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Too much computer for just NAS. What OS do I choose?

6ftdan
By 6ftdan
in Servers, NAS, and Home Lab
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So I'm getting a bunch of drives soon and I want to use them for a NAS.  But the only computer I have capable of having all these drives is a very capable machine to waste on just NAS use.  I'd like to be able to do virtualization with it to run as test ecosystems for software I write as a developer.  So I'd like to have the best of both worlds with a good open source operating system.

 

Looking around I see a mix of promising OSes such as FreeNAS, XPEnology, and Proxmox.  The RAM I have isn't ECC RAM and I don't want to fully load the system memory with RAID related work so ZFS is out of the question.  I rather like Btrfs and hope the NAS software can be useful with that regardless.  It has 8GB of RAM for now which I may upgrade later depending on my needs.

 

For my particular scenario which operating system would you all recommend I start with.

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ZFS and MDADM both are effected by non-ECC memory, so Using FreeNAS and Proxmox might not be the best idea for software raid. You could always get an internal RAID card off of ebay and do the raid on it, then proxmox would be the best solution.

My native language is C++

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When you say to buy a RAID card on eBay, what's the important properties the card should have?  I saw a video talking about them having a battery and that would protect the data in power outages.  Looking on eBay I see a lot of PCI-X which I'd never seen before and my motherboard doesn't have.  Also I heard that between SAS and SATA they're backwards compatible one way, but not the other.  Should I stay away from SAS specific cards?

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40 minutes ago, 6ftdan said:

When you say to buy a RAID card on eBay, what's the important properties the card should have?  I saw a video talking about them having a battery and that would protect the data in power outages.  Looking on eBay I see a lot of PCI-X which I'd never seen before and my motherboard doesn't have.  Also I heard that between SAS and SATA they're backwards compatible one way, but not the other.  Should I stay away from SAS specific cards?

I'd recommend getting one with a back up battery, at least SAS 2 (6GB/s). You can buy a SAS to four SATA 3 (6Gb/s) breakout cable. You can also get SAS expanders if you need more drives than that.

 

The LSI 9260-8i and up are pretty popular choices. If you were going to do software RAID like ZFS, you'd want a SAS HBA card.

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38 minutes ago, 6ftdan said:

When you say to buy a RAID card on eBay, what's the important properties the card should have?  I saw a video talking about them having a battery and that would protect the data in power outages.  Looking on eBay I see a lot of PCI-X which I'd never seen before and my motherboard doesn't have.  Also I heard that between SAS and SATA they're backwards compatible one way, but not the other.  Should I stay away from SAS specific cards?

The battery is definitely a plus, but if you have a NAS, it's not required. PCI-X is the generation between pci and pcie, which was an attempt to make a higher bandwidth bus. It's basically just a longer pci slot. PCI cards can work in a pci-x slot. Either way, don't get a pci-x card. They're really old.

 

You will probably want to look for a sas card, as sata drives can work with sas HBAs and controllers. SAS drives however don't work with SATA controllers. There are two main connectors in the SAS world. SAS-8087 and SAS-8088. SAS-8087 is basically 4 SAS/SATA ports in one connector. SAS-8088 is the same as SAS-8087, except that it is a morre ruggedized connector designed for use with external HDD enclosures.

 

And here is a good card with a battery: https://www.ebay.com/itm/ASR-6805T-ADAPTEC-SGL-2272800-R-512MB-SAS-6Gb-s-SATA-SAS-8I-Port-Raid-Controller/172978456903

Remember to get an adapter cable too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-SAS-to-4-SATA-SFF-8087-Multi-Lane-Forward-Breakout-Internal-Cable-3-28-Feet/311689047579

My native language is C++

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  • 1 month later...
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Proxmox was a great call!  I have many virtual machines and OSes running well on there.  It allows me to add in hard drives to extend the VM storage so many drives act as one without using any kind of RAID.  I put off getting a RAID card for now and tried a mSata to 4 SATA device: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072BD8Z3Y/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_u-YxAb2TB31M9 but the Linux kernel currently doesn't support it without extra work to install the drivers in the kernel.  So that experiment is on hold now.  It came with drivers but I'll need to set aside a day or two to do the work for that.  For now though the combined drive space works really well for my VMs.  I'm quite happy with it.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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BBWC = battery backed write cache

FBWC = flash backed write cache.

 

basically any "proper" RAID card will have one of those. a SAS card will take SAS+SATA a SATA card is SATA only.

 

as for OS it comes down to personal preference. Personally i'd keep it simple with a Windows Server 2016 install as its basically idiot proof, but if youre a linux person then go with a linux distro of som kind. all of these "NAS OS"'s are just bundled linux builds with some easier UIs

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