Recycling an old Dell Optiplex into a NAS

[Munich]

Hi guys,

 

Me and 2 friends run a small software firm at home and I'd like to setup a NAS for us to keep our work and entertainment files. I've bought 3x3TB WD Red hard drives, and we have an old Dell Optiplex (Core2Duo, 8GB DDR2) that I'd like to recycle for this.

 

Now this computer doesn't have ECC memory support, so using FreeNAS + NFS makes me a bit anxious as we can't lose the data. I was thinking of having the 3 HDDs in a RAID5 setup so we'd have ~6TB of usable storage. Everyone I see using FreeNAS goes for ZFS, is ZFS so crucial? The box won't be transcoding or streaming, just a plain NAS storage attached to Macs, Windows and Linux boxes, and nightly backups being done every night. 

 

I've heard of unRaid on LTT videos and how much they love it. I'd rather use something open source, but I don't know how FreeNAS and unRaid differ when not using ZFS. Should I go for FreeNAS + no ZFS, or unRAID  [$59 =( ]?

 

 

[SCHISCHKA]

i wouldn't worry too much about ECC if its just you and a friend using it. I'd be more concerned about having a UPS.

ZFS is better than raid5 (ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Data_integrity).

Maybe you could request an explanation of ZFS in techquickies?

[Munich]

17 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

i wouldn't worry too much about ECC if its just you and a friend using it. I'd be more concerned about having a UPS.

ZFS is better than raid5 (ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Data_integrity).

Maybe you could request an explanation of ZFS in techquickies?

 

 

I know that ZFS is not only for redundancy, but also for data integrity, but I see many people saying that without ECC memory, I can get my whole system corrupted as regular memory will just let any error pass by. I don't know the chances for this to happen though. It's not a huge NAS setup, but we're going to be storing college work, design and software work, stuff that we cannot lose =( Are you saying that ECC is not necessary for small arrays? (3 HDDs)

[SCHISCHKA]

1 hour ago, Munich said:

 

I know that ZFS is not only for redundancy, but also for data integrity, but I see many people saying that without ECC memory, I can get my whole system corrupted as regular memory will just let any error pass by. I don't know the chances for this to happen though. It's not a huge NAS setup, but we're going to be storing college work, design and software work, stuff that we cannot lose =( Are you saying that ECC is not necessary for small arrays? (3 HDDs)

I'm saying for two people you're not going to be pushing your hardware very hard and high end server components are not necessary. Iv been running my NAS on cheap hardware, just keep regular backups. You could always do a checksum of your files if you're really concerned

[Eniqmatic]

You shouldn't be using anything like this without a backup, no matter which option you choose. Very very important data should always be backed up elsewhere also. If you can do this, then I wouldn't worry too much about the ECC RAM for your use case. How much space do you actually need, could get one more drive and do a RAIDz2?

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 hours ago, Eniqmatic said:

You shouldn't be using anything like this without a backup, no matter which option you choose. Very very important data should always be backed up elsewhere also. If you can do this, then I wouldn't worry too much about the ECC RAM for your use case. How much space do you actually need, could get one more drive and do a RAIDz2?

I don't see a reason to do raid z2 with 4 drives, seems pointless. You might as well run a raid 10, esp since you can't expand a raidz.

 

Id probably run a raid z with 3 drives. A backup will make if so if there is a drive failure and anouther one goes kaput you still have data.

[Eniqmatic]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id probably run a raid z with 3 drives. A backup will make if so if there is a drive failure and anouther one goes kaput you still have data.

Please explain how a Raidz with 3 drives as you would run, is going to fair better than a Raidz2 with 4 drives? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Eniqmatic said:

Please explain how a Raidz with 3 drives as you would run, is going to fair better than a Raidz2 with 4 drives? 

Raidz uses the same amount of drives as raid5, so 3 drives gives you the space of 2 with a total of 3 drives, while raidz2 gives you the space of 2 drives with 4 drives.

[Eniqmatic]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Raidz uses the same amount of drives as raid5, so 3 drives gives you the space of 2 with a total of 3 drives, while raidz2 gives you the space of 2 drives with 4 drives.

Thanks for telling me something that everyone knows, whilst not explaining/answering the question.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Eniqmatic said:

Thanks for telling me something that everyone knows, whilst not explaining/answering the question.

It won't be better than a raidz2, but raidz2(or raid6) doesn't make sense for 4 drives, you might as well you raid 10.

 

A backup would solve the slightly higher failure rates with a raidz(but still very low with 3 drives)

[Eniqmatic]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

It won't be better than a raidz2, but raidz2(or raid6) doesn't make sense for 4 drives, you might as well you raid 10.

 

A backup would solve the slightly higher failure rates with a raidz(but still very low with 3 drives)

Why doesn't it make sense? The data loss rate probability is much lower with 4 drives in RAIDz2 than it is with 3 drives in RAIDz, that's why it makes sense.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Eniqmatic said:

Why doesn't it make sense? The data loss rate probability is much lower with 4 drives in RAIDz2 than it is with 3 drives in RAIDz, that's why it makes sense.

Id use a raid 10 over a raidz2 with 4 drives. 

 

 

For 4 drives, the failure rate is low with raid 5/raidz and your better off getting a backup drive than adding anouther parity drive won't help you with randsomware, fire, or a evil user.

[Eniqmatic]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id use a raid 10 over a raidz2 with 4 drives. 

 

 

For 4 drives, the failure rate is low with raid 5/raidz and your better off getting a backup drive as adding anouther parity drive won't help you with randsomware, fire, or a evil user.

I'm not disputing that, but since the original post was about a FreeNAS question, was are talking about RAIDz and RAIDz2, not RAID 10.

 

OK, I found a website for you to use to show you: 

 

Same inputs, all that has changed is the disk number:

 

3 drive config: https://www.memset.com/tools/raid-calculator/

 

4 drive config:

 

[Munich]

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

Yea raid10 and raidz2 would give me better failure tolerance than raidz/raid5, but this won't help me in case of corruption at all, because I'm not using ECC memory (is this right?). This is my main concern. I've never had two RED drives fail at the same time, though there's still a possibility, so I think we could take offsite backups.

 

Raid10/raidz2 still means that only 1 drive can fail though, just like raid5/raidz. Please correct me if I'm wrong?

[Eniqmatic]

7 hours ago, Munich said:

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

Yea raid10 and raidz2 would give me better failure tolerance than raidz/raid5, but this won't help me in case of corruption at all, because I'm not using ECC memory (is this right?). This is my main concern. I've never had two RED drives fail at the same time, though there's still a possibility, so I think we could take offsite backups.

 

Raid10/raidz2 still means that only 1 drive can fail though, just like raid5/raidz. Please correct me if I'm wrong?

No Raidz2 gives you 2 drive failures, RAID10 can give you *up to* 2 drive failures but at the same time your whole array could fail on the 2nd drive. RAIDz2 gives you 2 drive failures and you will be fine regardless.

 

There are some interesting cases from both sides of the camp on ECC vs Non-ECC ZFS. I urge you to do your own reading of this subject as you may be surprised. Many people will just blindly say something without any knowledge on what it is they are saying, they've just seen someone else on the internet say it.

 

Are you going to be backing this up?

[ultimatemythbuster]

On 10/26/2016 at 7:59 PM, Munich said:

-snip-

 

 

What model of Optiplex do you have?  I have 20+ Optiplex 740 PCs all with bad capacitors.  (2006 vintage)  I wouldn't trust a 740 for anything anymore.  I always have users asking me why their computers are so slow.  It's because they are 10 years old and your department head doesn't want to spend the money to replace them.  I don't even want to think about our 10+ year old switches (which I should probably go make backups of the configurations now).  (Sorry for the rant.)

[Munich]

Alright boys, I'm almost giving up on this Optiplex  The lack of ECC memory worries me, and the comment by @ultimatemythbuster above helped lol.

I don't want to have 6TB of offsite backups all the time (that would be $60/month on Amazon Glacier, or a $240 6TB drive).

 

I also have an old server though. It's a Supermicro X7DCA-L, with 2x Xeon L5420 Quad Core 2.5 GHz, 8GB DDR2 ECC. It's old and it's DDR2, but at least it's registered. I don't have a rack to mount it, but that's ok. (just saw a nice 2U vertical rack mount for $50)

 

The downside is power consumption. From the net, I see it needs 2amps of power in average, that would be 172kWh per month, which imo is a lot. I'm thinking about taking one of the 2 Intel L5420 out. For a normal NAS with some Plex transcoding, is a single L5420 2.5Ghz enough to do the job?