Building a NAS

[ghostofprice1]

Trying to build a nas for home photo and movie use. Was wondering is it better to use two 4 TB WD Red's or four 2 TB WD Red's

Also any recomdinations for good nas hardware 

[vorticalbox]

depends what sort of redundancy you're going for.

 

I would get two 4gb and have them in raid 1 to mirror to each drive giving you 4gb total space but one drive can fail and your data is still safe. 

 

 

[ChalkChalkson]

8 minutes ago, ghostofprice1 said:

Trying to build a nas for home photo and movie use. Was wondering is it better to use two 4 TB WD Red's or four 2 TB WD Red's

Also any recomdinations for good nas hardware 

depending on what you do... If you go with a parity system like unraid 2 4TB drives will give you 4TB and redundancy, if you go with 4 2TB drives you'll get 6TB and redundancy. If you go with RAID 1 on the 4TB drives or RAID 10 on the 2TB drives, you'll get a little better protection with the RAID 1, but the RAID 10 will have better read/write speeds.

If you go without parity or RAID at all it becomes a decision on whether you want to hedge your bet of losing data.

[MercuryRain]

Between the two you have three options for how to set them up: 

 

2x4TB in RAID 1 (4 TB, 1 drive redundancy)

4x2TB in RAID 10 (4 TB, increased performance, can lose one entire side)

4x2TB in RAID 5 (6 TB, 1 drive redundancy)

 

the 2x4TB option will be cheaper.

[ChalkChalkson]

BTW this should be in the Server / NAS thread.

And I'd strongly advise to go with at least some protection... Losing images sucks a lot and any harddrive will eventually fail!

(Entropy will prevail!)

[ChalkChalkson]

And just because I am curious: 

How do you plan to build the NAS? What platform will you be using? Which OS? This doesn't really matter when buying the drives (we'll, unless this impacts the setup of drives you are going for), but it is always interesting to hear what kinds of setups people are rocking

[WkdPaul]

The thread was moved to the Servers and NAS section.

[ChalkChalkson]

2 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

The thread was moved to the Servers and NAS section.

Thanks!

[ghostofprice1]

2 hours ago, ChalkChalkson said:

And just because I am curious: 

How do you plan to build the NAS? What platform will you be using? Which OS? This doesn't really matter when buying the drives (we'll, unless this impacts the setup of drives you are going for), but it is always interesting to hear what kinds of setups people are rocking

Ok thanks for the advice. I think i going to go with free nas and add a pelx plugin so i can stream all of my movies over. Hardware wise i am either going to buy a cheap pc off of ebay and just use that or build a small cheap pc at home. 

Any suggestions on hardware would also be welcome 

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, ghostofprice1 said:

Ok thanks for the advice. I think i going to go with free nas and add a pelx plugin so i can stream all of my movies over. Hardware wise i am either going to buy a cheap pc off of ebay and just use that or build a small cheap pc at home. 

Any suggestions on hardware would also be welcome 

I wrote a few words on hardware on my unraid guide, but basically it comes down to the following: You don't need much, any modern-ish dualcore CPU will do fine, even if you stream uncompressed blu rays via plex. I'd generally go with a low end intel chip, maybe even one of the low power (35W I think) ones, the kabylake pentium is a great choice because it also has hyperthreading.

With the software: Free NAS is a great choice, I personally prefer unraid, but I can see why you might want to go with the free option here. What you are saying doesn't seem to be too difficult to accomplish on Free NAS  

Have you figured out Backup yet?

 

[ghostofprice1]

4 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

I wrote a few words on hardware on my unraid guide, but basically it comes down to the following: You don't need much, any modern-ish dualcore CPU will do fine, even if you stream uncompressed blu rays via plex. I'd generally go with a low end intel chip, maybe even one of the low power (35W I think) ones, the kabylake pentium is a great choice because it also has hyperthreading.

With the software: Free NAS is a great choice, I personally prefer unraid, but I can see why you might want to go with the free option here. What you are saying doesn't seem to be too difficult to accomplish on Free NAS  

Have you figured out Backup yet?

 

Yeah i want to put two 4 TB WD Red's in Raid 1 just to make sure i do not lose any data. I just need to figure out how to raid drives in freenas.

Any advice

Also do you know if ecc ram is necessary  for a build like this or can i just go with normal ram 

[grimreeper132]

You could get the 4X 2TB HDDs and set them up in 5,6 or 10.

 

this would work as Cerberuslabrat said for 5 and 10

 

with RAID 10 you would also get (in theory) 4X the read speed and 2X write speed with one disk but if you lose one from each side your stuffed but you could lose 2 from one side

 

total Capacity 4TB

 

with RAID 5 you would get (in theory) 3X Read speed and no gain in write with one disk failure

 

Total Capacity 6TB

 

With RAID 6 you would get (in theory) 2X Read speed and no gain in write, with the ability to have 2 disk failures, no matter what drive dies

 

Total Capacity 4TB

 

You could also do RAID 1 for the 2X4TB where you'd get 2X Read speed and no gain in write (in theory) with one drive failure

 

Total Capacity 4TB

 

or you could RAID 0 the 2X4TB where you'd get (in theory) 2X read and Write speeds, but if any drives died, all data would be lost

[ghostofprice1]

Just now, grimreeper132 said:

You could get the 4X 2TB HDDs and set them up in 5,6 or 10.

 

this would work as Cerberuslabrat said for 5 and 10

 

with RAID 10 you would also get (in theory) 4X the read speed and 2X write speed with one disk but if you lose one from each side your stuffed but you could lose 2 from one side

 

total Capacity 4TB

 

with RAID 5 you would get (in theory) 3X Read speed and no gain in write with one disk failure

 

Total Capacity 6TB

 

With RAID 6 you would get (in theory) 2X Read speed and no gain in write, with the ability to have 2 disk failures, no matter what drive dies

 

Total Capacity 4TB

 

You could also do RAID 1 for the 2X4TB where you'd get 2X Read speed and no gain in write (in theory) with one drive failure

 

Total Capacity 4TB

 

or you could RAID 0 the 2X4TB where you'd get (in theory) 2X read and Write speeds, but if any drives died, all data would be lost

Ok thanks i think i am just going to go with two 4 TB WD Red's in raid 1, but i need to figure out how to put drives in raid with freenas

Also do you know if ecc ram will be needed for a build like this or can i just go with normal ram

 

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, ghostofprice1 said:

Yeah i want to put two 4 TB WD Red's in Raid 1 just to make sure i do not lose any data. I just need to figure out how to raid drives in freenas.

Any advice

that is redundancy not backup, but redundancy is always nice!

My advise would be to wait a few months and get another server with dirt cheap (maybe even archive) drives and use rsync via cron to schedule the backups (works the same on freenas as explained in my guide).

If you are going for redundancy I'd advise you to go with 3 2TB drives in a parity config, that way you will still get the comfort of any one drive being able to fail, and the read/write performance of the slower one of 2 drives, but you will save quite a few bucks

[grimreeper132]

Just now, ghostofprice1 said:

Ok thanks i think i am just going to go with two 4 TB WD Red's in raid 1, but i need to figure out how to put drives in raid with freenas

Also do you know if ecc ram will be needed for a build like this or can i just go with normal ram

 

You can get away with normal RAM, ECC would be nice if you have it, but it anit worth spending extra money on. As for how to do it. Uuuum give me a sec and I will look

[ghostofprice1]

Just now, grimreeper132 said:

You can get away with normal RAM, ECC would be nice if you have it, but it anit worth spending extra money on. As for how to do it. Uuuum give me a sec and I will look

thanks

[ChalkChalkson]

1 minute ago, ghostofprice1 said:

Also do you know if ecc ram will be needed for a build like this or can i just go with normal ram

 

normal ram is fine  Don't overspend on stuff like that, especially since you'd need to buy an X99 Motherboard as well

[grimreeper132]

Just now, ghostofprice1 said:

thanks

let me boot my one up. (I still haven't fully configured it so that's why it's off) I think if I remember how I did it correctly it was just you connected to the server over LAN, from another PC, logged in and then created a volume, select the RAID type and what drives, a few other basic things, then press create, but I could be wrong

[grimreeper132]

2 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

normal ram is fine  Don't overspend on stuff like that, especially since you'd need to buy an X99 Motherboard as well

or ryzen, I think several of those boards support ECC, in theory

 

 

yea it does, dunno how well though, may be bugs still there cause I know there was alot of issues to begin with with the RAM

[ChalkChalkson]

3 minutes ago, ghostofprice1 said:

Ok thanks i think i am just going to go with two 4 TB WD Red's in raid 1, but i need to figure out how to put drives in raid with freenas

It is quite simple, just select the raid you want to go for as "volume layout" (or however it is called these days)

[ChalkChalkson]

1 minute ago, grimreeper132 said:

or ryzen, I think several of those boards support ECC, in theory

yea it does, dunno how well though, may be bugs still there cause I know there was alot of issues to begin with with the RAM

yeah, ryzen r3 is an option too

[ghostofprice1]

1 minute ago, ChalkChalkson said:

yeah, ryzen r3 is an option too

ok here is what i am thinking of going with 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/

[ChalkChalkson]

2 minutes ago, ghostofprice1 said:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/

that is a link to an empty list  you need to get the shareable permalink shown at the top

[ghostofprice1]

2 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

that is a link to an empty list  you need to get the shareable permalink shown at the top

oops here this one should work https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LNMwf8

 

[ChalkChalkson]

that will totally work (assuming you have a usb drive for the OS), but if you have the money to spare an SSD as cache would be great for performance