Building my first NAS

[Guest]

Hi folks,

I've decided that I've kinda had it with  Dropbox and the like so I want to build a NAS to replace that. I don't really have a set budget. I'd like to spend around 500E if possible, but that's a flexible boundary. The use case is fairly simple. I want a place to store all my files (photos, code, data & other text stuff mostly) and host my code repositories. I want remote file access and intend to use it mostly like a dropbox thing, (meaning downloading the files to local storage when needed). Two other things: I want to host git repos there as mentioned, so I will need to be able to push and pull from that semi-frequently (a couple of times a day). But that's all more or less. It won't be anything else besides a storage box. Secondly, as added security, I'd like it to be able to make encrypted backups overnight and store those in a cloud storage like tarsnap. I don't need an enormous amount of storage but it will be long-term storage. I was thinking 2-3 TB should be fine for the foreseeable future if I have the ability to upgrade. I was thinking 4 1TB WD red drives in RAID 6 to start off with. Building it myself is not a problem, but I don't know a lot about hardware and this is my first NAS so I'm having a hard time choosing good components, especially when it comes to memory and CPUs. I'd really like it to have a low power consumption. A small case and low noise are nice to have but not essential. For the OS I was thinking of using either FreeNAS or ZFS + a Linux distro, but I'm not set on either. My two questions are, does this sound like a good setup, and can you help me choose good parts for it? Thanks! Please let me know if I left anything out. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id probably go prebuilt here, but for diy,

 

Id go with a celeron here. You don't need much cpu here. 4 or 8gb of ram will be fine aswell.

 

For storage id go with 2x4tb drives, bigger drives are normally cheaper per tb, user less power and are faster. Raid 6 with 4 drives really don't make since either.

 

FreeNAS will work well here, unraid will also work fine.

[njmyers3]

Everything sounds good to me except the 4 1TB WD Reds. Those are $60 per terabyte which is quite high. You can get 4TB Reds for around $120 which comes out to about $30 per terabyte. This makes a bigger difference as you add more drives. Of course this limits your pooling options, but personally I would purchase two 4TB reds and put them in raid1 (not sure what that is in ZFS). You already seem to have cloud backups in mind so that's good. You'll get 4TB of usable storage (vs 2TB if you go with the 4x1TB option in raid 6), have redundancy and off-site backup.

[aezakmi]

Quote

I'd really like it to have a low power consumption

A small case and low noise are nice to have but not essential.

You could go for a Gigabyte N3160-D3V combo board

 

pros: passive cooling, 4 SATA ports, DDR3 (cheaper), 2 LAN ports

cons: can't upgrade CPU

 

you could get a mini ITX case w/ included PSU, a couple of HDDs and that would be it...

if you want fast drives get 2TB barracudas, otherwise get WD Blue or Purple, if you don't do RAID it'll be easier, safer and you'd had full control over each drive

want to keep it simple? install Windows 7 and set up a network share for each drive, install a remote host on it and a remote client in your computer, after that you can just leave it next to your router and you wouldn't even notice is there

[Guest]

So this is the build I eventually came up with: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/8rc8ZR

I know it might not be the optimal config. For example, the PSU is a bit too powerful and 2x4GB  would have been better instead of 1x8GB but since it is just going to be a storage box I didn't think it was too much of a problem. A reasonable build for the budget I feel like. If someone could take a final look at it, that would be great. Thanks for the feedback everyone!

[njmyers3]

4 hours ago, ryugami28 said:

So this is the build I eventually came up with: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/8rc8ZR

I know it might not be the optimal config. For example, the PSU is a bit too powerful and 2x4GB  would have been better instead of 1x8GB but since it is just going to be a storage box I didn't think it was too much of a problem. A reasonable build for the budget I feel like. If someone could take a final look at it, that would be great. Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Looks good but you don't need the thermal paste. The CPU comes with a cooler that will have pre-applied thermal paste. If you want to clean it off and apply your own you'll get a few degrees cooler temps, but on a Celeron it's not going to matter much.

[jde3]

Check out Nextcloud, might be what your looking for. It also has a package for FreeNAS.

[NelizMastr]

On 6/28/2018 at 3:34 AM, aezakmi said:

if you want fast drives get 2TB barracudas, otherwise get WD Blue or Purple

Consumer drives in a NAS is a bad idea overall. Running regular Barracudas and WD Blues will lead to problems down the road. NAS drives exist because they're designed to run 24/7 and they have technology on board that prevents damage by vibration from nearby drives. Performance isn't that useful either since your main bottleneck is the network connection and even a single drive can saturate it. Blues and Barracudas aren't much faster than Reds and Ironwolfs either. They have slightly better response time due to the higher rotation speeds but sequential operations are identical.

[jde3]

11 hours ago, NelizMastr said:

Consumer drives in a NAS is a bad idea overall. Running regular Barracudas and WD Blues will lead to problems down the road. NAS drives exist because they're designed to run 24/7 and they have technology on board that prevents damage by vibration from nearby drives. Performance isn't that useful either since your main bottleneck is the network connection and even a single drive can saturate it. Blues and Barracudas aren't much faster than Reds and Ironwolfs either. They have slightly better response time due to the higher rotation speeds but sequential operations are identical.

I tend to disagree. The I in raid stands for inexpensive. They are intended to fail, you have to expect them to. If the choice came down to more drives or higher quality drives I would take more every day of the week. Your standard HGST drive for example would be just fine. This is especially true in home installs. There is a bell curve on the failure rate, extending that bell curve a little bit towards more reliability just doesn't make up for having a spare. Ovis you don't want the cheapest IBM DiskStar "death star" on the market but there is a mean level of reliability.

 

In enterprise your drives are going to be provided by your hardware vendor anyhow so it's almost moot there. Most of this is marketing.. just shoot for mid range and you'll be fine.

 

In NAS sometimes what you'll run into that is a larger problem is that a drive will be made + a sector or - a sector thus throwing off the size and making it's use as a spare impossible watch out for that.

[NelizMastr]

On 6/29/2018 at 10:43 PM, jde3 said:

*snip*

While I can see what you're saying, I'd still go for NAS disks on lower capacity prebuilts (especially 4-bay and lower) since the total cost difference is negligible and you're not really able to properly utilize the option of hot spares. With an 8-bay unit or a custom built, taking decent anti-vibration mounts into account, better quality consumer drives would be fine probably.

I've had some properly awful experiences with the 7200rpm WD Blues and the cheapo Toshiba Deskstar derivative disks in terms of vibrations that not even decent rubber mounts could reduce to an acceptible degree. From what I've heard the P300 series makes a pretty decent NAS disk on the cheap, though. 

[jde3]

Yeah, More spindles raises your failure rate tho. It's an issue and it just needs to be said once in a while. Drives will fail. all of them. no matter how expensive. Believing a top quality one won't isn't something people should get into their heads (I know you get this, this is for others)