NAS/Plex Server build

[Pixs]

Hi there,

 

I have been following the LTT channel for while now but never took a tour on the forums. 

Now that I plan to replace/upgrade my file storage at home I think this is a good time to join the board

 

I want to replace the way I store all my files. Currently I have a synology NAS for my "sensitive" data and my media are stored on several external HDD which I connect to my Linux DVB-S2 receiver. Not very efficient!

 

I was hopping that the community could help me to select the best hardware I'll need. 

 

Here are a few thoughts:

- I want the case to be rack mount, if possible with hot swap bays because it looks badass  but it has to stay on the budget. 

- The same machine will be use to store my "critical" data and as Plex Media Server

- My critical data aren't big files: it is pdf, text documents, spread sheets, some photos. For now it is only 300GB and it represents 12 years of work. For that part I thought that two 1TB drives mounted in RAID1 would be a great idea. Those data are also backed up in a remote location. 

- For my media I thought about four 4TB drives mounted in RAID10, not really sure about that...

- Possibility to extend the storage capacity in the future.

 

Could you give some tips about the hardware I should buy? I think that 500€, yes I'm European, should be the max budget (storage not included).

 

What I currently have at home: nothing too good:

- Asus P5Q-Pro

- Intel Q6600

- Some DDR2 memory!

- Some SSDs that I'll use for the os (Freenas or unraid?)

Yeah, haven't followed the technology for some years now

 

Well, I think this is it.

Thank you for considering this and sorry for the eventual bad writing in English

 

 

[Smite]

A few tid bits to catch you up on. First no to ssd's for the OS unless you just want it. freenas\nas4free etc runs best on a usb stick and ssd's are just throwing money away unless you have spares laying around with 0 use. The CPU etc is fine what you want is the most memory you can get in there. I used a similar build for my home freenas build.

While raid is a good for thought these NAS's run on ZFS file system which works best with JBOD disks. True JBOD controllers typically don't have a raid mode, as the ones that do usually offer a raid0 with 1 disk mode making things clunky.   Raids are Hardware based solutions that otherwise is ignored. You will get the same "Raid" like protection and speed with the NAS os with out need for wonky Raid utilities. For cases that are rack mounted start with how big you want and tune from there. 2-4U is ideal with 3.5" drives and non proprietary server hardware, imo. Then go for bays etc. 

I hope this is helpful is someway I would read up more on the nas OS you want to use first and foremost. 

[Pixs]

Thank you for your answer. 

 

I think I'll go with Freenas. 

 

If I'm right this does not require raid controller at all?

Is this true that it requires 1GB of RAM per TB of storage?

 

My P5Q-Pro motherboard with my intel Q6600 will do the job for Plex?

The thing is that the P5Q only supports 16GB of RAM.

 

Thanks for your help. 

 

[Sevilla]

3 hours ago, Pixs said:

Thank you for your answer. 

 

I think I'll go with Freenas. 

 

If I'm right this does not require raid controller at all?

Is this true that it requires 1GB of RAM per TB of storage?

 

My P5Q-Pro motherboard with my intel Q6600 will do the job for Plex?

The thing is that the P5Q only supports 16GB of RAM.

 

Thanks for your help. 

 

FreeNAS doesn't require 1GB per 1TB, but it does recommend it. The more RAM you feed it, the happier it'll be.

 

For Plex, it depends whether it's encoding locally or remotely. I'm sure given it's a quad core CPU it'll do fine, but don't expect more than maybe 2 1080p streams at once at best quality. 

[yippy3000]

About RAID, both FreeNAS and UnRAID explicitly say that they DO NOT support RAID cards and using them can actually result in data loss.  Both OS's need direct access to the drives and their SMART access as they manage the raid like redundancy themselves.

 

Key differences:

 

FreeNAS:

- Has great data integrity protection

- Must have all drives the same size and you cannot add drives to an array, the only way to expand is to replace ALL drives with larger ones.

 

Unraid:

- Can accept any mix of drives you want

- Effectively only supports 1 large pool of drives (plus a cache pool)