NAS Hardware Recommendation

[RelentlessAF]

Hi there, I'm thinking of building a NAS to have a localized storage system I can store my game development projects on so in the event of a hardware or software failure on my PC I don't keep losing the files. I'm really just looking for small form factor, with a 10Gbps capable NIC and moderate expand-ability. As I am only one person I don't foresee needing to expand too much but a little wiggle room is never bad. I don't really want to be overkill as well with the CPU and motherboard. I was looking into like a Ryzen 3 or something but I wanted to get additional opinions.

 

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

[Electronics Wizardy]

how many tb are we thinking?

 

Id probably go g4560 here as its lower power compared to a ryzen and normally better support for linux and freebsd.

 

Then id probably run freenas here. Id probably just get 4-6 8tb drives(look at those bestbuy easy stores)

[Gwersebe]

Linus did a cool build a while back i really liked the case he used. You can swap the board, cpu, and drives out for something a little less overkill.

 

[Jsmith2211]

I run 6TiB on an old dual core 6320 from intel and it works great. The only bottleneck for me is my 1gbps internal networking! Can i recommend for Operating System that you use OpenMediaVault. This OS is great, and even has extensive plugin support. I have mine configured to host a webserver and a youtube downloader.

[RelentlessAF]

33 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

how many tb are we thinking?

 

Id probably go g4560 here as its lower power compared to a ryzen and normally better support for linux and freebsd.

 

Then id probably run freenas here. Id probably just get 4-6 8tb drives(look at those bestbuy easy stores)

I figure freeNAS probably isn't too CPU intensive then. The g4560 is one of the unlocked Pentiums right? That makes a lot of sense for limited power draw. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, GingerbreadPK said:

I figure freeNAS probably isn't too CPU intensive then. The g4560 is one of the unlocked Pentiums right? That makes a lot of sense for limited power draw. 

that cpu is a locked 2c/4t pentium.

 

Cpu wise you don't need much for a nas. Really even a Celeron is fine. The cpu isn't doing much here.

 

Gpu won't be doing anything.

[RelentlessAF]

8 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

that cpu is a locked 2c/4t pentium.

 

Cpu wise you don't need much for a nas. Really even a Celeron is fine. The cpu isn't doing much here.

 

Gpu won't be doing anything.

Ah alright makes sense. Thanks for the help! I'll start looking into setting it up. 

[Psychopath]

If you are doing freenas you should look into getting ECC RAM and quite a bit of it to fully utilise that 10GB connection. Also for ZFS purposes, it is recommended to have 8GB absolute minimum RAM and at least 1GB/TB of HDD space you put into your NAS

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Psychopath said:

If you are doing freenas you should look into getting ECC RAM and quite a bit of it to fully utilise that 10GB connection. Also for ZFS purposes, it is recommended to have 8GB absolute minimum RAM and at least 1GB/TB of HDD space you put into your NAS

Nothing about freenas or zfs needs ecc more than any other file system. ECC is always nice to have to keep data safe. 

 

All modern oses use ram as a read cache and write cache and if there are memory errors it will hurt your data. ZFS does do scrubs, but its designed no know overwrite if there are memory errors.

 

The 1gb/tb is bs. The ram is mostly used as a read cache, and while a bigger read cache is always nice, it won't help the performance that much, depending on your use. For sequential uses it really won't help at all.

 

[Psychopath]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Nothing about freenas or zfs needs ecc more than any other file system. ECC is always nice to have to keep data safe. 

 

All modern oses use ram as a read cache and write cache and if there are memory errors it will hurt your data. ZFS does do scrubs, but its designed no know overwrite if there are memory errors.

 

The 1gb/tb is bs. The ram is mostly used as a read cache, and while a bigger read cache is always nice, it won't help the performance that much, depending on your use. For sequential uses it really won't help at all.

 

Actually more ram will help, from personal experience with my own freenas server at home as well as one I built for my work which both have 10GB NIC's. My home one has a G3220 in it and 8GB RAM (currently) which even with that 10GB connection quickly throttles back down after a few seconds of file transferring due to no swap/cache left from my small RAM amount. However my work freenas box has 32GB RAM and some low power xeon I can't remember but can actually fully utilise the 10GB NIC's bandwidth. 

A freenas box has nothing to do with seq. r/w and I was never mentioning this before so I don't really understand why you bought this up but the difference in having more ram and a 10GB connection is the difference between the 10GB connection being utilised and it being wasted.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Psychopath said:

Actually more ram will help, from personal experience with my own freenas server at home as well as one I built for my work which both have 10GB NIC's. My home one has a G3220 in it and 8GB RAM (currently) which even with that 10GB connection quickly throttles back down after a few seconds of file transferring due to no swap/cache left from my small RAM amount. However my work freenas box has 32GB RAM and some low power xeon I can't remember but can actually fully utilise the 10GB NIC's bandwidth. 

A freenas box has nothing to do with seq. r/w and I was never mentioning this before so I don't really understand why you bought this up but the difference in having more ram and a 10GB connection is the difference between the 10GB connection being utilised and it being wasted.

whats the drive config and speeds your getting for both? 

 

Once you finish the cache yea it will be slower, but it will also be slower if you never hit the cache.

 

Whats the hit ratio your getting?

 

Your not running into swap problems as the ARC never goes into swap.