Looking to start a nas

[BrandonPonYoutube]

Hey ltt community,

I am looking for some info on where to go with a nas project ID like to start.  I have some old drives and some storage that I'd like to put together for network access and kinda like my personal cloud.  I would like to also run Plex on this server and host a Minecraft box as well.  I am intrigued by the ltt video about using server hardware but not set on that.  Where do I go from here.  I'm not super savvy with OS stuff but I'm not one to shy away from learning something new. I know freenas and unraid are options but what about windows server?  Thanks for reading I hope you can point me to what I should consider for a good nas os

[79wjd]

Windows server is an option, but from what I understand (which isn't much as I have no experience with it) it's much more complicated and basically requires a RAID card if you want to do any sort of RAID reliably (don't quote me on any of that though as I may be entirely wrong). 

 

What at drives do you currently have? If they're small/old it's probably not a great idea due to reliability reasons (I threw two old drives I had lying around into my FreeNAS server and both of them are basically dying after a few months -- one because it was pulled out of a nine year old enclosure and was one of seagates troublesome drives, and the other is a wd green with 30,000 hours on it as well as 1.2 million head parks -- four times what it's rated for). 

 

How much are you looking to spend (ecluding drives)? How many users will be using plex? What other data will you be storing? How important is that data that's being stored? When you answer any of the above questions do think long and hard about what your plans are for the future going forward five or so years. 

 

Ive personally only ever used FreeNAS so I can't really comment much about alternatives although there are others I've heard good things about (Nas4Free having a lower requirement than FreeNAS, unraid, and Windows server). You don't necessarily need server grade hardware, but it improves reliability and in the case of ZFS (FreeNAS) improves data integrity -- which may or may not matter that much (ECC memory can prevent bitrot--data accidentally being changed/corrupted--now for video this doesn't matter too much since you can think of bitrot as changing the color of one pixel out of a couple million, but for more sensitive data it can matter more).

 

hopefully I didn't miss anything and hopefully I didn't start rambling and lose focus. 

[BrandonPonYoutube]

55 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

 

 

What at drives do you currently have? If they're small/old it's probably not a great idea due to reliability reasons (I threw two old drives I had lying around into my FreeNAS server and both of them are basically dying after a few months -- one because it was pulled out of a nine year old enclosure and was one of seagates troublesome drives, and the other is a wd green with 30,000 hours on it as well as 1.2 million head parks -- four times what it's rated for). 

The drives I currently have are older.  for this build i would go after some WD Reds for parity drives and want to add the older drives as additional storage. Can I just regular drives without having them formatted and losing their data?

 

How much are you looking to spend (ecluding drives)? How many users will be using plex? What other data will you be storing? How important is that data that's being stored? When you answer any of the above questions do think long and hard about what your plans are for the future going forward five or so years. 

Price isnt a super concern, Id say excluding drives i wouldnt spend outside of 1000 USD.  

No more than three Plex users.  

torrents, photos, business docs, full system backups for a 1 tb box, and completed video projects are what i would want to store there.  

 

As an alternate solution.  I have a dell XPS 8500 with a 700w PSU a 3770 and now 16GB with a r9 280 as my daily driver that i would be willing to configure as a Nas and move on to a new desktop for gaming and stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

[79wjd]

7 minutes ago, BrandonPonYoutube said:

 

No, you'd have to format the drives and transfer everything back onto them. WD Reds is a good idea, and if you wanted to reuse your current drives that would be fine as well, although I would be very careful with what I put on those random drives. 

 

For three (1080p transcoded) plex users an i3 would be ideal. Although you'll need more power to accomodate a minecraft server (and that I don't know much about, so I can't really comment on how much more power you would need). If you wanted to use FreeNAS, then I would recommend using ECC memory to protect your data (especially since you're planning to use RAID5/6 equivalent), which would mean your current system wouldn't be a viable option. If you'd use Windows Server, then ECC is much less important, although I believe you would want to get a RAID card (instead of using your motherboards on-board RAID), and you would thus be able to reuse most of your hardware. But keep in mind that good RAID cards aren't particularly cheap. 

 

My rough recommendation (since I don't know about the minecraft server, so i'll overestimate a bit) would be to go with FreeNAS, a Xeon E3 1231v3 ($250), a Supermicro X10SLL-F-O ($130), and 16gb of ECC memory ($100~), and then whatever case/psu you wanted and then either get a cheap SSD for the boot drive or a pair of >= 8gb flash drives (I would go with a Skylake Xeon E3 1230v5 if you wanted to have more than 32gb of RAM now or in the future, but right now FreeNAS doesn't support USB booting on Skylake, but FreeNAS 10.0 will).