Help me build a NAS?

[Craigathorn]

Want to build a NAS with quite a bit of expansion opportunities. No idea how powerful the machine needs to be to handle, so if you could suggest parts and specs that would be great!

 

dont worry about budget, but cheaper the better obviously. This is very early planning stages  

[Rohime]

What initial and total capacity is needed ?

 

What budget?

 

Do you need backup (local and offsite) to fit in your budget?

 

What network (connection) performance do you need (data transfer rates, and number of concurrent transfers)?

[Craigathorn]

1 minute ago, Rohime said:

What initial and total capacity is needed ?

Going to start small with probably just a 4tb or 8tb drive, but have the capability to handle 10-15 drives in total as I might set up a raid array for protection

[Craigathorn]

P.s. How come some HDD are labelled as NAS hdd? Are they different and can not be used in a normal OS system?

[Craigathorn]

4 minutes ago, Rohime said:

What initial and total capacity is needed ?

 

What budget?

 

Do you need backup (local and offsite) to fit in your budget?

 

What network (connection) performance do you need (data transfer rates, and number of concurrent transfers)?

It's only for a home network so 4 pcs would probably be the max to use it at once

 

as I said, might make a raid array for terms of backup, no offsite needed and budget would be small for this project as I've just spent quite a whack on my new gaming build

[knightslugger]

For you r needs, i'd hold off on a build, unless you have an old machine laying around.

[Craigathorn]

2 minutes ago, knightslugger said:

For you r needs, i'd hold off on a build, unless you have an old machine laying around.

I've got an old machine laying around, just trying to troubleshoot why it won't post which I'll be working on tonight haha  

[Rohime]

30 minutes ago, Craigathorn said:

How come some HDD are labelled as NAS hdd?

NAS drives are the mid-level drives that are designed to be a) Always on and b) in RAID arrays.

Other types (like "green" drives) are designed for low power and to spin-down (turn off) when not in use.

Other types (like "enterprise" drives) are designed for long term consistent performance, etc.

etc, etc, ... you get the point.   You should use "NAS" drives or better (Enterprise drives) for RAID and NAS systems.

 

BTW:  RAID is NOT backup.  It's redundancy, big difference.

 

-------------------

 

So to answer the question ... you need to find

- a Motherboard first with

a) Lots of SATA Ports.

b) Lots of options for additional RAID and / or PCI SATA expansion cards.

- a case with lots of drive bays.

 

http://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/discontinued-products/array-r2-mini-itx-nas-case

http://www.gigabyte.com.au/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5613#sp

( 6 x SATA, + 6 x USB3 for expansion).

[knightslugger]

well chances are quite high that your old machine will work just fine for what you want to do, overkill in fact. hell I've got a 6 year old Pentium E5800 lenovo pulling my local backup duties. Bought a cheap Intel dual port NIC for fail-over or teaming (later on) and four 1TB WD Reds for 24/7 operation and redundancy, all running off 8gb of DDR3. Just ordered some UPSs for it so i have better up time and better data security.

[Rohime]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor  ($144.99 @ Amazon Canada) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-B150N-GSM Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($131.50 @ Vuugo) 
Memory: Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($44.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Storage: A-Data Premier SP550 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($49.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($179.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($179.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Case: Fractal Design Array R2 Mini ITX Desktop Case w/300W Power Supply 
Total: $731.45
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-09-28 10:16 EDT-0400

 

1 x Boot disk (small).

2 x RAID1 x 4TB (4TB usable) - expandable to 5 x 4TB (16TB usable when in RAID5) internally.  

Also expandable using external USB 3 enclosures.

Deploy FreeNAS as the Operating System.http://www.freenas.org/ 

[knightslugger]

why the SSD? he's not going to need a high speed cache for backups or as a media center. the RAM should take care of that just fine.

[Craigathorn]

@Rohime @knightslugger thank you both for this, I shall test everything out with my old PC when I get home as I was having problems getting it to boot and then if I manage to get it to boot I'll try and find out the specs on it to post here so you can tell me if it will be sufficient or not if that's ok??

 

pretty sure it's running on one of the first gen quad cores and only ddr2 though  

[Rohime]

3 minutes ago, Craigathorn said:

@Rohime @knightslugger thank you both for this, I shall test everything out with my old PC when I get home as I was having problems getting it to boot and then if I manage to get it to boot I'll try and find out the specs on it to post here so you can tell me if it will be sufficient or not if that's ok??

 

pretty sure it's running on one of the first gen quad cores and only ddr2 though  

Should still do the job _IF_ you can get enough disk into it.

 

Try installing FreeNAS directly on it ... 

[knightslugger]

Just now, Craigathorn said:

@Rohime @knightslugger thank you both for this, I shall test everything out with my old PC when I get home as I was having problems getting it to boot and then if I manage to get it to boot I'll try and find out the specs on it to post here so you can tell me if it will be sufficient or not if that's ok??

 

pretty sure it's running on one of the first gen quad cores and only ddr2 though  

still plenty. backups do not wring the neck out of a system. less than 10% CPU load for a hourly back-up.

[Rohime]

7 minutes ago, knightslugger said:

why the SSD? he's not going to need a high speed cache for backups or as a media center. the RAM should take care of that just fine.

Its only to keep the installed binarys separate to the data disk.  no other reason really.

[knightslugger]

4 minutes ago, Rohime said:

Its only to keep the installed binarys separate to the data disk.  no other reason really.

Ah. I dig it. But it doesn't sound like he'll be running virtualizations though. no backup to a back up, no plex... just a straight up simple NAS. i mean he could get away with a WD Cloud drive and probably still be just fine...

 

I understand the desire to tinker though. 

[Rohime]

7 hours ago, knightslugger said:

Ah. I dig it. But it doesn't sound like he'll be running virtualizations though. no backup to a back up, no plex... just a straight up simple NAS. i mean he could get away with a WD Cloud drive and probably still be just fine...

 

I understand the desire to tinker though. 

My observation of the OP's style of question is that over time a "simple NAS" will transform into a "home server" as soon as the users start to understand what they are really capable of (oh, so much more...)

[knightslugger]

something the OP needs to keep in mind then is once you build a RAID, you can't UNbuild a RAID... at least to the point where you keep your data.

 

the larger you make your array, the more likely you are to encounter multiple drive failures, even during repair. You can make them bigger, but you can't make them more redundant. RAIDz1 is RAIDz1 forever. You can't add another parity disk to the array to make it RAIDz2. I've personally found the PLEX Media server plug-in super handy. I recommend it, and the several good youtube videos on the web demonstrating setup.