confirmation on my nas server

[Technomancer__]

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https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07CG3XJ6F/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A3JWKAKR8XB7XF&psc=1

https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B075M8FH4C/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?smid=A29D61YZMYPL6V&psc=1

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https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07B428M7F/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=A3JWKAKR8XB7XF&psc=1

https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00GTDT0VC/ref=ox_sc_act_title_6?smid=A29D61YZMYPL6V&psc=1

 

for mobo, i was going to get the Asus Prime X470 Pro but it got expensive and the Amazon seller is out of stock so its only available from 3rd parties. should i get another one?

 

just to be sure i can expand my raid 5 array? https://www.broadcom.com/support/knowledgebase/1211161503168/how-to-expand-an-array-on-megaraid-controllers-adding-drives-to-

btw do i need something like this for my raid card or does it already have sata?

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

What OS?

 

Why the raid card? Use the onboard sata and run software raid, its almost always better here. And that raid card isn't great, you want one with a battery, but really save the money and use better software raid.

 

What are you doing with it?

 

Get a boot ssd.

 

 

[homosapien99]

Does your motherboard have built in RAID support (software raid)? FreeNAS and other NAS operating systems don't work as well with hardware raid, and the RAID controller specified uses SAS instead of SATA (The Seagate drive uses SATA). I would recommend you get multiple 1TB/3TB drives instead of one 12TB hard drive because rebuild time will take a long time with a 12TB hard drive (and will be expensive to buy new ones). I would recommend WD Red drives, they are made for a NAS build.

 

Also, it would be a lot cheaper to get a Xeon processor that isn't as powerful (E3/E5 or maybe even 56xx) as the Ryzen 7 2700X because this is a NAS server, not a gaming machine. You can spend the money on drives instead. 

 

Edit: 

Get a boot ssd.

 

 

There is no need for a boot SSD as NAS operating systems typically are loaded into RAM, it is better to get a 16GB flash drive and put the NAS OS on it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, homosapien99 said:

Does your motherboard have built in RAID support (software raid)?

Dont use motherboard raid, it sucks, software raid is much better like zfs, mdadm, storage spaces or others.

 

2 minutes ago, homosapien99 said:

RAID controller specified uses SAS instead of SATA

All sas controllers work with sata drives.

 

2 minutes ago, homosapien99 said:

recommend you get multiple 1TB/3TB drives instead of one 12TB hard drive because rebuild time will take a long time with a 12TB hard drive

But bigger drives let you expand later on, cost less, use less power.

 

Rebuilt really isn't that bad, and warraty covers replacement cost.

 

2 minutes ago, homosapien99 said:

Also, it would be a lot cheaper to get a Xeon processor that isn't as powerfu

Not really as they use a good amount more power, and a r7 is faster than most of the older e5 systems.

 

 

[homosapien99]

14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Dont use motherboard raid, it sucks, software raid is much better like zfs, mdadm, storage spaces or others.

My bad, I thought software raid was the same thing as motherboard raid.

 

16 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

But bigger drives let you expand later on, cost less, use less power.

 

Rebuilt really isn't that bad, and warraty covers replacement cost.

It is bad if you are in the process of rebuilding a drive and another drive fails and all of your data is gone. I can see why you would want to use bigger drives but personally I wouldn't do it myself.

 

17 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Not really as they use a good amount more power, and a r7 is faster than most of the older e5 systems.

Most NAS systems use processors the equivalent to an i3 and they work fine, it's not like this is a high speed DAS.

[Technomancer__]

2 hours ago, homosapien99 said:

It is bad if you are in the process of rebuilding a drive and another drive fails and all of your data is gone. I can see why you would want to use bigger drives but personally I wouldn't do it myself.

Yea I will have offsite backup

@Electronics Wizardy I will be using raid 5 and I will be using windows.

There's s battery module for this card. What is the battery for? The cache?

 

[Technomancer__]

Also I will be probably using it as a render server with vray probably. My CPU sucks I have a 6600

[Electronics Wizardy]

52 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

Yea I will have offsite backup

@Electronics Wizardy I will be using raid 5 and I will be using windows.

There's s battery module for this card. What is the battery for? The cache?

 

If you don't mind more power, id go dual lga 2011, about the same cost, almost 2x the cpu power.

 

Id put something like proxmox on the system and use vms, making managing it  much easier.

 

Don't use hardware raid, use storage spaces in windows or zfs on proxmox.

 

 

[Technomancer__]

7 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id put something like proxmox on the system and use vms, making managing it  much easier.

 

Don't use hardware raid, use storage spaces in windows or zfs on proxmox.

Zfs is hard to expand down the line and spaces doesn't have raid 5

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

Zfs is hard to expand down the line and spaces doesn't have raid 5

Well there adding raidz expansion later this year so that might fix that problem. Also raidz is basically raid5 for most all uses.

 

Otherwise you can use md in linux, easy expansion, better than that raid card.

 

Or look at unraid.

 

 

[jde3]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Well there adding raidz expansion later this year so that might fix that problem. Also raidz is basically raid5 for most all uses.

 

Otherwise you can use md in linux, easy expansion, better than that raid card.

 

Or look at unraid.

 

 

They are adding it to FreeBSD head later this year, (think rolling branch, or nightly) you might see this in the release branch for FreeBSD 12 but it could also be 13.. so possibly 2 years away. The feature your looking for is called ZFS Reflow. And.. even if it dosen't have it it's still probably the best choice. Expandability sounds good in theory.. and you can already expand mirrored pools but in practice it's a pretty rare thing to do. Personally I like my data so there are few circumstances where I don't use ZFS even on single drive desktop systems.

[Technomancer__]

32 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Well there adding raidz expansion later this year so that might fix that problem. Also raidz is basically raid5 for most all uses.

 

Otherwise you can use md in linux, easy expansion, better than that raid card.

 

Or look at unraid.

 

 

Quote

(raid5) used with five(5) disks or more

i want to start from 3 drives.

and i prefer windows @jde3

[jde3]

2 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

i want to start from 3 drives.

and i prefer windows @jde3

I'm sorry, I thought you wanted help with a nas server. My mistake.

 

Windows is a consumer desktop operating system. It's something secretaries use not sysadmins. (i'm joking, no hate here)

[Technomancer__]

also @Electronics Wizardy you told me about a battery i found this is it the 2nd one that's compatible with the MEGARAID SAS 9341-8I

[Technomancer__]

2 minutes ago, jde3 said:

I'm sorry, I thought you wanted help with a nas server. My mistake.

 

Windows is a consumer desktop operating system. It's something secretaries use not sysadmins. (i'm joking, no hate here)

ok what distro should i use? 

i can dual boot so if i want rendering or something i will just boot windows and then go back to linux when i finish

[Electronics Wizardy]

15 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

i want to start from 3 drives.

and i prefer windows @jde3

Raid 5 can work with 3 drive, the number is completly abrity.

 

Look at storage spaces in windows. It will work well here.

13 minutes ago, jde3 said:

I'm sorry, I thought you wanted help with a nas server. My mistake.

 

Windows is a consumer desktop operating system. It's something secretaries use not sysadmins. (i'm joking, no hate here)

There are many servers running windows, nothing wrong with that, and will make a good nas.

 

11 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

ok what distro should i use? 

i can dual boot so if i want rendering or something i will just boot windows and then go back to linux when i finish

Don't dual boot, vms.

[jde3]

40 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

ok what distro should i use? 

If you want real enterprise grade storage with an interface for home use, you have two choices. FreeNAS and NAS4Free. Anything else is going to cost you a butt load.

 

FreeNAS can do some fancy stuff like jails plugins media servers like emby and plex etc. NAS4Free is just plain old boring storage. NAS's are traditionally very boring so that is a good choice sometimes. If all you want is something that stores your files and never dies, go boring and use mirrored pools. (raid1 equivalent)

 

Linux based stuff like unraid and openmedia valut exist but generally use XFS or btrfs that are ok for home use but they don't get used in enterprise due to some concerns and lack of trust/design problems. XFS is generally more trusted than btrfs.

 

I've worked as a sysadmin for ~30 years I will tell you your drives are secretly piloting your demise and want to kill your data.. don't let them. Have a copy of your data live. Your workstation/desktop/media server whatever... then the backup on the NAS and if you want extra protection do offsite like S3 or Tarsnap. offsite is where you send the stuff you can not lose.

[leadeater]

55 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

spaces doesn't have raid 5

Space does have RAID 5, or more correctly single parity (RAID 5 like) and dual parity (erasure coding). You shouldn't use either for primary storage though, only as slow tiers.

 

14 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

also @Electronics Wizardy you told me about a battery i found this is it the 2nd one that's compatible with the MEGARAID SAS 9341-8I

I don't think the 9341 supports flash cache/BBU at all, look at the 9260/9265/9266/9270/9271 or 9360/9361.

[jde3]

18 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

There are many servers running windows, nothing wrong with that, and will make a good nas.

 

Oddly enough when I started out as a sysadmin Windows NT was coming in. I worked on Unix and Sun and watched people flock to the Windows server wagon but.. Unix (and Linux it's bastard clone) ..even though Unix was made the the 60's the ideas still reign supreme, it's a monument to how revolutionary this was at the time.. clearly the model of computing they implemented was correct and Microsoft was just marketing.

 

That's kind of the nice thing about code. Once it's right and does it's job it lives on forever.. when it's wrong (and more often than not it is) people always want the new version with the fixes and they start to think that's just normal progress. these are logical machines and sometimes a device made 100 years ago can still be correct today. John Browning is an example of that.

 

My opinion on things, clearly I'm biased but there may be some reasons behind that too so.. who knows.

[jde3]

Oh yeah, one thing I left out.. When you copy files to your backup, make sure you do so in a transnational way. Just dragging and dropping from windows isn't good enough. Incomplete writes are pretty common. You need a way to verify what you backed up is actually the same data.

 

Some solutions to this... rsync or a backup program of some form like duplicati or whatever your preference is.

[Technomancer__]

4 hours ago, leadeater said:

I don't think the 9341 supports flash cache/BBU at all, look at the 9260/9265/9266/9270/9271 or 9360/9361.

 

i will get the 9341. the server will have a psu so it should be fine

[Technomancer__]

3 hours ago, jde3 said:

Oh yeah, one thing I left out.. When you copy files to your backup, make sure you do so in a transnational way. Just dragging and dropping from windows isn't good enough. Incomplete writes are pretty common. You need a way to verify what you backed up is actually the same data.

 

Some solutions to this... rsync or a backup program of some form like duplicati or whatever your preference is.

backblaze should be good for offsite

[leadeater]

31 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

i will get the 9341. the server will have a psu so it should be fine

The flash cache/BBU is required for write-back cache to be active which is also required for decent RAID 5/6 performance. Without active write-back cache you'll only get around 60-120 MB/s write performance to the array no matter how many HDDs you have.

 

Edit:

I can confirm the 9341 has no onboard cache at all, I wouldn't use it for RAID 5 or 6.

[Technomancer__]

28 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The flash cache/BBU is required for write-back cache to be active which is also required for decent RAID 5/6 performance. Without active write-back cache you'll only get around 60-120 MB/s write performance to the array no matter how many HDDs you have.

ok can you sugest a raid controler in the range of 200 - 300 euros from something like https://www.amazon.de?

[leadeater]

19 minutes ago, Technomancer__ said:

ok can you sugest a raid controler in the range of 200 - 300 euros from something like https://www.amazon.de?

 

https://www.amazon.de/MegaRAID-9260-8i-8-Port-6Gbit-SATA/dp/B00AENMZF6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1525610005&sr=8-2&keywords=lsi+9260-8i

And

https://www.amazon.de/LSI-LSI00264-Batterie-Backup-RAID-Controller/dp/B004L62KIY/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1525610005&sr=8-5&keywords=lsi+9260-8i