Building a NAS

[ghostofprice1]

1 minute ago, ChalkChalkson said:

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 

no my budget is $500 so i think i am going to skip out on the ssd for now. Thanks for all the help i'l let you know how it goes

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, ghostofprice1 said:

no my budget is $500 so i think i am going to skip out on the ssd for now. Thanks for all the help i'l let you know how it goes

I am looking forward to hearing from you again, I hope everything goes well for you!

If you have trouble: FreeNAS is very similar to unraid , so you might want to read that guide I linked, or a specific guide on FreeNAS. It is pretty good to know a little more when building servers. Like currently you are overspending a little on drives, since a RAID 1 is in inferior to a 3 drive parity setup in performance, while offering the same protection and being more expensive. You really want to consider going with 3 2TB drives instead of 2 4TB.

[ghostofprice1]

Just now, ChalkChalkson said:

I am looking forward to hearing from you again, I hope everything goes well for you!

If you have trouble: FreeNAS is very similar to unraid , so you might want to read that guide I linked, or a specific guide on FreeNAS. It is pretty good to know a little more when building servers. Like currently you are overspending a little on drives, since a RAID 1 is in inferior to a 3 drive parity setup in performance, while offering the same protection and being more expensive. You really want to consider going with 3 2TB drives instead of 2 4TB.

oh how would that work, would i get that same amount of storage and would it work in free nas?

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, ghostofprice1 said:

oh how would that work

Technical description:

one drive will store whatever is on all other drives XORed, meaning that any given bit will be whether the bits on the other 2 drives are equal. So if any of the 3 drives fail you can restore.

What you need to do:

I don't know if FreeNAS has support for non raided redundancy via a single parity drive, but as a modern NAS OS it very well should. This is the way (and the only way) unraid work.

Data will be stored in file wise separation on the drives, meaning that even if both other drives fail at the same time, you will only lose half the data, and if any one drive fails non. The performance will always be the better out of the worse of the parity and one other drive.

This also allows you to add drives later without losing data or rebuilding everything, since this XOR system scales very well.

This is the main reason why I prefer unraid  

[grimreeper132]

2 minutes ago, ghostofprice1 said:

oh how would that work, would i get that same amount of storage and would it work in free nas?

tell you what I would do. I would scrap the idea of buying new parts for the PC and do what I did for mine. I got a old PC  that I owned and stuck some hard drives in it and used that. Now you may not have a old PC lying around to do that with currently, but if you look on gumtree (sort of UK equivalent of craigslist) or ebay for a PC with at least 2 SATA connectors (which would be more of them) and get that, you'd be looking at £50 max for that, which is a massive price reduction on your plan, considering what you've got there excluding HDDs,costs £182 and you hasn't got RAM so that might be another £30. Which cuts the price by £130 which is practically another HDD

[ghostofprice1]

1 minute ago, grimreeper132 said:

tell you what I would do. I would scrap the idea of buying new parts for the PC and do what I did for mine. I got a old PC  that I owned and stuck some hard drives in it and used that. Now you may not have a old PC lying around to do that with currently, but if you look on gumtree (sort of UK equivalent of craigslist) or ebay for a PC with at least 2 SATA connectors (which would be more of them) and get that, you'd be looking at £50 max for that, which is a massive price reduction on your plan, considering what you've got there excluding HDDs,costs £182 and you hasn't got RAM so that might be another £30. Which cuts the price by £130 which is practically another HDD

see i was going to go with that but i have had some bad experiences with ebay over here and this way at least it also looks okay 

[ChalkChalkson]

9 minutes ago, ghostofprice1 said:

would i get that same amount of storage and would it work in free nas?

damn edited comments

You would get 4 TB of effective storage with 3 2TB drives and probably though I don't know how to configure it

[grimreeper132]

Just now, ghostofprice1 said:

see i was going to go with that but i have had some bad experiences with ebay over here and this way at least it also looks okay 

yea it looks ok, still suggest doing that, either that or talk to your local IT guy, as they might be a fucking amazing guy like mine and give you 14 old PCs/server/laptops all for free which you could use

[grimreeper132]

1 minute ago, ChalkChalkson said:

damn edited comments

You would get 4 TB of effective storage with 3 2TB drives and probably though I don't know how to configure it

with FreeNAS it's really easy to do. Far as I remember

[ChalkChalkson]

1 minute ago, grimreeper132 said:

yea it looks ok, still suggest doing that, either that or talk to your local IT guy, as they might be a fucking amazing guy like mine and give you 14 old PCs/server/laptops all for free which you could use

I built my backup server from an LGA 1150 mobo a client let me keep when I replaced it for him (had broken audio). A case that had missing parts and lots of scratches I found in the basement, a psu from my gaming rig from 2006 and drives I found somewhere (no clue where they came from)... So yeah, ebay or random old PCs will do fine  

[ChalkChalkson]

4 minutes ago, grimreeper132 said:

with FreeNAS it's really easy to do. Far as I remember

It has been a long time since I used FreeNAS and I used RAID 6 back then, so no clue  ...

OP will probably need to google that  

[grimreeper132]

Just now, ChalkChalkson said:

I built my backup server from an LGA 1150 mobo a client let me keep when I replaced it for him (had broken audio). A case that had missing parts and lots of scratches I found in the basement, a psu from my gaming rig from 2006 and drives I found somewhere (no clue where they came from)... So yeah, ebay or random old PCs will do fine  

yea NASs are some of the only uses of PCs where, certainly for home use,  old slow PCs can be  used without many issues, due to them just not needing to do anything too resource intensive. Only thing that is fully used is RAM

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, grimreeper132 said:

Only thing that is fully used is RAM

Even that... 4GB is fine for pretty much every home NAS there is, unless you start hosting servers that is  

[grimreeper132]

Just now, ChalkChalkson said:

It has been a long time since I used FreeNAS and I used RAID 6 back then, so no clue  ...

OP will probably need to google that  

I think if I remember the steps for that is

1) create new disc group

2) create a disc group and with the desired discs

3) Create volume

4) choose disc group (prob one made in 2)

5) choose size of volume

6) that's you done

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, grimreeper132 said:

I think if I remember the steps for that is

1) create new disc group

2) create a disc group and with the desired discs

3) Create volume

4) choose disc group (prob one made in 2)

5) choose size of volume

6) that's you done

I think you might need to do something more... Unless they changed something this should create an unprotected volume

[grimreeper132]

Just now, ChalkChalkson said:

Even that... 4GB is fine for pretty much every home NAS there is, unless you start hosting servers that is  

hey, I anit doing that yet, mind you NAS 1 does have 6GB (didn't know what else to do with it) and NAS 2 (the FreeNAS one which hasn't been configured yet and is currently being mean to me and not working, cause I am currently trying to configure it. I need to configure a static IP address for it) has 4GB I think

[grimreeper132]

Just now, ChalkChalkson said:

I think you might need to do something more... Unless they changed something this should create an unprotected volume

I could be wrong. Oh I forgot one step. After step 2 you select desired RAID type 

[ChalkChalkson]

1 minute ago, grimreeper132 said:

hey, I anit doing that yet

Might want to go into it, it is great fun, and god, do I love myself having an OpenVPN server on the home network of my parents, this way I can have my backup in another city  

[ChalkChalkson]

1 minute ago, grimreeper132 said:

After step 2 you select desired RAID type 

Yeah, but this type of parity is technically not a RAID config, and I don't know if it is listed off the top of my head  

[grimreeper132]

2 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Might want to go into it, it is great fun, and god, do I love myself having an OpenVPN server on the home network of my parents, this way I can have my backup in another city  

yea I keep on meaning to set up a VPN thing so I can access my home network for when I'm at uni. You use OpenVPN, guessing it's encrypted. 

 

 

3 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Yeah, but this type of parity is technically not a RAID config, and I don't know if it is listed off the top of my head  

yea I think I know what kind your meaning and I think it's all there, could be wrong though

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, grimreeper132 said:

yea I keep on meaning to set up a VPN thing so I can access my home network for when I'm at uni. You use OpenVPN, guessing it's encrypted. 

Jup, key exchange via RSA 2048 or 4096 and symmetric is AES 256 or 512. The public RSA keys are in the certificate file you exchange once and by hand.

[grimreeper132]

Just now, ChalkChalkson said:

Jup, key exchange via RSA 2048 or 4096 and symmetric is AES 256 or 512. The public RSA keys are in the certificate file you exchange once and by hand.

well considering I have't done well anything with encryption yet, that's just a long list of numbers and letters.

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, grimreeper132 said:

well considering I have't done well anything with encryption yet, that's just a long list of numbers and letters.

^^ RSA is the oldest unsymmetrical cipher we have, it relies on the difficulty of the factoring and the discrete logarithm problem, so in theory it is less safe than RSA EC or Diffie-Hellman but it is a widely used standard and considered safe.

AES literally stands for "American Encryption Standard" it won an open contest for the best symmetric ciphers by the NSA, but was not designed by them. It is considered to be very safe it is almost never the target of attacks.

[grimreeper132]

1 minute ago, ChalkChalkson said:

^^ RSA is the oldest unsymmetrical cipher we have, it relies on the difficulty of the factoring and the discrete logarithm problem, so in theory it is less safe than RSA EC or Diffie-Hellman but it is a widely used standard and considered safe.

AES literally stands for "American Encryption Standard" it won an open contest for the best symmetric ciphers by the NSA, but was not designed by them. It is considered to be very safe it is almost never the target of attacks.

fair enough thanks, I will look into that at some point. 

 

Also due to some issues I need to redo all the software shit I did with NAS 2 (it's probably easier to than try recover it, especially considering no files are on it yet) so I need to get a new OS for it, All I'm doing with it is streaming videos and movies from it to another PC which is connected to the TV. what OS would you suggest, it's gotta be free as I anit paying for it, and being able to access it easily from outside the house would also be nice

[ChalkChalkson]

1 minute ago, grimreeper132 said:

fair enough thanks, I will look into that at some point. 

 

Also due to some issues I need to redo all the software shit I did with NAS 2 (it's probably easier to than try recover it, especially considering no files are on it yet) so I need to get a new OS for it, All I'm doing with it is streaming videos and movies from it to another PC which is connected to the TV. what OS would you suggest, it's gotta be free as I anit paying for it, and being able to access it easily from outside the house would also be nice

Well yet again, unraid would be awesome since all you need to do is quite easy to achieve with it and there are lots of resources how to configure these things.

But if it got to be free I'd go with Ubuntu Server, you got the "Appstore" like thingy and it is pretty straight Debain Linux, so most stuff is available. Getting the share exported might be a lot harder than on say FreeNAS, but everything else will be easier and you can use all your previous linux knowledge if you have some, or, even better, build linux knowledge if you don't have it yet  

But give poor LimeTech a shot, they offer a free trial you can in theory loop forever and 50 bucks is not that much all things considered