BUILD HELP: Need a RAID NAS system/server

[p0ntif]

Hi all, I have recently decided (due to some suggestions made in a previous thread by lakedude) to build or buy a good raid NAS. What I am looking for is drive redundancy and high capacity storage. I am open to building a system and using something like FreeNAS, or something similar. i am also open to buying a stand alone unit (that is upgradeable) from dell or other retailers.

Price range is $2000.00

Hit me with your suggestions!

For details:

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. That means what types of tasks you'll be performing.

-STORAGE, NAS/RAID

2. What YOUR budget is. A price range is acceptable as long as it's not more than a 20% spread

$2000.00

3. What country YOU will be buying YOUR parts from.

USA

4. IF you're buying parts OUTSIDE the US, please post a link to the vendor you'll be buying from.

N/A

5. IF YOU have a brand preference. That means, are you an Intel-Fanboy, AMD-Fanboy, ATI-Fanboy, nVidia-Fanboy, Seagate-Fanboy, WD-Fanboy, etc.

No preference

6. If YOU intend on using any of YOUR current parts, and if so, what those parts are.

Nope

7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds.

Default

8. What resolution, not monitor size, will you be using?

Irrelevant, no dedicated monitor necessary

9. WHEN do you plan to build it?

within the next 2 weeks (before Jan 1st 2016)

 

[dave_the_nerd]

How much storage (hard drives) do you need, and does that $2k budget include storage?

The easy answer is to get something like this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thin...604032?hash=item3f585fa9c0:g:pjUAAOSwp5JWYOVa

It'll hold up to four HDDs with the right brackets/adapters. 4GB is enough RAM to get you started. If you're using FreeNAS and ZFS it'll work, but performance will be a lot better with MOAR RAMZ.

http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/compatible-upgrade-for/Lenovo/thinkserver-ts140

^^ Hey look, more ram. ^^

Should be able to drop in an 8GB DIMM (12GB total if mixing and matching works) and four pretty big HDDs and still keep the overall outlay under $1k.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OP2PKH2/?tag=pcpapi-20

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Or you can shop ebay for used enterprise grade stuff if you want to rackmount something.

 

[LurchFrinky]

Like Dave said, how much storage do you need?

Some (very) rough numbers:
motherboard - $100
cpu - $100
memory - $100
cheap case - $100
psu - $100
with $1500 left, you are looking at ~ten 4TB HDD or 20TB in RAID1.

It isn't quite so easy, as you will need 10 SATA ports on your motherboard. And if you are going to spend that much money on that much storage, you will probably want a good RAID controller card.

So yeah, how much storage did you need?

 

[nk215]

With a budget that big, the real question is what else do you want your “NAS” to do?
Let me tell you my specific example

1) I want a NAS

2) I also want to the NAS to host my picture/movie files for light Photoshop/video editing

3) I want my NAS to be my Plex server

4) I also want a VPN server included in the NAS

5) I want a USB3 speed backup from NAS HHD to my external USB3 HDDs using windows file system

6) Fast iSCSI

7) Handbrake video conversion if possible

8) Future proof for the next 5 years or so.

####
(2) and (6) Need a 10G fiber networking.
(3) and (7) Needs a powerful CPU.

At the end, I ended up with a ESXi host with 72 Gig ECC memory and a dual Xeon CPU setup. Xpenolog as a NAS guest VM – using PCI pass-through the entire HBA controller. One of the Windows 7 guests (with USB3 card pass-through) is used for Plex server and Cobian Backup software to backup the NAS data to external USB HDD.

Others Win 7 guests with PCI pass-through of Quadro 4000 cards for light Photoshop/video editing. I then use remote connection (Horizon view) to directly connect to the Win7 guests to do light Photoshop. This works out great even away from home (at in-law houses for example) via Open VPN.

I also have a 10G network card installed on the ESXi host, connected to a 4-SPF++, 24 port switch. At the end I rarely need the 10G network switch/connection speed to my other computers. Horizon view is fast enough locally to do most things I need on the VM.

A dual Xeon CPU satisfy my CPU power needs for Plex/VM/handbrake tasks. The ESXi virtual network switch is 10G so all my guests has the 10G connection to the NAS data.
If I need anything else, I can always run windows server as a guest on the same host.
I picked Xpenology because I already have experience with Synology unit.

Ever since my ESXi host got built, I didn’t even power on one of my 2-bay QNAPs and my other 12-bay Synology units.

 

[mvbighead]

Without knowing more about what you're after, this is purely a guess:

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/T82p7P
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/T82p7P/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1220 V3 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor ($195.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock C226WS ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($183.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: Mushkin Proline 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1333 Memory ($99.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Toshiba 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($81.99 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Toshiba 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($81.99 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Toshiba 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($81.99 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Toshiba 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($81.99 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Toshiba 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($81.99 @ NCIX US)
Storage: Toshiba 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($81.99 @ NCIX US)
Case: NZXT Source 210 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($36.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Power Supply: EVGA 500W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply ($34.99 @ NCIX US)
Total: $1043.89
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-12-22 13:53 EST-0500

CPU is most likely overkill, but I would figure the above platform would run something like FreeNAS with ZFS very well, and it is well under your budget.

 

[p0ntif]

Thanks all for your comments.

Ultimately, I want something that will be a storage solution, and secondly, would love to be able to share files amongst computers on my network, and lastly would love to have a scanner attached to it (I have a fujitsu scansnap i500) that i can scan loads of documents into it and access from muttiple other stations.

No need for rackmount stuff. (but i am not opposed to it either)

Prefer all HDDs to be SSD.

But that's really it.

Just want it to be as failproof/futureproof as possible to protect the integrity of the data.

 

[Cerb]

lastly would love to have a scanner attached to it (I have a fujitsu scansnap i500) that i can scan loads of documents into it and access from muttiple other stations.

A Windows desktop is the easiest way to get that done. But, you can just have it save to the server by default, and then still have a turn-key NAS, BSD box, or whatever, storing and serving the files. Some of those scanners are fast, but they aren't going to outstrip 100Mb, much less GbE, N600, or ac. So, the file storage box itself doesn't need to be what has it attached.

Just want it to be as failproof/futureproof as possible to protect the integrity of the data.

NAS4Free/FreeNAS, plus backups, would be the most solid proven solution. BTRFS is still sort of almost ready by not quite. ZFS is here, and good. ReFS (through Storage Spaces, on desktop Windows) offers similar features, but a bit more restricted. But, ReFS isn't as mature as ZFS by a long shot.

For just a few drives, a TS140, with an i3, and ECC RAM, is hard to beat; but it gets to be less of a value once you have to add an HBA, compared to building something else.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

...
Prefer all HDDs to be SSD.
...

No point.

 

[XavierMace]

No point.

Bite your tongue, all SSD arrays/pools are awesome.

 

[p0ntif]

No point.

Don't the SSDs provide any advantage? Faster access, no moving parts so less likely to fail? Please inform me - I am a self-admitted noob and just want to understand. thanks.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Don't the SSDs provide any advantage? Faster access, no moving parts so less likely to fail? Please inform me - I am a self-admitted noob and just want to understand. thanks.

I haven't see any data that indicates they fail less. They just fail for other reasons. Even if they did have a lower failure rate, they're individually a lit more expensive, so replacing failed disks is cost prohibitive.

They are faster, but the bottleneck in a NAS is the network, not the disks - an array of even moderately slow hdds will be stuck waiting for 1 GbE.

So for a NAS build it basically comes down to GB/$.

The only circumstance where they really provide an advantage is in very heavy loads of very small transactions. (Database servers or email/Exchange servers with lots of clients.) Even if the total number of megabytes per second is modest, the number of read/write requests can be very large - large enough that even large arrays of hdds will start to lag, but a couple of ssds will hardly flinch. In these cases, a couple of SSDs are typically used as a cache for a larger array of less expensive hard drives.

 

[lakedude]

Sorry I've not been more help. I set mine up years ago in the DDR 2 days so my info is a bit outdated but the concept is still brilliant.

The software is going to be the tricky part but you can still buy parts by the end of the year and worry about the software later. I don't have any specific experience with the parts I'm about to suggest, they are just suggestions.

Shopping list:

Get 4 to 10 drives, 2 matching (with each other) bootable drives and 2 to 8 matching drives for the "pool". SSDS will be faster, mechanical hard drives will provide more storage, your choice. You will need good quality SATA cables as well. I'd avoid WD green drives.

Get a case that can hold a mess of drives. Fractal Design mid or even full towers are excellent for this purpose.

Get a motherboard with a bunch of SATA ports, 8 minimum. If you are going to buy 10 drives make sure the MB has 10 SATA ports.

Get a bunch of RAM. This is one application that can really make use of lots of RAM.

Consider getting a server board with ECC RAM. I can't help much here except to say that if you go with a real server board you will need a CPU that supports ECC and ECC RAM. My "server" uses normal non-ECC DDR 2 and it works fine.

MB video is fine, in fact once it is setup you can run it headless if you like.

You can get RAID if you want but ZFS does not require such things. ZFS will handle such things in software. Software RAID was a bad thing at one time but those days are long gone. ZFS is an excellent way to store data.

If you do go with SSDs you can use 2x 2.5 to 1x 3.5 adapters to shove a ton of little drives into not much space. You could then get a much smaller case if you wanted.

ZFS is flexible with storage to redundant drive ratio. You can have as many or as few redundant drives as you like. The more redundant drives you have the more fault tolerant the system will be at the expense of storage space. Having fewer redundant drives will make for more storage space at the expense of fault tolerance. For me 2 redundant drives out of 6 was the magic number. I get 4 drives worth of storage space. Any 2 drives can go bad and the system will still work like brand new, YMMV.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you don't need the newest CPU with DDR4. DDR 3 should be fine and it should save you some money.

MB with 10x SATA: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157500

i3 CPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116946

Case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352048

I'm not married to any of these. If anyone has a better idea, great.

 

[lakedude]

Evidently if you go with FreeBSD the boot drives are no longer needed (A good reason to go with FreeBSD). It looks like the OS can be "ZFS on root" now.

As I said the software is going to take a little doing since I'm completely out of date on this stuff. Don't worry we will figure it out together...

 

[lakedude]

The rule of thumb on RAM is a GB plus one GB per TB of storage. I don't have enough in mine because DDR 2 was expensive back then.

 

[mvbighead]

Don't the SSDs provide any advantage? Faster access, no moving parts so less likely to fail? Please inform me - I am a self-admitted noob and just want to understand. thanks.

Not really. Like he said, you're always going to be limited by your 1 Gbe. Right now, a single spinning disk can reach that transfer rate. Throw 4-8 together and you'll definitely surpass your network.

I will say that, in looking for drives to purchase, the failure rate on some models of 3TB plus drives seems abnormally high. Backblaze however has done quite a bit of research on the matter: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/

Long story short, avoid Seagate and look for HGST or WD, or Toshiba. I opted for Toshiba due to cost and the 3 year warranty. They'll be running a simple array from an IBM M5014 ServeRaid card purchased from ebay, and hooked into an ESXi host.

And using pcpartpicker to find the lowest cost drives both on the spinning and SSD side for the raw media costs (not factoring in redundancy and additional drives):

89.99 for 3TB of spinning disk
779.97 for 3TB of SSD (3 x 1TB at 259.99)

Now, if you're only planning to store a few TB, fine. But is it really worth 8 times the cost?

SSDs are vital when you're talking about:
* Production workloads
* End user experience (in desktops and such, they're a game changer)
* Reboot times

But for a NAS? Unless you're running a workload against it with constantly changes bits and massive reads across a 10 Gig network, you're wasting a significant amount of cash for minimal benefit.

I dunno if they make end-user software that could use SSD as cache for tiering and such, but if you do consider going that type of route, you'd be best to look for SLC SSD (this would be the only reason to put SSD in a NAS):

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/MLC-vs-SLC-Which-flash-SSD-is-right-for-you

And with that, you'd only new a disk or two depending upon how the platform uses it.

 

[XavierMace]

ZFS will make use of SSD's for ZIL and ARC.