Need Help setting up a NAS

[LordGabeNisBae]

Hey Peeps,

 

Was looking at setting up a NAS server for my house for DVD/BluRay streaming and mass storage. Preferable compatible with windows and Mac. Just had 3 laptop Hard drives fail on me and lost a crap-ton of data  

 

I have been looking around on the internet and found many consumer NAS systems which seem far too overpriced for what they give you... also Australia tax RIP :'( . Will it be just better to build a computer and turn it into a nas or just go for one of the consumer stuff. I have a spare 5820k and was thinking of setting up an x99 NAS  with a node 304 and a mITX board. Or I was also looking at an i3 6100 with ECC memory support... and a build that will probably be cheaper than a new motherboard for the 5820k... 

 

but obviously I have no idea what I am doing.

 

Please provide guidance regarding drives choice, and hardware  I am looking at the WD red 8 tb x 2/3 dunno  

 

~GabeN

[SCHISCHKA]

being discussed in

 

[paddy-stone]

It's debateable whether pre-built or build yourself NAS is the way to go, depends on circumstances for some of it, stuff like space/noise/upgradeable etc. I personally would lean towards upgradeable, and when some decent itx Am4 boards come out would go with a ryzen 3 or 5, can also then make use of ECC ram if you want. If you need more oomph could even go straight to threadripper, but doubt that a NAS would need that much oomph, and think ryxen 3/5 or even 7 is good enough. If you only need basic serving needs and storing, then I would think even a g4560 build would be enough, and very cheap too.

 

eg £527 for a full 6TB NAS build with room to upgrade to an i7 if needed in the future. But if you need ECC support would be better going with your 5820k and an itx board.

 

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

[paddy-stone]

Same build but with 5820k and mobo comes in around £150 more  https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/WvGGzM

[LordGabeNisBae]

I can sacrifice a ramstick from Powerhouse. Also the prices are so much more cancerous in Australia...  

 

Also i dont think the 5820k has ECC support. intel protecting their xeons there.

 

Might look into the i3 and sell the 5820k that doesnt seem to be doing much 

[paddy-stone]

33 minutes ago, LordGabeNisBae said:

I can sacrifice a ramstick from Powerhouse. Also the prices are so much more cancerous in Australia...  

 

Also i dont think the 5820k has ECC support. intel protecting their xeons there.

 

Might look into the i3 and sell the 5820k that doesnt seem to be doing much 

Ahh yes, sorry about that was trying to think about 2 things at once and put the wrong thing, lol... . But TBH I would be looking at maybe the APUs that are coming out from AMD for a cheap build, or a ryzen 3 with a cheap low power GPU, it will have a lot of options for upgrade either way with that AM4 board, so if you found it wasn't powerful enough for you it'd be an easy upgrade to any APU or zen CPU. I am a big fan of AMDs ryzen CPUs if you hadn't guessed

 

[LordGabeNisBae]

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

Ahh yes, sorry about that was trying to think about 2 things at once and put the wrong thing, lol... . But TBH I would be looking at maybe the APUs that are coming out from AMD for a cheap build, or a ryzen 3 with a cheap low power GPU, it will have a lot of options for upgrade either way with that AM4 board, so if you found it wasn't powerful enough for you it'd be an easy upgrade to any APU or zen CPU. I am a big fan of AMDs ryzen CPUs if you hadn't guessed

 

Haha I can see that. Not hating on AMD or anything. Ryzen is pretty neat but I want to see it mature. It is still very new tech and will probably improve with time with AMD FineWine(TM) haha. Where I am at, there is not a lot of difference going between intel and AMD for the lower end stuff (lol 5820k is low end RIP).

 

I might wait and setup a VM on my 5960x instead with Unraid and use 2 of the unneccessary cores for something useful. or not becasue i will have to sacrifice a gtx 1080ti for video out to the VM derp... Might add it my old gtx 480 as the VM GFX card, it is winter here in Australia and we could use an extra heater  

[paddy-stone]

1 minute ago, LordGabeNisBae said:

Haha I can see that. Not hating on AMD or anything. Ryzen is pretty neat but I want to see it mature. It is still very new tech and will probably improve with time with AMD FineWine(TM) haha. Where I am at, there is not a lot of difference going between intel and AMD for the lower end stuff (lol 5820k is low end RIP).

 

I might wait and setup a VM on my 5960x instead with Unraid and use 2 of the unneccessary cores for something useful. or not becasue i will have to sacrifice a gtx 1080ti for video out to the VM derp... Might add it my old gtx 480 as the VM GFX card, it is winter here in Australia and we could use an extra heater  

Well, if you want to go that route it's more feasible and cheaper in some scenarios IMO. I have a 1700 ATM as my main build and use VMs a fair bit, writing this ATM in my windows VM on my Ubuntu host OS

 

I have a NAS too, but have been considering just having Ubuntu serve the media etc  instead, but in that scenario the data is more susceptible to failures IMO. So have been debating using a VM for hosting the NAS OS of choice, but there are problems with that way too. The only relaible way is having a separate NAS IMO, they still have problems, but you can just set it up and forget it for the most part. I had a power cut the other day and my NAS freaked out, and when rebooted when the power came back on loaded my other profile and chose a different IP address, luckily it was an easy-ish fix, but still a PITA. I had to go and retrieve my other monitor to sort it out, took about 10-15 mins to get it back to how it was, but happened typically right when I was in the moddle of doing something else, so had to stop that to fix this problem.

I would still recommend a stand alone NAS build though over any other method, fixing some of those problems are a bit beyond my scope sometimes, lol.

[LordGabeNisBae]

2 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Well, if you want to go that route it's more feasible and cheaper in some scenarios IMO. I have a 1700 ATM as my main build and use VMs a fair bit, writing this ATM in my windows VM on my Ubuntu host OS

 

I have a NAS too, but have been considering just having Ubuntu serve the media etc  instead, but in that scenario the data is more susceptible to failures IMO. So have been debating using a VM for hosting the NAS OS of choice, but there are problems with that way too. The only relaible way is having a separate NAS IMO, they still have problems, but you can just set it up and forget it for the most part. I had a power cut the other day and my NAS freaked out, and when rebooted when the power came back on loaded my other profile and chose a different IP address, luckily it was an easy-ish fix, but still a PITA. I had to go and retrieve my other monitor to sort it out, took about 10-15 mins to get it back to how it was, but happened typically right when I was in the moddle of doing something else, so had to stop that to fix this problem.

I would still recommend a stand alone NAS build though over any other method, fixing some of those problems are a bit beyond my scope sometimes, lol.

That is the plan my friend. I am almost willing to forgo my x79 system and retire it to NAS duty (lol an extreme edition as a home NAS server) and maybe give ryzen 7 a go for my secondary PC. The Rampage 4 extreme has intel NIC onboard and tons of Drive options and 40 pci lanes for raid cards later if I wanted or other expansion stuff. but the costs are prohibitive to go that route ATM. 

 

I either build a high end Ryzen system complete with watercooling which i could get from the x79 system, or go the other extreme and get a super low-end bare-minimum thing. Data loss really sucks so i know it is mandatory. 

 

I might actually save up and wait for Threadripper or intel's i9 stuff. I dunno . I am aware that NAS needs ECC memory to be safe and a decent CPU and Network interface to be fast and seamless... So many things to consider.

 

And I have ended up confusing myself again... oh well. 

 

 

 

[paddy-stone]

1 minute ago, LordGabeNisBae said:

That is the plan my friend. I am almost willing to forgo my x79 system and retire it to NAS duty (lol an extreme edition as a home NAS server) and maybe give ryzen 7 a go for my secondary PC. The Rampage 4 extreme has intel NIC onboard and tons of Drive options and 40 pci lanes for raid cards later if I wanted or other expansion stuff. but the costs are prohibitive to go that route ATM. 

 

I either build a high end Ryzen system complete with watercooling which i could get from the x79 system, or go the other extreme and get a super low-end bare-minimum thing. Data loss really sucks so i know it is mandatory. 

 

I might actually save up and wait for Threadripper or intel's i9 stuff. I dunno . I am aware that NAS needs ECC memory to be safe and a decent CPU and Network interface to be fast and seamless... So many things to consider.

 

And I have ended up confusing myself again... oh well. 

 

 

 

 

Yeah, the problem with a high end CPU as a server is power draw and possibly noise too, depedning on the components, you could always under-clock and under-volt maybe, but at the point it might just be better to get the cheap-ish g4560 system as a NAS and not worry about ECC ram. It depends as well on how important the data is and whether you also have another backup of your MOST important files at least... even if it's just a wd mycloud or USB 3.0 drive attached to the NAS or network. If you do have a way if backing up and are vigilant with it, then I don;t think ECC is needed as much in that situation.I have both a wd mycloud 3TB and 3TB USB 3.0 drive for backups of NAS important stuff, just in case.

I like the idea of a ryzen 3 build though, you get the benefit of ECC ram that way if you want/need it too, and if they come out cheap enough and with 4/8 cores and threads it'll definitely be a competitor for people wanting NAS components, TDP should be fairly good too and keep the amount of electric used to a minimum. And as I said before, at least it has an upgrade path for in the future if you need more cores or whatever. A nice little 100W system isn't too expensive to run 24/7, works out around 28 pence max per day, and most of the time it'd use a lot less than that too.

[ChalkChalkson]

I might be a little late for the party, but I stream uncompressed blue rays off of a server rocking a haswell pentium dual core (forgot the number  ), so pretty much any modern desktop chip will do fine for you.

As of setting up: I have written a pretty detailed guide for doing this on unraid

With drives I'd generally advise to go with A: what every you have laying around in the house or B: WD Red or Seagate Iron Wolf, SATA 3 (6GB/s) drives.

 

In the end, you should probably just search for "Windows 7 PC" or just "PC" on ebay, any x64 system will be fine in the end

[LordGabeNisBae]

22 hours ago, ChalkChalkson said:

I might be a little late for the party, but I stream uncompressed blue rays off of a server rocking a haswell pentium dual core (forgot the number  ), so pretty much any modern desktop chip will do fine for you.

As of setting up: I have written a pretty detailed guide for doing this on unraid

With drives I'd generally advise to go with A: what every you have laying around in the house or B: WD Red or Seagate Iron Wolf, SATA 3 (6GB/s) drives.

 

In the end, you should probably just search for "Windows 7 PC" or just "PC" on ebay, any x64 system will be fine in the end

I have a pair of Seagate 10tb Ironwolf drives on hand for the nas/whatever i end up building. Do you rekon an old APU system will be good enough? given their prices i could get a brand new system in for very cheap as you can tell I spent all my budget on the drives oops  

[ChalkChalkson]

1 hour ago, LordGabeNisBae said:

I have a pair of Seagate 10tb Ironwolf drives on hand for the nas/whatever i end up building. Do you rekon an old APU system will be good enough? given their prices i could get a brand new system in for very cheap as you can tell I spent all my budget on the drives oops  

You mean an old amd cpu? Probably depends on the chip... But a "gaming" chip from 2014, hell even 2012 will probably be sufficient...

But I wouldn't buy one since they use ridiculous amounts of power compared to a kabylake/skylake pentium