Building or Buying a NAS w/Raid

CaptGaucho

Junior Member
Dec 1, 2009
4
0
0
Hi All.

First post here.
I've been throwing this option around for awhile and can't seem to make a decision on what type of NAS with Raid option I want for my home enviroment.

We have 3 Laptops and 2 Desktops in my house and what I would like to do is build a NAS where I could store all my pictures/music and some videos. I was thinking of building a HTPC but I don't think that would get much use. I also do not want to have a slip up and lose and pictures on this box reason why I want RAID (1).

Should I build a box that would always be on and might have heat issues or go out and buy a premade box that is green and would light up when it senses computers are on the network???

I also do not want to spend an arm and leg. What are the pros and cons on these 2 options.

Thanks
 

drebo

Diamond Member
Feb 24, 2006
7,034
1
81
Your best bet is to just get a Windows Home Server box. The consumer-grade NAS and RAID crap sucks and isn't really worth the money. Even the $500-$1000 boxes aren't really worth it. They're very slow and not very tolerant of drive failures.

Windows Home Server, on the other hand, has some really cool features and is generally the best route to go for centralized storage at home. Performance/Price ratio is MUCH higher, too.

Edit to add:

The purpose of RAID is NOT for data redundancy/backup purposes. RAID is for fault tolerance ONLY (i.e. drive failure doesn't take your system down). If you "slip up," as you say, and accidentally delete files from the drive, a RAID will NOT help you. Additionally, if you misconfigure your system (to use write caching or something without a battery backup or BBWC) and cause file table corruption, that corruption WILL be mirrored to all drives. If you want to avoid data loss, back the files up to a separate drive or burn them to DVD.
 
Last edited:

tonyyy

Member
Nov 10, 2009
75
0
0
I second that. Go and get a Windows Home Server.

You can build it! that way you know what parts you have and you know how much expansion room you have for additional hard drive upgrades, ram etc.

If you just want to get it over with and buy a Windows Home Server from newegg you'll get a basic system that prolly doesn't have the room for more then 2 TB's or 1 TB .... your very limited to upgrading adding more hard drives blah blah.

check out

www.wegotserved.com for all your WHS questions.

you can download modules/addon's, stream video/music, setup automatic backups of all your PC's turn on file duplication that will make a backup copy of whatever folder/file you choose!

just remember to turn duplication on for those important data that you need back up and your all set.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
69,307
13,047
126
www.anyf.ca
Build a mid end machine, try to find a mobo with 8 sata slots (hard to find, but they're out there) and get something like this case, and these. Install your favorite flavor of Linux and setup MD raid. Super easy and reliable, and no need to pay for any software to do it.

My current server is of similar configuration. One drive for OS (non raid) and 3 drives in raid 5. At any given time if I want I could remove one of the 3 drives, add a bigger one, rebuild the raid, then repeat, and then grow the raid. I have 4 spare slots for a future raid 10 or raid 5. I will probably wait till the 2TB drives are cheaper (they've already gone down quite a bit) and buy 4. I use this as the actual server but idealy it would be better if I had another separate server and used this as a dedicated NAS. Could put the OS on a USB stick that way I have 8 data drives. Imagine a raid 10 with 8 2TB drives... *drull* That would be bigger then our $60k SAN... that's kinda sad actually lol.
 
Last edited:

CaptGaucho

Junior Member
Dec 1, 2009
4
0
0
Thanks for the replies!!!!!!

Im not really interested in backing up any machines, I would just like a network drive where my family could share pictures from and use to dump my 1000+ cd collection into. And maybe even drop a few hundred dvd's on to it.

My #1 concern is that if there is a disk failure I am set up in RAID and could swap out the drive and rebuild also no proprietary stuff.
 

Pantlegz

Diamond Member
Jun 6, 2007
4,627
4
81
I have a freenas setup with a hardware raid5 setup, the most expensive part of the setup is the hardware RAID5 and the SCSI controller. Other than that, freenas is well free and SCSI HDD's are pretty cheap as well.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
69,307
13,047
126
www.anyf.ca
I have a freenas setup with a hardware raid5 setup, the most expensive part of the setup is the hardware RAID5 and the SCSI controller. Other than that, freenas is well free and SCSI HDD's are pretty cheap as well.

Guessing you meant SATA not SCSI. SCSI disks are ridiculously expensive, and they're usually very small in size. It's good if you're looking for the max performance, but for home use I really don't see the need, I prefer to go big with sata.

You can also use software raid, but I would research the drawbacks and advantages of both software and hardware raid and decide for yourself.
 

drebo

Diamond Member
Feb 24, 2006
7,034
1
81
They have 600gb 15K RPM SAS drives now...not exactly small. Though they are insanely expensive (almost $1k each).

Software RAID and RAID integrated on to consumer-grade motherboards (it's the same thing, regardless of what they tell you) is absolutely garbage, and most cannot reliably recover from a disk failure anyway. OP: if you're dead set on going RAID, get an add-in hardware RAID controller with built-in processor, RAM, and battery backed write cache. If you don't have those things, you're asking for trouble.

Alternatively, just get a cheap WHS server and schedule it to push a backup to an external drive every night. It'll be faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
 

CaptGaucho

Junior Member
Dec 1, 2009
4
0
0
Living in the era of Digital Pictures, I already had a drive failure and lost pictures that I can't get back. It was between the time I scheduled a weekly backup of the drive.

I just figure if I put these drives into a RAID I would be safe if there is any disk failures I could always rebuild.
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
0
0
They have 600gb 15K RPM SAS drives now...not exactly small. Though they are insanely expensive (almost $1k each).

Software RAID and RAID integrated on to consumer-grade motherboards (it's the same thing, regardless of what they tell you) is absolutely garbage, and most cannot reliably recover from a disk failure anyway. OP: if you're dead set on going RAID, get an add-in hardware RAID controller with built-in processor, RAM, and battery backed write cache. If you don't have those things, you're asking for trouble.

Alternatively, just get a cheap WHS server and schedule it to push a backup to an external drive every night. It'll be faster, cheaper, and more reliable.

Linux softwware RAID is infinitely more awesome than onboard software RAID and generally faster and more flexible than hardware RAID.
 

CaptGaucho

Junior Member
Dec 1, 2009
4
0
0
Ok I took all the advice here and put together a box from parts I had around.

My box is an older unit 2.7ghz with 1.5g ram. Promise Raid card with 3 hard drives, 1 for an OS then 2 400g for the picture back ups.

Now should I use Windows 2003 since I also have it laying around or keep it as an XP drive and share it?
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
69,307
13,047
126
www.anyf.ca
Linux softwware RAID is infinitely more awesome than onboard software RAID and generally faster and more flexible than hardware RAID.

Is it really faster? I've been wondering this. I'm using it myself and see no performance issues but I've also never played with hardware raid much to compare. Every time I mention software raid to people they usually say "eww" but most people I work with are windows people so the windows software raid is probably not as good as the Linux one.

When I have more cash I actually want to try to build a huge array with software raid and see how it goes. Maybe like 8 drives in raid 6 or something. Or maybe raid 10.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
69,307
13,047
126
www.anyf.ca
Ok I took all the advice here and put together a box from parts I had around.

My box is an older unit 2.7ghz with 1.5g ram. Promise Raid card with 3 hard drives, 1 for an OS then 2 400g for the picture back ups.

Now should I use Windows 2003 since I also have it laying around or keep it as an XP drive and share it?

I'd go with linux, it's more light weight, secure, and flexible. You can easily setup shares with permissions and what not. You could even setup apache and serve the files through http if you really want.
 

Crusty

Lifer
Sep 30, 2001
12,684
2
81
Is it really faster? I've been wondering this. I'm using it myself and see no performance issues but I've also never played with hardware raid much to compare. Every time I mention software raid to people they usually say "eww" but most people I work with are windows people so the windows software raid is probably not as good as the Linux one.

When I have more cash I actually want to try to build a huge array with software raid and see how it goes. Maybe like 8 drives in raid 6 or something. Or maybe raid 10.

I've run 4x WD RE3 1TB drives on both an Adaptec card with 512MB cache and Linux software raid and could not tell a difference on performance at all, they both saturated a 1gbps link. CPU usage was completely negligible, but I should mention that it was an Intel i7 920 w/ 12gb of RAM.
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
0
0
Is it really faster? I've been wondering this. I'm using it myself and see no performance issues but I've also never played with hardware raid much to compare. Every time I mention software raid to people they usually say "eww" but most people I work with are windows people so the windows software raid is probably not as good as the Linux one.

When I have more cash I actually want to try to build a huge array with software raid and see how it goes. Maybe like 8 drives in raid 6 or something. Or maybe raid 10.

Calculating parity takes virtually no power with the CPUs we have now so having a dedicated XOR processor doesn't buy you much at all. If you look, md does a quick benchmark on startup to see which method is the fastest. Generic XOR using SSE can do ~8GB/s on my CPU and RAID6 runs at ~2GB/s.

Basically it almost always comes down to the drive being the bottleneck.