Another NAS build guidance thread!

[DG2assassin]

I am going to build a NAS that will be capable of 10 Gb in the future. 10 gig network cards are still too expensive for me at the moment, so I will be using 1 gig until then. With that being said, when I upgrade this system to 10 gig I would like it to be a "simple" put in the new NIC and done. I have a z87 mobo that I plan on using for this build. I am also planning on using free NAS with their raid 10 equivalent, and utilizing hardware raid. I have two questions for this build. One, can I get away with G1820? And two, what is a good raid card for my needs? I know my way around a computer, but I have never ventured into raid cards.

[Electronics Wizardy]

If your using free nas then use their raid 5 equ. There no reason to use raid 10. FreeNAS is not designed to use hardware raid, it meant to be used with zfs and its raid system and hardware raid will make it worse at keeping your data safe. Use the sata on your mobo  or get a hba(host bus adapter) if you need more drives like the lsi 9201 16i.

[DG2assassin]

Thanks for the raid card info. Correct me if I am wrong on this, but I thought raid 10 has more speed then 5? I understand that 10 is more expensive and I will lose half of the total storage capacity. 

[scottyseng]

9 hours ago, DG2assassin said:

Thanks for the raid card info. Correct me if I am wrong on this, but I thought raid 10 has more speed then 5? I understand that 10 is more expensive and I will lose half of the total storage capacity. 

RAID 10 is faster, but not by much. You can only lose two drives if they're the right drives (One different from the other mirrored pair). RAID6 will let you lose any two drives safely. RAID10 has no parity, where RAID6 does (A little harder on the CPU to crunch). There's pros and cons to both. If you're using freeNAS, you don't need a RAID card, but a HBA card. Though if you have enough onboard SATA ports, you could use those instead.

 

That CPU should work fine and you should try to get as much RAM into it as possible. I would personally recommend ECC, but you'd have to buy a Intel Cxxx series motherboard for proper support and those don't come cheap.

[DG2assassin]

Quote

If you're using freeNAS, you don't need a RAID card, but a HBA card. Though if you have enough onboard SATA ports, you could use those instead.

And basically a HBA enables the ability to add more drives and increases system speed with big arrays, correct? Also, am I right in thinking that because I am going to use 4 drives, the speed benefits will not be very much?

[scottyseng]

5 hours ago, DG2assassin said:

And basically a HBA enables the ability to add more drives and increases system speed with big arrays, correct? Also, am I right in thinking that because I am going to use 4 drives, the speed benefits will not be very much?

Well, if you have the ports on the motherboard, I would just use the onboard SATA ports.

 

HBA just lets you add more drives if you ran out of SATA ports. It does not increase speed (It just allows you to connect more drives) because it does not do any RAID calculations itself. If you did have a bottleneck with the onboard SATA (or you ran out of ports), this would fix that (by allowing you to have more drives hooked up), but with hard drives, you won't come close to bottlenecking the onboard SATA ports.

[DG2assassin]

8 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Well, if you have the ports on the motherboard, I would just use the onboard SATA ports.

 

HBA just lets you add more drives if you ran out of SATA ports. It does not increase speed (It just allows you to connect more drives) because it does not do any RAID calculations itself. If you did have a bottleneck with the onboard SATA (or you ran out of ports), this would fix that (by allowing you to have more drives hooked up), but with hard drives, you won't come close to bottlenecking the onboard SATA ports.

Ah, thanks for the clarification and your help!