Rarely-accessed NAS, how important are NAS hdd's?

[Kalm_Traveler]

Hey guys, I'm repurposing my old tower as a home server, for a backup copy of media, as well as to be able to stream it to my home theater without the main rig to be on (they're in the same room and the pc is loud) as well as maybe having that old rig do DHCP and vpn server duties later on. 

 

Anyway, i already have two 4tb desktop hdd's in there and was hoping to add 3 more for a 5 drive array either as RAID 5 or maybe as RAID 0+1 for some redundancy since this is partly for a local backup. 

 

I see on FreeNAS website that they strongly recommend NAS specific drives, but honestly I probably be accessing data on this thing once or twice a month at most so how important is the drive type really? 

 

IE with such extreme low use, does it really matter if i buy 3 more desktop drives instead of building it with 5 NAS specific drives? 

[NelizMastr]

Will the system be running 24/7 with those drives or only when you need it? If the former, consumer drives can get damaged by the vibration of nearby drives and they're not designed for constant spinning causing more wear than you'd usually expect. NAS drives handle vibration and running 24/7 very well. They don't like frequent spinup cycles, though.

[simson0606]

26 minutes ago, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

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It wouldn't matter much if you would only power up the nas when you need it and shut it down when you're done (not much a nas anymore though)...

But to be safe i'd then steer away from complex raid types and just stick with raid 1 or raid 10. (rebuilding is much less wear on the working drives)

 

All in all: nas drives are often not that much more expensive, and if the data is important to you... why not spend a little more for the peace of mind.

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

Hey guys, I'm repurposing my old tower as a home server, for a backup copy of media, as well as to be able to stream it to my home theater without the main rig to be on (they're in the same room and the pc is loud) as well as maybe having that old rig do DHCP and vpn server duties later on. 

 

Anyway, i already have two 4tb desktop hdd's in there and was hoping to add 3 more for a 5 drive array either as RAID 5 or maybe as RAID 0+1 for some redundancy since this is partly for a local backup. 

 

I see on FreeNAS website that they strongly recommend NAS specific drives, but honestly I probably be accessing data on this thing once or twice a month at most so how important is the drive type really? 

 

IE with such extreme low use, does it really matter if i buy 3 more desktop drives instead of building it with 5 NAS specific drives? 

You don't need NAS or Server grade HDD's for FreeNAS (or any other NAS). Consumer grade drives are fine.

One thing: I would avoid RAID01 or 10. The risk of pool failure is higher, because the specific order in which drives die becomes important. If both pairs in a mirror fail, the entire thing is gone because of the fact that data is striped across the array.

 

RAID5 is definitely more appropriate.

 

I would, however, make sure that you have a separate backup of any important data that you can't afford to lose. Remember, RAID is not a backup in and of itself.

 

FreeNAS is great - I use it myself. But one consideration you should be aware of is that adding drives to an existing array is difficult to do. So growing your pool becomes a hassle. The "recommended" way of growing a pool is simply backup the data, create a new pool, copy the data back. They ARE working on introducing features to ZFS that allow you to add drives to a RAIDZ1 (RAID5) or RAIDZ2 (RAID6) pool, but these aren't likely to happen until the end of the year.

 

So what does that mean for you? Well, just make sure to plan your pool properly from the get-go.

 

Other alternatives include using Linux + ZFS or Linux + MDADM (built-in software RAID). OpenMediaVault. unRAID. FlexRAID, etc.

[Meic]

I use normal consumer drive as I have the same use case of only accessing this "cold storage" a couple of times a month. Everything with frequent access fits of the server's SSD (also used for the OS).

 

My main advice is to make sure that the drive spin down when no longer in use. It's easy to check as you will hear if they are spinning or not...

 

I'm using ubuntu server and I had to tweak the settings to get the spindown to work, I spindown after 10 mins of inactivity. You can use the "hdparam -S" to do this on the command line, afraid I have no experience with FreeNAS.

 

It is worth noting that frequently spinning as disk up and down is much worse that constantly being on so only take this approach if you really are only occasionally using the drive and make sure there are no automated scans of the disk causing it to spin up every hour.

[unijab]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

RAID5 is definitely more appropriate.

Not if using standard desktop drives...don't do it

[dalekphalm]

Just now, unijab said:

Not if using standard desktop drives...don't do it

You're thinking of Hardware RAID. In that case, yes you can run into issues, because they lack TLER, so the hardware RAID card might drop a disk because it's taking too long to respond.

 

This is largely not an issue in home-brew software RAID arrays, like RAIDZ1, or parity based Storage Spaces. They tend to be more forgiving.

 

The risk is extremely minimal. And assuming the OP has a proper backup of anything he can't afford to lose, I would say the increased cost of NAS/Server rated drives outweighs the risk in this case.

[Blebekblebek]

While everyone busy arguing about unimportant hardware classification which isn't even matter in this scenario.

 

I'm more concern about the NAS purpose

If you only access it once in a while, why build it?
In what scenario your usage will be more frequent?

 

I mean while NAS is supposed to be your data bank but in today situation it can do lot's and more than just data bank.

Use SCSI so you don't store data locally

Install Plex, torrent service, vm etc..

 

if it's really once in a while I suggest just get USB enclosure and call it a day, the most expensive stuff with this scenario is your time, while installing it pretty easy and fast you might encounter issue with different configuration.

 

[Kalm_Traveler]

ok I am a little confused now. This machine will be used as a NAS to stream video probably twice a month, and I was hoping to add DHCP, VPN, and maybe firewall duties to it later on to offload those functions from my router, so the machine at least eventually will be running 24/7.

 

Having the HDD's spin down (to off) most of the time is fine, and probably a good thing? since I'd only be accessing them occasionally at night to watch a movie.

Again the reason I'm asking if NAS drives are really important for this type of use is because I already have 2 desktop 4tb drives, and was planning to buy 3 more to complete the setup.

[Kalm_Traveler]

9 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

While everyone busy arguing about unimportant hardware classification which isn't even matter in this scenario.

 

I'm more concern about the NAS purpose

If you only access it once in a while, why build it? I thought I explained that in the OP, but basically it is already built - I have spare parts laying around and would like to stream video from a PC not located in the same room as my theater
In what scenario your usage will be more frequent? eventually it would be on 24/7 for other server duties like DHCP, VPN server, firewall, etc

 

I mean while NAS is supposed to be your data bank but in today situation it can do lot's and more than just data bank.

Use SCSI so you don't store data locally

Install Plex, torrent service, vm etc..

 

if it's really once in a while I suggest just get USB enclosure and call it a day, the most expensive stuff with this scenario is your time, while installing it pretty easy and fast you might encounter issue with different configuration.

I had one of the 4tb drives in a USB enclosure attached to my router but it seems streaming from an actual computer is much faster even though it was using usb 3.0 on the router. 

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