Advice for a NAS

[AllanDavidson]

I've been wanting to buy a NAS unit for quite some time, but the high prices always scared me, usually more than $1000 for a Diskless 8-bay unit, and these commercial units are way more powerful than I need, so now I am thinking of build my own unit.

 

I dont want to run a complex application server, or store/run VMs or use it as a rendering/gaming machine, I just want a secure and fast storage for my audio/video files.

 

I am planning to build a 8x4TB NAS in RAID 10, and I don't know if I could have RAID 10 with ZFS, and I'm also wondering what motherboard/psu/cpu I need, 'cuz I see some people using low power ARM or Atom boards with 4GBs, and then I ser some people running powerfull Dual Xeons with 128GB and I am completelly lost. I'm also not sure with OS should I use, or to go with unRaid.

 

I just want a small, silent, and simple NAS that provides audio/video files over Ethernet/wireless that can be acessed by 4 different Windows Notebooks in real time.

 

Thank you!

[leadeater]

Split in to own thread and moved to Servers and NAS

[AllanDavidson]

Thanks mod!

[AshleyAshes]

You may want to consider a FlexRAID setup like what I did here:

 

 

Asside from OS and FlexRAID licenses, all you really need is 'Some kind of case that will hold the number of drives you want it to hold', 'Some kinda motherboard and CPU, dual core is fine, ensure it has enough SATA ports and PCIE slots to expand with drive controllers as needed', and 'You should probably invest in a decent PSU for 24/7 operation'.

 

FlexRAID certainly isn't RAID10 but, well, first, why do you even want RAID10 to serve media to some notebooks?  You'll basically saturate a 1gbit network on RAID5 anyway.  RAID10 is just adding excess cost.  FlexRAID uses snapshot based parity so it generates parity data for every file and there is a dedicated parity drive, you can survive as many drive failures as you have parity drives.  Even if you lose two drives and only have one parity drive, you only lose the data on the dead drives, the other drives remain intact.  It's not all or nothing like with most RAID arrangements.  You can also add drives over time, why invest in drives today when you can add drives as  demand grows and drive prices go down.  The only requirement is that the parity drive must be as large or larger than any storage drive.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, AllanDavidson said:

8x4TB NAS in RAID 10,

Use raidz or raid 5. Raid 10 is only usefull when you need iops. Raid 5 is faster with sequenical, but that doesn't really matter a gig connections is a limit with a single drive.

 

If you want a small simple nas, buy something like a synology or qnap nas. There about 300-500 for a 4 bay, and do everything so you don't have to wory about it.

[paddy-stone]

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/Hs8RYr

 

Just change case to one you want, and add more hard drives for the actual components.

The CPU should be enough for your needs, and can be swapped out for another at a later date if you need to, PSU is probably overkill, but with a 10 year warranty plus being a tier 1 is a great buy, should also help to keep it quiet as even under load should come nowhere near 50% power, so fans should spin up at all/often.

 

But agree that for your usage case you mentioned a pre-built would possibly be better. But if you want to build one, then run Freenas on it it's very easily do-able.

[AllanDavidson]

20 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

Asside from OS and FlexRAID licenses, all you really need is 'Some kind of case that will hold the number of drives you want it to hold', 'Some kinda motherboard and CPU, dual core is fine, ensure it has enough SATA ports and PCIE slots to expand with drive controllers as needed', and 'You should probably invest in a decent PSU for 24/7 operation'.

You're right, this is what get me lost, what kind of hardware I need, since there is to many options and I have zero experience with NAS, so I didn't knew what kind of hardware I need, but you are right.

About RAID10, I need the speed, this is why I'm going to use RAID10 instead of RAID6, because I'm storing uncompressed lossless audio/video files in the NAS and the Notebooks will work with these files in real-time, with a throughput of ~50MB/s each notebook, so I need the LAN to perform as fast as possible, just like the files where locally stored in the Notebook.
 

19 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Use raidz or raid 5. Raid 10 is only usefull when you need iops. Raid 5 is faster with sequenical, but that doesn't really matter a gig connections is a limit with a single drive.

 

If you want a small simple nas, buy something like a synology or qnap nas. There about 300-500 for a 4 bay, and do everything so you don't have to wory about it.

I'm going to store sentitive data in the NAS, so I'm inclined to the path that gives me the best security with the greatest performance, I need the files to be available with great speed (raid 0), and I also need a contant backup in case one driver (raid 1), so I think Raid 10 is better than Raidz2 or Raidz3 in my case, but I can be wrong!

 

13 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/Hs8RYr

 

Just change case to one you want, and add more hard drives for the actual components.

The CPU should be enough for your needs, and can be swapped out for another at a later date if you need to, PSU is probably overkill, but with a 10 year warranty plus being a tier 1 is a great buy, should also help to keep it quiet as even under load should come nowhere near 50% power, so fans should spin up at all/often.

 

But agree that for your usage case you mentioned a pre-built would possibly be better. But if you want to build one, then run Freenas on it it's very easily do-able.

Thanks for the input, the FreeNas forum's Hardware Guide recommend nothing but ECC RAM and Server motherboards, eveno for home/small bussiness, so the parts price of my simple NAS were higher than my high-end PC. I saw many and many NAS using small boards with 65w power supplies that I don't even know if they where better than standard PCs.

If I'm assembling my own NAS with Standard PC Parts, I'm thinking of a high-quality fanless PSU with ~450w, that should be enough to power the whole NAS with 45% load (max efficiency).

Or buying a old server would be better?

Thank you all!

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, AllanDavidson said:

About RAID10, I need the speed, this is why I'm going to use RAID10 instead of RAID6, because I'm storing uncompressed lossless audio/video files in the NAS and the Notebooks will work with these files in real-time, with a throughput of ~50MB/s each notebook, so I need the LAN to perform as fast as possible, just like the files where locally stored in the Notebook.

My mistake.  I assumed you meant media and audio files compressed for consumption, not source files.  Yeah, no that's a whole different animal for sure.

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, AllanDavidson said:

going to store sentitive data in the NAS, so I'm inclined to the path that gives me the best security with the greatest performance, I need the files to be available with great speed (raid 0), and I also need a contant backup in case one driver (raid 1), so I think Raid 10 is better than Raidz2 or Raidz3 in my case, but I can be wrong

Raid 5 is faster with most data as you can read from 3 disks at once instead of 2. Also you get more space. 

 

 

Speed won't matter as as you limited by your network   a singe had can fill a gig network connection and raid will only be faster  

[AllanDavidson]

21 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

 

I'm thinking here... instead of having a huge NAS with decent hardware, and a very powerfull Working/Gaming PC, it would not be better to have just a single and very powerfull machine on a Antec P380 or Corisar 700D running both the media server and Windows?

A motherboard like the Asus P10S WS would give everything I need (Modern LGA1151, ECC Support, 8x SATAs + 2x M.2, 4xPCI-E 16x for extra SATA ports or Network ports) for $199, just lacking the IPMI.

Also, how would this work? Two VMs, one being the Windows, and the other being the FreeNas? This thread recommends to NOT use unRaid like Linus do.

 

[AshleyAshes]

2 minutes ago, AllanDavidson said:

I'm thinking here... instead of having a huge NAS with decent hardware, and a very powerfull Working/Gaming PC, it would not be better to have just a single and very powerfull machine on a Antec P380 or Corisar 700D running both the media server and Windows?

If this is a suggestion for my setup, the main motivation is to make things less complicated.  A gaming PC is a machine that, well, can crash a lot.  Games can be buggy, drivers can be buggy, hardware updates, the users is installing various updates that need reboots, and lots of other stuff that would threaten the stability of the storage server.  So if that box is down or rebooting, disassembled, or something else, that means my two HTPCs that primarily rely on the storage server's content to provided me with televisions and movies.

 

In simpler terms, if I'm having technical problems, how the heck am I supposed to enjoy American Pickers while I fix those problems?

 

Going with dedicated hardware may not be fancy and technical, but it archives reliability through total autonomy of the hardware.

[AllanDavidson]

8 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

If this is a suggestion for my setup

No no no, I just saw your Corsair case with tons of space for HDDs and I tought it would be a simple idea to use one single PC for both Working/NAS under unRaid or FreeNas (since the thread mentioned above sait do NOT use unRaid).

[AshleyAshes]

4 minutes ago, AllanDavidson said:

No no no, I just saw your Corsair case with tons of space for HDDs and I tought it would be a simple idea to use one single PC for both Working/NAS under unRaid or FreeNas (since the thread mentioned above sait do NOT use unRaid).

Well, in that case... Honestly my point largely stands.  Your gaming PC going down can take your storage server down at the same time. Which isn't a problem if only your gaming PC relies on that storage, but if other computers depend on that storage, they're dead in the water till your Gaming PC Combo is back up.

 

I mean, I can see many different 'service' VMs in one box, storage, webserver, databases, whatever, anything but a gaming PC.  When it comes to 24/7 uptime operation, that's just not something gaming PCs bring to the table.

[AllanDavidson]

4 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

 When it comes to 24/7 uptime operation, that's just not something gaming PCs bring to the table.

Thank you for your input.

Now I have to decide which way should I go, because "Ready NAS" like Thecus N8850 are expensive, they cost +$1200 while diskless

1) A cheap server like Dell T20 or Lenovo TS140 and add Ram and HDD or;
2) A ITX board like AsRock C2750D4I on a NAS case like Silverstone DS380.

[AshleyAshes]

Maybe LTT can give better input:

 

 

But if a budget is a concern, I say pick out a case that will hold the number of drives you need and then just put 'some kidna PC' in it.  You could recycle a cheap desktop or old parts or get new parts for a low powered dual core setup.  Again, add extra SATA controllers as needed, and then look at one of the good free open source software solutions such as NAS4Free or FreeNAS to turn that machine into a NAS storage appliance that you will only need to service through a web interface.

At my previous job I got to rebuild our main storage solution after our dual socket Xeon (Single core, dual socket Xeon!) running RAID5 on Ubuntu went kaput.  I took an old workstation that had an overkill Supermicro dual socket, quad core Xeon with 6GB of ECC RAM in it, stuck a cheap PCI-E SATA controller since the mobo didn't have enough onboard SATA ports, and used NAS4Free.  We stuffed 8 3TB WD Reds in it, set up ZFS with a hot spare and that thing could service the workstations in the office and spit out 2gbps to a 20 node render farm no problem.  Nas4FREE wasn't even running off a HDD, it was installed on an 8GB Kingston USB key stuck into the back of the machine.  The only 'new parts' were the HDDs, the SATA controller, and the USB key.  You could do the same with MUCH lower spec hardware.

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, AllanDavidson said:

Thank you for your input.

Now I have to decide which way should I go, because "Ready NAS" like Thecus N8850 are expensive, they cost +$1200 while diskless

1) A cheap server like Dell T20 or Lenovo TS140 and add Ram and HDD or;
2) A ITX board like AsRock C2750D4I on a NAS case like Silverstone DS380.

Do you actually need a NAS with 8 bays? With the large 6TB, 8TB and 10TB disks available now days, which will only get cheaper with time, could a 4 or 5 bay suffice?

[AllanDavidson]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Do you actually need a NAS with 8 bays? With the large 6TB, 8TB and 10TB disks available now days, which will only get cheaper with time, could a 4 or 5 bay suffice?

4x 8TB will be way more expensive and slower (due to RAID10) than 8x 4TB or 10x 4TB.

[AshleyAshes]

If this is for servicing a 1gbit network, you're really not going to find any advantage in RAID10.  RAID is also a kinda old approach these days. RAID-Z on NAS4Free or FreeNAS is a much smarter, more reliable, and more efficient solution.

[leadeater]

Just now, AllanDavidson said:

4x 8TB will be way more expensive and slower (due to RAID10) than 8x 4TB or 10x 4TB.

Well the speed difference while true (due to number of disks) won't matter since you'll be limited to network performance and not disk system performance. Also I'd never recommend RAID 10 for almost any NAS use case, RAID 10 is only faster in highly random write I/O which is really only applicable to database servers and storage hosting VMs. Every other scenario RAID 5/6 is actually faster than RAID 10, even more so when talking about hardware RAID controllers but that isn't what your after.

 

Anyway a QNAP TS-451+ 4 disk RAID 5 is capable of saturating 2x 1Gbps network connections in both read and write and is around $450US diskless. This is one of QNAP's most basic NAS's but as your aware the cost goes up very quickly as you go up in bay count and in model tier, it's mostly factored on number of bays which is why that 8 bay you linked was so expensive.

 

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/model.php?II=196&event=2

https://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TS-451-Personal-Quad-Core-Transcoding/dp/B015VNLGF8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481437720&sr=8-1&keywords=TS-451%2B

 

 

[AllanDavidson]

42 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

I took an old workstation that had an overkill Supermicro dual socket, quad core Xeon with 6GB of ECC RAM in it, stuck a cheap PCI-E SATA controller since the mobo didn't have enough onboard SATA ports, and used NAS4Free.  We stuffed 8 3TB WD Reds in it, set up ZFS with a hot spare and that thing could service the workstations in the office and spit out 2gbps to a 20 node render farm no problem.  Nas4FREE wasn't even running off a HDD, it was installed on an 8GB Kingston USB key stuck into the back of the machine.  The only 'new parts' were the HDDs, the SATA controller, and the USB key.  You could do the same with MUCH lower spec hardware.

Good Lord, I followed your tip and searched for old servers on ebay, they have amazing pieces for incredible low prices just like this one, I would not even mind the huge size.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-2U-Server-X8DTN-2x-Xeon-L5630-2-13ghz-QC-32gb-HW-Raid-Add-HD-/291823914815

 

I'm just worried that this LSI controller might not work well with ZFS since FreeNAS DO NOT RECOMMEND to use RAID controllers.

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, AllanDavidson said:

Good Lord, I followed your tip and searched for old servers on ebay, they have amazing pieces for incredible low prices just like this one, I would not even mind the huge size.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-2U-Server-X8DTN-2x-Xeon-L5630-2-13ghz-QC-32gb-HW-Raid-Add-HD-/291823914815

 

I'm just worried that this LSI controller might not work well with ZFS since FreeNAS DO NOT RECOMMEND to use RAID controllers.

the LSI controllers are only 'normally' RAID controllers.  They can be flashed to HBA or Host Bus Adaptor's and with that firmware they become just proper dumb SATA controllers like every other SATA controller are perfectly fine for FreeNAS or NAS4Free.  That said, I would not suggest using an LSI controller that has not been flashed with HBA firmware.

 

If you are looking at rack units like that though, keep in mind that they will probably be LOUD as a result of powerful cooling fans pushing air through their long thin cases.  It'd sound like a hair dryer running non-stop or worse.  That kind of form factor is designed to operate in a server rack an in an environment where 'peace and quiet' is not a concern.  If you're going to put that in a small office and it's not in a dedicated machine room, people will be bothered by the sound pretty quickly.  But if you have a dedicated room for that kind of hardware, it's not a concern.  if it is a concern, building something in a desktop tower type case can be made much more quieter.  My server for example is in my bedroom because it's mostly just running three 140mm fans at low speed.

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, AllanDavidson said:

Good Lord, I followed your tip and searched for old servers on ebay, they have amazing pieces for incredible low prices just like this one, I would not even mind the huge size.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-2U-Server-X8DTN-2x-Xeon-L5630-2-13ghz-QC-32gb-HW-Raid-Add-HD-/291823914815

 

I'm just worried that this LSI controller might not work well with ZFS since FreeNAS DO NOT RECOMMEND to use RAID controllers.

Those systems are very good, I have 4 similar dual L5630 servers but are custom builds. The included RAID card can be flashed to true HBA firmware and is very common, look for the guides on how to do it for IBM M1015 RAID controllers as it's the same card.

 

Or you can just buy a pre-flashed IBM M1015-IT/LSI 9211-IT off ebay instead to save you the hassle.

[leadeater]

Just now, AshleyAshes said:

If you are looking at rack units like that though, keep in mind that they will probably be LOUD as a result of powerful cooling fans pushing air through their long thin cases.  It'd sound like a hair dryer running non-stop or worse.  That kind of form factor is designed to operate in a server rack an in an environment where 'peace and quiet' is not a concern.  If you're going to put that in a small office and it's not in a dedicated machine room, people will be bothered by the sound pretty quickly.  But if you have a dedicated room for that kind of hardware, it's not a concern.  if it is a concern, building something in a desktop tower type case can be made much more quieter.  My server for example is in my bedroom because it's mostly just running three 140mm fans at low speed.

 

7 minutes ago, AllanDavidson said:

Good Lord, I followed your tip and searched for old servers on ebay, they have amazing pieces for incredible low prices just like this one, I would not even mind the huge size.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-2U-Server-X8DTN-2x-Xeon-L5630-2-13ghz-QC-32gb-HW-Raid-Add-HD-/291823914815

 

I'm just worried that this LSI controller might not work well with ZFS since FreeNAS DO NOT RECOMMEND to use RAID controllers.

Additional advice based on what @AshleyAshes just talked about regarding the noise of these servers you can do what I did, buy an Intel S5520HC motherboard and 2 Intel L5630 off ebay which are both cheap then build it like a standard desktop system. I also used Corsair H55 AIO CPU coolers.

[AshleyAshes]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

 

Additional advice based on what @AshleyAshes just talked about regarding the noise of these servers you can do what I did, buy an Intel S5520HC motherboard and 2 Intel L5630 off ebay which are both cheap then build it like a standard desktop system. I also used Corsair H55 AIO CPU coolers.

We should do 'Junk Yard Wars: NAS Edition'.    This is 100% not a scam to get LTT to provide me with six new NAS drives and $300 to build the rest of the machine.

[AllanDavidson]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Additional advice based on what @AshleyAshes just talked about regarding the noise of these servers you can do what I did, buy an Intel S5520HC motherboard and 2 Intel L5630 off ebay which are both cheap then build it like a standard desktop system. I also used Corsair H55 AIO CPU coolers.

I was just going to post this, if it was not possible to buy the rack, throw the chassis away and mount the juicy core on a regular E-ATX PC Case, or just buy the parts.
 

2 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

We should do 'Junk Yard Wars: NAS Edition'.    This is 100% not a scam to get LTT to provide me with six new NAS drives and $300 to build the rest of the machine.

#ChallengeAccepted.