Home Nas/Server

KGBK · November 8, 2017

Hey guys,

after reading some material on here and some elsewhere I feel like I have the facts yet still can't figure out the best solution.

I have at least 3 external drives (archive, which is used actively, backup and other bits) and my gf has one for archiving/pulling off archive which is now full and no backup drive. Instead of buying an external drive each I though it would be great to have a Nas with lots of storage. In addition I could park my archive drive there and take the drive off her external box and also place there for easy access. I also have an old dlink nas that is now obsolete as it does not support drives bigger than 3tb and was never updated for the switch in backups on macs. It also gives me an amazing 30MB/s transfer rate, which makes even a 15gb project download off it seem painful.

So after researching various Nas boxes i came to a conclusion that you are mainly overpaying for a compact AIO solution. I decided to build my own machine for this purpose initially thinking of a celeron g3930, asus b250m-k (6 sata ports on board) 8gb of ram (as freenas suggests this as a minumum) and start off with an 8tb seagate archive as it was made for a similar purpose. This seemed like a spec that a QNAP nas would have so i was confident this would serve me well. Heck i even got overexcited and though that i could also run a plex server for a single stream. The only issue here was - if i keep adding 8tb drives over time (as i cannot afford more than one at this point) they are either going to be added as separate drives (which is not ideal) or i would need to rebuild software raid with freenas (which would obviously mean i would need to backup all of the stuff, which i would not have an opportunity to as i am buying more storage due to not having any). Also i need to think of some sort of backup or another solution to prevent losing everything if one drive dies on me. I was thinking of raid5-6 and whatever the freenas software equivalent is but with 8tb drives i am losing a lof of money/space on that. I could instead use 4tb drives which would help with redundancy but i am still losing drives and its not a backup solution. I was looking into cloud backup but those consumer plans which offer unlimited storage also only work on mac/windows (obviously) and would not support the freenas apps that would sync up stuff to them. The only way to achieve that would be to use business services, however instead of paying 5-10$ a month which i would go for, amazon s3 (or iceberg or whatever the archival one they got) would cost me at least 45-50$ per month for only 10tb of storage, not including downloads, which would be costly as well. I found one service which seems to cover my needs which is crashplan for small businesses. I did send them an email to verify that for 10$ a month i can upload as much as i want from a freenas, which i am waiting on right now.

To add to my complicated journey so far, a mate has told me he had an 8gbram/pentium file server and it kept crashing a lot due to samba shares eating up the cpu while reading them from a htpc. I am not sure but i guess for macs i would need to use smb shares as well. Not really researched into which share type is best for my use and how much cpu it requires. He told me to pick up a xeon workstation instead, which already doubles the price of the machine itself (for like a hp z600 2x xeon e5620 @ 2.4, 16gb ram and quadro fx 1800 which i found at £250 here in UK) as he told me not to go for a very old one.

So literally, when i thought i have covered my concept, I now have absolutely no clue about what machine to use/build, how to backup/prepare for any disk failures in the future, how to actually approach buying/adding disks to reserve space for future additions of drives. Bare in mind, if my setup saves me money and works fine without the Plex server, i am not going to cry. File storage/computer backup is more essential.

Any help would be gladly appreciated. Thanks guys

jjohn390 · November 8, 2017

KGBK,

There is a lot to unpack here, so let's take it bit by bit....as it were. I was in this exact same position about 2 years ago. I had a lot of drives floating around with no redundancy and needed a central place to put it all. Here is what I suggest and is where I started, but I suggest upgrading to something with DDR4 since you can get higher capacity DIMMS.

Core i3 - 4770

SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SL7-F-O Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1150

8-16 GB RAM (I have 32 and wish I had more)

120GB SSD

650W Power supply

Now for the future planning with FreeNAS. If you want to do RAID5, then do that now, but use 2TB drives. As you can afford bigger drives you can purchase them and swap out the 2TB drives. Once you replace all the drives in that group it instantly jumps in capacity. As you pull out the 2TB drives you can use them to create other arrays within the same box for added storage or if you just need a place for backups (TimeMachine) I would only use a single disk or Striped array since it is already a backup.

Also, don't worry too much about the jails and how many arrays you have. You can assign multiple arrays as storage. I have two arrays for my Plex jail for space and future. I also suggest installing a small SSD just for Jail storage. Plex uses it for transcode caching and also stores the metadata there. Having the SSD reduces that bottleneck of the disk array and increases the responsiveness of Plex or any other Jail.

Integrating FreeNAS with external services like S3 can be difficult, SLOW, and not secure if you are not careful. Also read the terms of service, I have seen where they can have access to your data at any time.

I have been working my way up on this server and in the future I can upgrade the Processor to a Xeon from eBay since it is older hardware. I currently have a mixture of old drives from external enclosures and new NAS drives (I suggest HGST NAS or Seagate Ironwolf NAS since they both are 7200 RPM). As a drive fails or I need more space I just swap it out and rebuild the drive.

I also suggest an ASUS router since they have VPN services baked in and work very nicely. Then you don't have to worry about opening up your box to the rest of the world.

KGBK · November 8, 2017

Hey jjohn390,

so if we are talking raid5/6 vs backups, would you say it is safe to go with just raid?

also the drive situation makes sense, however if i was to get 4 drives now and keep adding drives in the future to replace and keep old ones to make a second array, i would need more space/sata ports. What was your solution to this? I guess i can get a raid card, and that will allow me to add more drives, but the space inside will still be an issue.

Thanks!

GDRRiley · November 8, 2017

37 minutes ago, KGBK said:

Hey jjohn390,

so if we are talking raid5/6 vs backups, would you say it is safe to go with just raid?

also the drive situation makes sense, however if i was to get 4 drives now and keep adding drives in the future to replace and keep old ones to make a second array, i would need more space/sata ports. What was your solution to this? I guess i can get a raid card, and that will allow me to add more drives, but the space inside will still be an issue.

Thanks!

no, you should have raid on drives but back up the raid array off site if you can.

for a cheap nas look at something like this https://pcpartpicker.com/list/tTHCGf . It can take 11 HDD if you use adapters for optical bays. note it does have a raid card but you would need to get SAS to sata break out cables. this could run 12 drives(8 from raid card, 4 from mobo).

jjohn390 · November 8, 2017

2 hours ago, KGBK said:

Hey jjohn390,

so if we are talking raid5/6 vs backups, would you say it is safe to go with just raid?

also the drive situation makes sense, however if i was to get 4 drives now and keep adding drives in the future to replace and keep old ones to make a second array, i would need more space/sata ports. What was your solution to this? I guess i can get a raid card, and that will allow me to add more drives, but the space inside will still be an issue.

Thanks!

1) It all depends on your data and how valuable it is. All of my Movies I have are in their cases, so if I lose the entire array it is an inconvenience, not a disaster. Now all of my photos are on a mirrored array, on my MacBook Pro, and backed up with TimeMachine. You can also create snapshots with an external drive for additional backups with FreeNAS.

2) The Motherboard I have has 12 SATA/SAS ports, so quantity is not an issue. If I were to have more drives you 100% do not do a RAID card. You will want a Host Bus Adapter Card so the OS can manage the array and S.M.A.R.T. FreeNAS has a list of recommended hardware in the user guide. You also lose the ability to rebuild the array if you have a mobo failure. FreeNAS allows you to just swap out hardware since everything is software based.

The issue with running larger disks is the ability to fail and lose a lot of data at one time. Having to rebuild an array with 10TB drives vs 4TB drives takes SIGNIFICANTLY longer and you risk losing another drive in the process and losing the entire array.

If you are looking for a case, check out the Fractal NODE 804. I currently can mount 12 hard drives and I also have connections for 2 more ESATA enclosures.