I need some advice

DanKepke · December 29, 2013

Hello everybody

First of all i want to apologize if me english is bad, im on the way to learn the english grammatics properly. I seek ed for help and suggestions in german forums, but they like to ignore me needing.

I want to upgrade my storage. Currently i run some old external hdd in a big data chaos. I want to do my self something good and build a datacanter, but i'm not sure what would be better. I don't need my anime, date and music on my smartphone, so i don't know if a NAS is what i need. I would love to have 16TB storage, but i want to minimize the risks of a dead hdd after a year.

What do you guys think? Should i buy a NAS, build my self a homeserver or go whit a external multi-hddcase? I would love if the storage system run fast and allows to play date direct from the storage (i heard some nas don't allow dat/can't do that). I don't have a lot of money, but i will spend as much as needed for a good and solid storage system.

All help and ideas are welcome!

Greetings from switzerland, Dan@Dan!

CwGoh · December 29, 2013

If you want 16TB you will probably need a custom home sever since most consumer NASes are 4 bay. (4 x 4 = 16TB, no redundancy). Just get an ordinary computer with PCIe slots in it, place in a RAID card, and do a RAID 6 of 6 4TB drives and have 16TB of usable storage that can sustain 2 drive failures.

DanKepke · December 29, 2013

Sounds good. I saw some 8 to 12 bay NAS but the price is unreasonable high. Would a i5 3470, Gigabyte GA-H61TN, Prodigy and 8GB 1333MHz do the job? Which RAID card and OS should i chose?

DanKepke · December 29, 2013

I heard NAS4free needs a lot of RAM, will 8GB be enough? L2ARC is the same as SSD caching for HDD, right? Sounds good to me.

wpirobotbuilder · December 29, 2013

I heard NAS4free needs a lot of RAM, will 8GB be enough? L2ARC is the same as SSD caching for HDD, right? Sounds good to me.

It doesn't, unless you are doing data deduplication. 4GB should be fine.

L2ARC is a sort of L2 cache for your entire system. It caches volumes, not individual drives.

If you want 16TB you will probably need a custom home sever since most consumer NASes are 4 bay. (4 x 4 = 16TB, no redundancy). Just get an ordinary computer with PCIe slots in it, place in a RAID card, and do a RAID 6 of 6 4TB drives and have 16TB of usable storage that can sustain 2 drive failures.

You could go with that. However, RAID6 rebuilds take forever to complete, on the order of many hours or even days. Especially with a RAID card and large drives, since it will try and rebuild all 16TB of data, even if the array is mostly empty.

It will be more expensive, but I would highly recommend a RAID 10. If a single drive fails, then it will only have to rebuild one drive. Plus, since there is no parity to calculate, the controller will be able to run at full speed, restoring the data more quickly. You will be able to sustain one drive loss, and have an 86% chance of sustaining a second drive failure, if you do a RAID10 of 8 4TB drives.

DanKepke · December 29, 2013

Ok thanks, i will look in to this the next coming days, and look for some hardware.

Edit: My Bro means that a NAS would be just fine for me, but is there a NAS dat supports watching media (1080p, surround sound, 10bit, ect) in high quality?

Edit2: After a long talk we came to the conclussion that 4x4TB in a RAID5 will be the perfect system for me. Now is the question how and what HDD should i use(for one WD Red 4TB i can buy two baraccudas~)? The Synologie DS412+ sems really good, but a customiced system allows mor power, which is for me eventually to much (media server/nas). I don't know what to do