On 2/11/2016 at 7:00 AM, Blake said:

~ snip ~

 

Not always, you will find that a lot of the cheaper RAID cards, still offload the Parity Calculation to the CPU.

Neither LSI 9260-8i nor HP P410 does this. Any RAID card that comes with onboard cache will have to perform the calulation on its own, and my friend's LSI 9260-8i never failed him so far. Also one of my two RAID cards, 3ware 9750-8i, have the same circuit as LSI 9260-8i (identical to its same tier sibling LSI 9261-8i)